The cure to soulless crushing modern society is a life of narcissistic sociopathic hedonism (or why humans can't have nice things)

Great Debates
61

I mean, Horace’s very first satire wouldn’t be out of place in this thread:

How come, Maecenas, no one alive’s ever content

With the lot he chose or the one fate threw in his way,

But praises those who pursue some alternative track?

‘O fortunate tradesman!’ the ageing soldier cries

Body shattered by harsh service, bowed by the years.

The merchant however, ship tossed by a southern gale,

Says: ‘Soldiering’s better. And why? You charge and then:

It’s a quick death in a moment, or a joyful victory won.’

When a client knocks hard on his door before cockcrow

The adept in justice and law praises the farmer’s life,

While he, going bail and having been dragged up to town

From the country, proclaims only town-dwellers happy.

62

My observation is that a good number of the fictional works mentioned were written in and take place in times of relative prosperity. Fight Club and Office Space from the late 1990s. Catcher in the Rye from 1951. I’m sure there’s lots of other good examples. I don’t think the “soulless mind crushing modern society” is due to just being in a time of difficult economic conditions, given that the issue seems to become more prominent during times when we’re relatively better off. Times like the roaring 20s, Eisenhower’s 50s, the post Cold War / pre 9/11 prosperity of the 1990s, and so on. I don’t know why that is, but I do think that it means the solution is more than just economic prosperity for society as a whole.

63

Or maybe that it’s only when people aren’t dealing with real hard external problems that they have the leisure to get all angsty and existential about how life sucks?

64

I’m not denying that, but I think that people who assume that the system is deliberately set up by those people to have the effects it does is ludicrous.

It’s far more likely that what we see are essentially emergent properties of a system that rewards people with those traits, and their self-enrichment activities have collateral effects on others. And since they score highly on the Dark Triad traits, they don’t care.

But being indifferent to something and letting it happen is not the same thing as actively working toward it as a goal, which is what’s being suggested.

An example might be that a CEO who scores highly on the Dark Triad sees an opportunity to enrich himself by cutting a corner somewhere and saving a bunch of money, thereby raising the bottom line and his compensation. He doesn’t give a damn that it might cause people to be unemployed, lose their homes, or have negative health effects. It just doesn’t matter to him.

But that’s not the same thing as twirling his mustache with glee as he makes the choice to put people out of their jobs/homes, or implement corporate policies that increase pollution. The cruelty is NOT the point, to use the term from the earlier post. It’s a byproduct because the people in power don’t care.

As for the OP’s question, I think the whole thing is rooted in the fundamental mismatch between what a lot of people find satisfying in a job sense, and what they’re actually employed to do, and they fantasize about having a lot of freedom and agency in what they DO with their lives in a macro sense.

Most jobs are either highly routinized and very controlling on the blue collar side, where they’ve got to punch a time clock and adhere to (IMO) oppressive policies and conditions, or on the white collar side, what they’re doing is so far removed from what the company does and from anything they perceive as useful, yet they’re under some degree of stress to do these things. I mean, Office Space’s TPS reports are a perfect example of something that some minor functionary in Initech likely used to do something else, but to Peter, they were utterly useless, a pain in the butt, and a source of stress.

Combine that with the fact that the “accepted” domestic trajectory of getting married, having kids, and owning a home are also often not a great fit for a lot of people, and you get a LOT of people who are disaffected with their lives.

Combine that with romantic fantasies about being a ladies’ man, action hero, etc… and you start getting the stories about latter-day pirates, beach bums, cult leaders, fight clubs, resistance leaders, etc… Those stories are pretty much what people’s romantic, fantastic side thinks they’d like.

But ultimately when you get down to it, actually doing those things comes with a lot of discomfort and inconvenience that most are unwilling to endure for the sake of being outside the usual life/career trajectory. What people really want is to be a well off beach bum, or a part-time pirate, or a 2% biker who doesn’t have to murder people/fight people, work in the circus, but not shovel the elephant crap, etc…

65

Precisely.

66

Ehh, I dunno. Death was everywhere up until recently. Abraham and Mary Lincoln had four children, and only one lived to adulthood. I’ll gladly accept today’s “stresses,” along with modern medicine.

67

My wife’s grandpa had an older sister who died as a baby and then after he was born they had another baby who they gave the same name. You know, like in the Simpsons, where Snowball dies, so they get a new cat called Snowball II, but with people. And apparently at the time this was normal.

Death really was everywhere until not very long ago at all.

68

The Blue Man Group’s “How to be a Megastar” is presented as a manual on how to be a rock star. Shown as numbered “Movements” they start out pretty simple such as Movement #6, The one-armed fist pump.

But eventually they get to Movement #237,
Taking the audience on a Jungian journey into the collective unconscious by using the ‘shadow’ as a metaphor for the primal self that gets repressed by the modern persona and also by using an underground setting and labyrinth office design to represent both the depths of the psyche and the dungeon-like isolation of our increasingly mechanistic society which prevents people from finding satisfying work or meaningful connections with others.

Which leads to “Shadows, pt. 2”

(https://youtu.be/iil7rpItejw?list=PLbR7rY_mmyrDK4xWzZ9RYGCdVpsJfV4bV)

69

Yes. But:

I see life dissatisfaction coming from a lot of different places. There are a lot of people living in poverty right now, and I’m hard pressed to see how the truly poor have anything like leisure. Then there are the middle class who are unhappy that their lives are increasingly trending toward the poverty lifestyle. They can’t afford all the things they used to. Then there are the contingent of people in white collar jobs who feel a disconnect between what they think a job owes them in terms of emotional fulfillment and what the job can actually give them. All three of these unhappinesses are really about class stratification and feeling like their status within the hierarchy is slipping. But to dismiss all modern unhappiness as characteristic of the white collar disaffecteds is to fail to understand that all three are driven by wealth inequality, which is a problem for almost everyone.

70

I think people can still be justifiably miserable even if they don’t have to worry about dying of consumption or polio.

I assume you are familiar with terms like “gilded cage” or “golden handcuffs”. A person can live a life of relative comfort and privilege but still feel like is freedom and creativity is being stifled or that they aren’t realizing their full potential.

Particularly in our modern society that seems to constantly tell people they need to be doing “more” while many of those people are having trouble making ends meet.

71

That’s strange, because the poor people I know spend almost all their time on leisure.

If you live in a first-world country such as the U.S., count your blessings. Even the poor people have it good. Things could be a lot worse.

72

Holocaust survivor and psychologist Viktor Frankl famously observed:

To draw an analogy: a man’s suffering is similar to the behavior of a gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the “size” of human suffering is absolutely relative.

I generally feel like that guy knows what he’s talking about. I’ve always admired his willingness to take other people’s suffering seriously even in light of everything he suffered.

73

Then you haven’t been paying attention as there has been a great deal of very public effort to do precisely that, and to punish corporations that are insufficiently cruel and bigoted.

One of the major reasons that the Right has gotten as far as it has and done so much damage is the refusal of so many people to believe in the bigotry and malice of the Right even when they openly and loudly publicize and act on it.

74

For the most part, but sometimes the suffering is the point. Violent cops, a secret police and a violent military are designed to inflict pain and suffering so people don’t resist. The suffering isn’t a byproduct, the suffering is the point.

The more you keep people drowning in debt, tied to their job or the military for health insurance, terrified to join a labor union, terrified to lose their jobs, etc the easier they are to control.

Media that keeps people angry and afraid makes people easier to control. Wanting people to have a dystopian media that keeps them angry, afraid and distracted is the goal.

So there is amorality there, but sometimes there is intentional infliction of duress, insecurity and suffering as a means to keep people obedient.

But again, the amorality can go in both directions. If a corporation realizes it can make $X in profit by having children work 16 hour days in a factory, it will try to do that. If it realizes it can make $X+1 in profits by curing alzheimers disease, it will do that instead.

75

Thus the Right’s complaints about companies being “woke”. A company may decide to do good instead of evil if good is more profitable, and that’s unacceptable to the Right.

They want a society that’s 100% dedicated to cruelty in every way, at all times, under all circumstances, no matter how unprofitable or outright suicidal it is.

76

I disagree. I think it’s more fundamental than economic considerations. Most white collar people who are unhappy would still be unhappy at twice the pay. I know that more money wouldn’t make my job any less annoying. At best, I’d be able to tell myself “At least I’m making crazy money to do this.”

And for the working class, it’s likely about having your employer treat you like a fungible commodity, and one step away from being a prisoner. You can’t take a whiz when you feel like it, you get some dinky amount of time for lunch, you have to wear specific clothes, and so forth. You have little autonomy and control, and what you do probably isn’t terribly fulfilling if you’re selling tennis raquets to rich women, or fitting widget A onto gizmo B on the assembly line.

I feel like maybe back in the day, people were either so focused on survival, or they had jobs that were more fulfilling in some sense (or they just worked less perhaps) that these sorts of fantasies were minimal. And until maybe the middle of the 20th century, one could head West and reinvent themselves/engage in adventures, etc… Now there’s nowhere to go. No frontiers, nowhere to realistically reinvent yourself.

So people fantasize about it in increasingly fantastical ways.

77

It’s been pointed out that work in the past used to be more direct and tangible in the result. “I moved that load”, “I built that thing”, “I harvested that food”, “I sewed that coat”.

Now for many people it’s more being a cog in the machine and doing paperwork or minor technical work that may never be used for a project that may never come to pass that you’ll never see any credit or reward for and won’t accomplish anything useful anyway.

78

That’s always been the case for the working class, though. That was the case when I was working class in the 1990s. I’m sure it was much worse in decades prior. People who are working class have always had it like this. So if they are more unhappy now than in the 90s, they are probably unhappy about something else.

The issue is white collar workers are being treated more and more like the working class has always been treated, and we don’t like it. I can’t speak for anyone else but one of the reasons I got a college degree and went into nonprofit work was to not be treated like that. I mentioned earlier today in the Mini-Rants Pit thread, my non-profit is becoming a corporation. The whole point of going into nonprofit work was supposed to be to avoid corporate bullshit. But corporate bullshit has a tendency to get into everything.

Something I’ve noticed about “it could always be worse” is that it’s a terrible thing to tell someone else but pretty useful to tell yourself.

79

I don’t really know your circumstances so I don’t want to misconstrue what you are saying. But in my mind poor people by definition don’t have it good and have little money to spend on leisure other than sitting around on the couch or other activities that don’t cost anything. There’s like “college poor” where the only money I have is what I earn at a minimum wage job while my parents pay for my $40k a year tuition. Then there’s actual poor like “no job because the local steel mill shit down so we need to decide on paying for rent, food, or medical bills.”

When I think actual poor, I’m really thinking of people who not only don’t have money, they lack access to the infrastructure or means of changing their situation.

I think one of the reasons people in modern society are unhappy isn’t so much they don’t like their jobs. People have always hated their jobs since forever. But I think it’s maybe that we have created a society that is capable of producing tremendous wealth but it is widely distributed with soon to be trillionaire Elon Musk on one side and homeless people on the other end. And we tell people that the difference between the two is completely up to them and within their control when in actually much of it is dependent on a great many factors outside of their control. And furthermore, much of our technology seems to be focused on ensuring we can squeeze every dollar and minute of value out of people which all seems to go to billionaires and hedge funds and private equity rather than figuring out problems to make people’s lives better.

Like a minor example would be my employers work from office policies. Apparently there was a miscommunication and I’m supposed to be in the office 3 days a week, not 2. My actual boss doesn’t really care, but he gets a report generated from people’s security badges that he’s held accountable to.

In actuality, there is little reason for me to go to the office at all. My boss and my bosses boss work in different offices. A couple peers sit next to me but we all work on different projects and those teams are all scattered all over the place. So it begs the question, why is this something the company is enforcing?

It’s a minor thing. But what is ironic is that I think this policy is really designed to address the flip side of this argument that having everyone working remotely can actually be very isolating. It can turn people into this interchangeable carbon nodes connected digitally to each other.

80

In some ways yes, but in others not much has changed. For example, I’ve still got all the workplace freedom I’ve ever had, and then some with work-from-home. Dress codes are relaxed, and so forth.

But what has happened over the course of my career is that there’s been a sustained push to convert corporate IT work into a predictable, repeatable process, rather than the more chaotic, more individual skills-based model it worked under before. Think ITIL, Agile, and DevOps if you’re familiar with the industry.

While I’m sure it makes all the metrics better, and is better for the company and management, it’s awful to work under. It’s no longer “You’re empowered to solve this problem- work with people, figure it out, and get it done.” Now it’s "Create a ticket, then some other guy works the ticket, and they pass tickets around, and get pissy if you create the wrong kind of ticket. And creating a customer project has multiple “gates”, as do the phases of project management, and everything focuses on the process, not the actual work.

In short, it’s going from the heroic/artisanal model to one of assembly lines, repeatable processes, and production. And it sucks moldy balls. I largely don’t care about the administrivia and bureaucratic artifacts, not in the way I did actually care about doing the job back before they turned it into a process. My job horizon went from “entire project” to one fairly circumscribed portion of the process, and some parts are tightly defined and others are remarkably vague.

The only saving grace is that come review time, regardless of the goals, it comes back to “Are you a fuck-up who requires your boss to get onto you and fix your mistakes, or do you handle your sphere of influence without assistance?” But they’re trying to mess that up too by introducing “SMART” goals, which makes your job goals specific, measurable, achievable, reasonable, and time-bound. In other words, nailing it all down and making it repeatable and part of the process. I generally resist as much as I possibly can, but it takes a lot of effort to think up SMART goals that sound good, but are none of those five things in practice.

Back to the original discussion… I think it’s losing that “artisanal” (for lack of a better term) control and responsibility over one’s job and having it routinized and turned into part of a process that leads to a lot of deep dissatisfaction among many white collar people.