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

Great Debates
141

I think it depends. No one feels a sense of angst following directions on Wayz.

My hypothesis is that much of the “soulless crushingness” of society comes from extensive wealth and “easiness”. Some crappy jobs will always be crappy. But I think most people would prefer to be evaluated and measured based on the real work they perform as opposed to being scrutinized for how well one conforms to arbitrary subjective nonsense. And I think in absence of real stuff to do that creates real value, people start to evaluate each other based on superficial stuff like fashion, mannerisms, and social politics.

That’s why the wealthy classes throughout time tend to dress ridiculously.

Think of Peter from Office Space being happier in a job where he is outside helping to actually build something where he can presumably joke around with his buddy as opposed to his Inetec job where he has to dress a certain way and sit in one of a hundred identical workstations being scrutinized by 8 different bosses for every infraction of what seems to be pointless administrata between bouts of idleness.

142

Ever since last year, I’ve been saying it’s no conspiracy if the bastards are doing it right out in the open and don’t care who knows about it.

143

It’s my belief that most first worlders cannot derive any purpose or meaning from our work. And that we make ourselves miserable by caring about a career, or worse, trying to find relevance or meaning within a corporate environment.

Let’s face it: Most of us spend our days in a grey box with a glowing rectangle and a plastic board with the alphabet on some buttons. And our job is to mash the buttons in the correct order for whatever task the corporate management has defined.

The “cure” to this soulless crushing life is complete and total indifference to the job, and the corporation behind it. They want me to pretend to use Agile, Kanban, CMM, Fagan or whatever while I mash buttons - fine. I don’t care one way or another. If the schedule is impossible, I’ll be late. If the management becomes unbearable, I’ll be gone.

It’s been 46 years from high school to my retirement, and in that time I’ve had 23* different jobs. I never cared about any of them, never had even a sliver of loyalty to any of the companies, don’t know whether they’re still in business, and honestly can’t name 4 of my former bosses. Almost all jobs involve working for a corporation. And my only relationship to a corporation is extracting resources in the form of a paycheck. My only moral obligation is that I don’t steal, or endanger my co-workers or the customers. That’s it.

Meaning can only be derived outside of, and away from modern work, and it seems to me that’s the only rewarding path for most of us.

*Excluding McJobs, lawn-mowing, paper routes, etc.

144

People keep saying society is “soul-crushing,” but I think we’re misdiagnosing the problem.

We’ve put self-actualization at the very top of the pyramid, like it’s some rare, elite achievement—something reserved for the lucky few after everything else is taken care of.

That sounds nice in theory, but in practice it turns self-actualization into a bottleneck.

If it only counts when it looks big—success, recognition, mastery—then yeah, most people are going to feel locked out. There simply aren’t enough “top-tier” slots to go around for 8 billion people.

But that’s a framing problem, not a reality problem.

Because when you zoom in, self-actualization stops looking rare and starts looking almost unavoidable. It breaks down into thousands of small, constant opportunities:
figuring something out, improving something, contributing something, even just doing something a little better than you did yesterday.

At that scale, it’s everywhere.

The catch is, we’ve trained ourselves to ignore those versions because they don’t look impressive enough. They don’t qualify as “real” self-actualization in the cultural sense.

So people end up surrounded by opportunities to express themselves—and still feel like they’re suffocating.

That’s not because society made self-actualization impossible.

It’s because we defined it in a way that makes most of it invisible.

145

Very interesting point. My grandfather would agree. It’s not that he was dying to do payroll, but he figured out the best and most efficient way to do it and he really found meaning in that. Meanwhile he worked on getting into the power company which is where he really wanted to work. He said his first job at the power company was just following the inspector around with a clipboard and writing down what he was told to write. I think most people would not find that fulfilling work. But my grandfather said, “It was great! I learned so much about transformers and substations and how it all works, by the time I got promoted I had a handle on everything.” He found his meaning in learning and getting better at things and figuring out the best way to do everything. And that’s how he contributed to his company. Literally - he ended up saving them a lot of money.

I do find meaning in my work. It’s stressful, but for a cause I believe in, and I work with people I respect. I feel like that’s more than a lot of people get.

146

The theme I keep seeing both in fiction and IRL is that people are generally happier and fulfilled when they believe there is a point to the work they are doing and feel like they are treated like and are given the opportunity to act like actual human beings.

Most of my many office jobs has been some variation of “mashing buttons on a plastic board in a grey box”. But what has been the difference between jobs that suck vs ones that are enjoyable usually comes down to having coworkers to actually hang out with for lunch or by the water cooler, maybe getting to travel a bit, and even sometimes creating something of actual value.

I think there is also a sense of fulfillment that comes from time spent in something (assuming you want to spend time in it).

40+ years of total indifference to your job IS soul crushing, almost by definition.

If you take the same button mashing job and you make it so people don’t spend any time interacting with coworkers, don’t spend any time learning and improving, have no emotional attachment because they know their job can be arbitrarily eliminated at any time and even if it isn’t the company has no interest in investing in their future, that’s what makes people miserable.

147

Oh, absolutely. What you’re actually doing at a job may be less important than how you’re getting treated while you’re doing it and who you’re doing it with.

148

True. If and only if your job is 50+ hours a week and something you choose to define yourself as. Otherwise my response is “Nonsense!”.

I spent most of my adult life working only part time (unless I owned the place). The rest I wasted. I have never answered the question “What are you?” with my then occupation.

As @Lucas_Jackson almost said, the key is to stop defining oneself by one’s job. The bastards in charge need you to do that. Just say “no” to that and to them.

Fulfillment occurs away from work. Life occurs away from work. Everything that matters occurs away from work. Work is where you eviscerate yourself on the altar of the CEO’s ego or the share-trader’s (not -holder’s) value. Don’t do that.

149

Again, I think the fact that many, if not most people view “work” as a sort of corporate serfdom subject to the whims of some distant CEO they will likely never encounter a contributor to society’s soulless crushery.

From what I read online, it seems like many people have trouble building a real, fulfilling life outside of work. They can’t form friendships. They have trouble finding romantic partners. They can’t afford a decent home. Many can’t find decent jobs and even “good” jobs don’t seem particularly stable. They spend too much time watching screens and social media and porn.

I’d say that in the past that would drive people to turn to sex, drugs and alcohol, but it seems like people don’t even do that anymore.

150

Well, the first of those takes two…

151

The unabomber felt that technology would disconnect us from the consequences of our labor and actions. Before technology our actions had direct consequences (being fed, being clothed, being sheltered) but now with the modern economy everything is abstract and indirect where we perform meaningless work on a computer and then buy mcdonalds with the money.

No idea what the answer is, but it may just be a side effect of living in a technocracy.

Also the idea that everyone finds a cure to modern society with narcissistic, sociopathic hedonism isn’t true. Some people find meaning in helping other people or helping animals, or helping the environment.

152

It also implicitly concedes the argument to that very “soulless modern society” by framing your options as “be a cog in the corporate machine or a selfish monster”.

153

I wonder to what extent given the option that people might accept the bare minimum of survival (food, shelter, medical care) from “the Machine” and devote the balance of their time and energy to, essentially, hobbies: producing things by their own skills that can’t compete with the Machine in terms of value returned for input but offer the satisfaction of being the direct result of their own labors. For trivial examples, baking your own bread or sewing your own clothing.