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What if it is simpler than a quest for meaning?

What if our pandering to rugged individualism has simply lead us to create a society where institutions, instead of providing a level playing field, reward those that have already won and punish those that have not?

Buy a million dollar house? Write off the cost of financing it. Get injured and not be able to work for a year? Huh, not sure someone with that kind of resume gap is the kind of person that we want to hire.

Then we wring our hands about why a frustrating, alienating society frustrates and alienates people.

> Get injured and not be able to work for a year? Huh, not sure someone with that kind of resume gap is the kind of person that we want to hire.

This is often voiced in HN as "a bad hire is a liability", which I mentally translate to "my life has gone so smoothly, I've lost the ability to imagine a life history unlike my own".

The challenge is that a bad hire really is a liability, especially on a small team where the effects aren't diluted and there's little room for waste.

How to separate "this person is likely to be a good hire but has had some bad luck in the past" from "this person has had some bad outcomes in the past and is likely to continue to have those bad outcomes if we hire them" is a hard but important question.

I think this is a very reasonable comprehension of the problem. It’s tough. I think caling these thing “bad” is a little more assuming than would be ideal if we intend a fair trial. Many of the things are just things, results of not having a wealthy family, results of not having parents who made your life choices for you and striking out on your first couple tries. These are far from bad things and very often great things

Only a very disingenuous reading of history would lead to the conclusion that our society is less "objective" than the past.

What has been lost is widespread confidence and faith in those institutions that previously served as the pillars of society -- the church, the king and the nobility. Now people are completely on their own for their worldview. What's become abundantly clear is that people are very, very bad at constructing useful or reliable models of the world. Left to their own devices the people will readily embrace all sorts of nonsense, the more extreme the better. Some will turn to drugs and some will turn to ranting about crisis actors and some will turn to video games.

None of this is a cause for concern. These people's lives are still orders of magnitude better than those enjoyed by people just a century ago. A life wasted playing video games for 12 hours a day still beats one wasted slaving away for 12 hours a day on the farm.

What is disconcerting is that the "poison" is seeping into the vital and core institutions and systems that contribute to our extraordinary quality of life. The author is concerned about the suicide rate (which impressively continues to break new records every year) but what should really be frightening is the extraordinary poor governance that Americans have enjoyed for the past 20 years. (Seriously, trillions of dollars flushed down the drain on completely pointless wars.) When the real engine of American prosperity sputters out we will have much more significant and difficult problems than a bunch of dumb, bored kids getting high on dope.

In a world without objectivity, perception of objectivity and objectivity are indistinguishable. I was using the word as short hand for those very pillars you're referring to; hence 'religion and jingoism'.

It could be that mere freedom from discomfort isn't enough to call life good. Anyway, by what measure is a life spent slaving away for twelve hours on a farm worse than 12 hours spent playing video games? Both seem demeaning to human dignity, and the fact that one was "chosen" and one was (maybe) not is missing the point--both states of being are inflicted from without, whether slavery (wage or actual) or alienation. Both are symptoms of systems that dehumanize.

On the farm you can at least tell yourself you're supporting society and that people would starve without your labor. Video games give you no such delusions.

"A life wasted playing video games for 12 hours a day still beats one wasted slaving away for 12 hours a day on the farm."

This is not at all self evident, can you back up this statement?

"orders of magnitude"

So people living today are literally 100x or 1000x happier than a century ago? Again, do you have any basis for this claim? How do you measure it?

> So people living today are literally 100x or 1000x happier than a century ago? Again, do you have any basis for this claim? How do you measure it?

You can't put an exact number to it, but you could argue that in some ways people living today are infinitely more fortunate than people living a century ago. I recently got in an airplane and flew 700 miles in two hours to visit my mother. The richest person in the world a century ago did not have that option. That's just one of many, many examples.

We could argue about whether having all these new options makes people "happier". But more options means more people are able to do more things, which gives more people more ways to figure out how to be happy. Another example of options that the richest person in the world did not have a century ago is this very conversation. Presumably we are both getting some satisfaction out of it, or we wouldn't be here at HN. Nobody living a century ago had any such option. Multiply that by all of the myriad things that we have available that people then did not. That huge expansion of possibilities is basically what the grandparent is talking about.

People a century ago rarely lived more than ten miles from their mothers.

If that is true (I'm not so sure it is--lots of people emigrated between countries a century ago, and many of them left their mothers when they did so), it means that people were drastically reduced in their options, since they never ventured far from their places of birth. The ability to travel further in shorter time has greatly expanded those options.

I remember in college reading "Laborem Exercens", despite it's very religious justifications, had a major point that resonated with me about the "dignity of work". In my interpretation of it (as a 20 year old), it argued that much of man's (and woman's) meaning in life is derived from the work that they do because of the interactions with the earth that work often creates. If you take that away, much of life's meaning tends to fall to the wayside as well.

That being said, if I stop to think really hard about whether I'd enjoy 12 hours of farm work or 12 hours of video games, I can't say I really know which one I'd prefer. A tired, overworked me says the video games. But I know having had several days of uninterrupted laziness before, that I'd quickly feel lost and unhappy with the video games as well because there's no "larger" gratification from them than whatever immediate feedback the game system provides.

i don’t agree with everything you said but you make an important point here:

“what should really be frightening is the extraordinary poor governance that Americans have enjoyed for the past 20 years. (Seriously, trillions of dollars flushed down the drain on completely pointless wars.)”

those wars were a political attempt to focus americans on an externl enemy and thereby create social cohesion via patriotic solidarity, but vietnam (and to a lesser extent the gulf war) soured us on that strategy. we don’t want to fight random, far-away people we don’t know and don’t threaten us in the least (despite the propaganda of trying to equate muslims with terrorists).

it was literally an attempt to fix domestic issues like the opioid crisis (while also catering to the military-industrial complex) through a reflexive desire to return to post-world war II american prosperity. somehow that failure is lost on many americans, but let’s not do that again.

If those 12 hours is working on a farm that you own, I think that produces a very different outcome in the long run. If you can see a buildup of improvements and a reduction of hours over the long haul. Build a shed or a barn, improve the well, build a fence to last, breed the next generation of cattle, plant an orchard, etc. Maybe these operations are hard to fund by themselves, but the popularity of farm-to-table consumption could help bring it back. Being a steward to the land can bring great meaning especially when also getting to raise a family in that situation.

This is sort the situation that a lot of video games simulate, so doing it in real life might just work.

It's a false dichotomy. The life spent doing farm work for 12 hours per day, forever, is not to be compared against the life spent in non-productive consumption of entertainment, forever.

The alternative is to spend one's days doing anything at all--whatever a person may find pleasing. That may include playing video games for 12 hours every day. It may also include injecting as much heroin as the person can lay hands on. It might also include writing out a 1000-page mathematical proof. Or breeding rats to have better bladder control and better responsiveness to humans. Or designing a near-space habitat suitable for supporting a population of humans indefinitely. Or deciphering ancient scripts. Or building a roadworthy vehicle from scratch. Or building cosplay outfits. That kind of life completely blows the farm work out of the water.

A lot of jobs only get done because someone has to do them in order for everyone else to live. Those jobs compete with the things that don't need to get done, but people want to do because they think it's challenging, interesting, or fun. Nobody thinks that a job that can be done by a stupid robot is challenging, interesting, or fun. Boring, mind-numbing drudgery does not give anyone purpose.

It's not that people are bad at generating their own world views. They are bad at reconciling the colossal dungheap of comforting lies that have been fed to them for most of their lives with the objective reality that is starting to sneak past it, as lines of communication start to route around the gatekeepers that have traditionally been able to control the spread of information. The confidence and faith were never deserved in the first place. The story that could have previously been quashed by a local news editor, before reaching a national or worldwide audience, can now be spread instantly via social websites, and so too can the unfounded rumors of a malicious gossip. Before, people had to trust their kings, bishops, bosses, and touts. They had no alternatives--believe my bullshit now, or wonder forever what the truth might have been. Now, they are faced with a whole world filled with story-tellers, and are forced to decide whether any given person is trustworthy or not. For obvious reasons, the rulers that were formerly trust-because-you-have-to were lax in teaching those subject to their info-control about how to detect falsehoods or think critically.

The institutions formerly relied on most people believing them when they told plausible lies. They will be forced to educate people in critical thinking, now that everyone can be a believable liar on the Internet, because otherwise people will be more likely to disbelieve when the institutions tell lies, and also disbelieve them when they tell the truth.

>A fictional world is readily graspable

I've been reading "Sapiens" and one of the recurring themes is the idea humanity's success is built on the ability to create useful fictions to bind large groups to a goal or cause. I think we are struggling with that in the first world as we give up religion without a clear replacement fiction that reassures people someone will be there if they get sick and when they die. In addition, we are discovering some groups have (for want of a better term) weaponized fiction to achieve their goals.

I liked it all a lot better when that last sentence lived entirely in the fiction of people like Warren Ellis and not in reality.

EDIT: Sapiens, not Simians.

Sapiens?

Ha, yes, sorry. Went up a level too high.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

a sort of maco-history of human civilization. Highly recommend

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapiens%3A_A_Brief_History_of_...

You may be interested in reading Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, which says (roughly speaking, and after Kierkegaard) that the striving to find a meaning in life is the primary motivating force in the lives of people, and its frustration creates an existential vacuum that leads to boredom, distress, depression, aggression, addiction, and the rest. He would agree that there has been a sort of crisis of meaning since around the middle of the last century, loss of religion and other societal conventions having a lot to do with it.

I think what you regard as "people engaged rabidly in the consumption of fiction" he might interpret as people living passively, bored and confused, abdicating a sense of responsibility for their own lives. I think he is a precursor to the Neil Postman line of cultural criticism, if anyone's looking for more books.

Man's Search for Meaning is a short and compelling book, he describes a way forward that doesn't involve resurgent nationalism or religious fundamentalism, and I've gotten a lot out of it personally.

Your comment about the rabid consumption of fiction these days hits home for me personally. In this "golden age" of television, with more high quality entertainment than anyone can possibly consume, I've begun to feel that my media consumption is more compulsive escapism than casual enjoyment.

I find Pitirim Sorokin's classification of societies as either ideational (spiritual) or sensate (materialistic) helpful in understanding where we are. I strongly believe the evidence points to our modern civilization being in the late stages of sensate decline. Science and technology has brought enormous benefits to the world but has utterly devastated the individual dignity of man, leaving only meaningless pleasures to provide any motivation for living. I think we will soon (100 years?) see a cultural shift back towards immaterial values and purposes higher than the satisfaction of our sensory desires. The question in my mind is whether that shift happens before or after our current civilization destroys itself.

> utterly devastated the individual dignity of man

I smell survivorship bias.

Have the masses of humanity ever had dignity?

In the distant past the peasantry were largely illiterate, so nothing of them survives. What we get are a lot of stories written by upper class literate people suggesting that they had dignity and meaning.

In the more recent past they lacked access to broadcast media or television stations, so very little of them survives. What we get is again a lot of survivorship bias.

Now they all have Internet connections and can fill cyberspace with their cries for help, so now we say "hey, why are all these people so unhappy?"

History is one consistent story of wars over nothing, constant crime and drama, and escapism through sex, drugs, entertainment, and religion-used-as-opiate. Those are things that people who lack a sense of dignity or purpose do to pass the time until they die.

when I talk about the devastation of human dignity, I am referring to a distinct worldview that robs us of agency and purpose, that says we have no free will and no purpose as individuals other than to seek out our immediate happiness and pleasure.

You can see that worldview in the response to this article by some who suggest that it is not necessarily a bad thing that the people who abuse opioids are dying in such high numbers, that they are self-selecting out of society and society is better off for it.

I agree, that there have always been selfish and cruel people who exploit others for their own purposes and human suffering has always existed. And yes, people have always sought escape from that suffering in some fashion.

We are in a unique point in human history, though, where there are so many people living at a high material standard, but utterly divorced from any sense of higher purpose or meaning. That is the existential question that we desperately need to answer.

I'll be the one to bring up Jordan Peterson, I guess. To attempt to synthesize his views:

1. Even if you start from a position of complete nihilism, you can recognize that pain (both physical and psychological) is real and that you don't like it.

2. You can observe that people who perceive their life as meaningful are more likely to be capable of persevering in the face of extreme pain and suffering. So in a sense meaning is "more real" (stronger) than pain. (I don't get much out of the "more real" aspect, but I think it's part of Peterson's attempt to find harmony between rationality and religion.)

3. Even if/though meaning is completely subjective, you can derive meaning from taking steps toward a goal, specifically a positive vision for your own life that you've imagined in great detail (and ideally written down), including how you want to affect the people around you and the wider community. Having a vision of the life you want to avoid (Hell) is good, too.

4. Your goal (life vision) will change as you move toward it, but that's a good thing because it means you're learning and expanding your horizon.

Peterson and some colleagues created a kind of self-help course based on this sort of thing called Self Authoring and he often cites the positive outcomes it had when they researched it using college students (higher grades and lower dropout rates).

I think he would say that the societal malaise you're talking about is essentially Nietzsche's death of God and that you can draw a line from that loss of a foundation to the horrors of the 20th century (Peterson would probably just say "the gulags"; he sees more of a danger from "radical leftism" in contemporary society than fascism). The above could perhaps be described as his alternative to attempting to address the lack of a social firmament through some totalistic ideology, which has in the past led to pathological totalitarian states like Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR.

It's really too bad the alt-right has adopted him. I'm not sure the affinity is mutual but it's tarred everything he's said with a toxic association with fascism.

Asking why the fascists like Peterson yields a great deal of insight into fascism.

Among other things fascism represents a fanatical reaction to post-modernity's undermining of foundations. The fascist sees the same problems that Peterson is talking about (hence the affinity) but the fascist's reaction is less intellectual and more emotionally driven. Fascism just says "I will myself to have this meaning, and to defend that meaning I will assert that anyone not holding it is wrong." The fascist actually accepts the premise of nihilism but then rebels against it by substituting "violence" (verbal or physical) for objectivity.

In other words instead of "it is true because God said so" or "it is true because facts demonstrate it" you get "it is true because if you disagree I will hit you."

Other types of totalitarianism are similar, though I think fascism may be alone in the degree to which it is conscious of this. Others such as theocracy and totalitarian forms of leftism seem unaware of their nature as violent cults of will against nihilism but they behave similarly.

Are you being downvoted only because you mentioned Peterson? What you are writing here, and attributing to Peterson, was first described in depth by Viktor Frankl in Man's Search for Meaning[0]. In that book he describes how prisoners in Nazi concentration camps who didn't find meaning to their suffering would quickly die by illness or suicide while those that ascribed meaning to their suffering (such as staying alive to take care of someone or to reunite with their wives in another camp) would survive. He synthesized these lessons into Logotherapy. I highly recommend that book.

[0] https://archive.org/details/MansSearchForMeaning-English

It's quite possible that one of the times I listened to Peterson talking about this subject he cited Viktor Frankl but I didn't recognize the name. I looked around and Peterson evidently incorporated Frankl into his course on personality at the University of Toronto (I don't usually watch these lectures because I'm somewhat allergic to college):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zooE5GE81TU

Note: This crisis exists only in america. The philosophical context is more or less the same in other rich countries.

I would look in ways american society puts more pressure on individuals, than, say , scandinavian societies do.

I would look to economic and not existential issues.

I think the article nailed it when it pointed out america has no experience of pre-industrial culture at large.

> It's harder and harder to know what moral right and wrong are.

Morality isn't about what is right or wrong. You need to get past that. There are plenty of situations where there is no right answer and an individual is forced to choose between two wrongs.

Morality is what an individual ascribes to be proper or improper and it is very fluid. An individual's morality is influenced by everything from the situation to the people around them. They may inherit their sense of morality of another person or group but morality is still a personal choice.

We tend to think that everyone shares the same morality and so it becomes confusing when we encounter situations where our moral beliefs are at odds with others and we're in the minority. It doesn't help that the moral code ascribed to by a community might be completely different from the one the next town over.

This viewpoint is part of the problem the person you're replying to was describing. That we are freer than ever to choose our own values, but people are simultaneously finding less meaning in life. That with the erosion of constraints, religion, and social roles people have to create their own substitutes for these things. It's the idea of Nietzsche's Übermensch.

People have always been free to choose their own values and just as always, when your values are wildly outside or in direct conflict with others you have to deal with the fall out. You may choose to go along with the herd even if you don't agree 100% but that's your choice and always has been.

The reality is that most people share a common core set of values and morality because we've all independently concluded that some things are just improper. It's only when we discuss more complicated issues (e.g. abortion) that we start to see divergence.

In the past people were able to run away from their problems. Puritans flew England for the new world. People leave the city for the country or leave the country for the city. Hermits live out in the woods along. You can't really do that anymore without completely unplugging yourself from the world.

The conflict that we haven't really come to terms with is that modern communication enables us to be constantly aware of the morals and values of other people and communities. In the past we only needed to concern ourselves with that of our immediate community but today we see commentary from everyone on everything at all times and are immediately aware of the morals and values of everyone on the planet.

Um, people have been “rabidly” consuming fiction since the Greeks created theater?

They were also busy surviving, most of the time. First world problems.

The appeal of fiction has never changed and been around. Availability and the volume people consume has changed drastically.

> But it hasn't been replaced with anything.

Can it be? Maybe the universe is so information-rich that it yields a vast and ever multiplying array of fundamentally undecidable questions. Everyone knows the big ones: god/gods, life after death, ultimate origin of the universe and consciousness, etc., but there's quite a few more.

If there are lots of undecidable things then how do we ever agree on objective meaning without some totalitarian or tribal pressure just dictating one to us?

It takes me back to one of my favorite quotes ever:

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents... some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age.” ― H.P. Lovecraft