Modern Malaise
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So many of the systems and technologies for discourse we engage with have reduced the amount of content presented on a given topic at a given time down to the smallest micron possible. Even this “essay” is just a list of bullet points, each of which alone is a thesis that’s probably worth significant reflection and elaboration, but that’s simply not the dominant modality anymore. We’ve come to expect, and only make room for, bite-sized discourse. This helps ensure we remain in our internet bubbles and never develop the critical stances and motivations necessary to drive toward change because we don't make room for the complexities and nuances that inevitably arise when exploring any topic seriously.
The technologies we use to engage in discourse today establish patterns that are anti-discourse. They only support a vapid form of commentary, “takes”, reactions, but hardly discourse. Twitter has an extremely compressed character limit. Facebook is limited to similar snippets of information. Tiktok and Instagram reduce discourse to series of images with at most small snippets of text. Furthermore, there is no “program” as there was with television—we’re completely free to sporadically jump between a thousand different topics at will, ensuring the 21stcentury schizoidization of our brains really takes hold.
When reading works from before the broadcast era, I remember authors would somehow try to converse with the reader with via their writing style as in the writer acknowledged the existence of a reader in their writing explicitly (“Dear Reader”) or via a narrative (the narrative style of Plato) and acknowledged that the reader was somehow capable of responding and that the writer could listen. Over time, writers started acknowledging that the reader was one amongst many (“Dear readers”), but still capable and worthy of being conversed with. Moving further along, wartime recruiting posters are what comes to mind of when I think of broadcast media when there is a short message often written in the imperative: the reader exists and expected to do something, but has no avenue or agency to discuss the message. There are examples and counter-examples of the styles I mentioned, but my observation has been that the prevailing writing style has changed from expecting/demanding a two-way conversation to a sort of “speaking at each other not to each other” unless negotiated differently otherwise.
Or maybe she's just a lazy writer who clicked "numbered paragraph," who knows.
And by that I don't just mean climate change. The terrifying truth of our time is that we are destroying life on this planet at an unprecedented rate; all life: not just megafauna but insects as well as forests, etc., in exchange for... building parking lots.
We make the world lonelier and uglier and there is zero solution in sight.
Responses to climate change have not yet begun, we have not started to modify our behavior in any meaningful way. But much more importantly, climate change is but one problem, not the only problem. If climate change was solved today, it would maybe postpone the apocalypse for a little while, but it would not make us happier.
Switching to less CO2-emitting energy sources doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things; if we use an electric truck to build a parking lot in the middle of a forest, we may emit a little less CO2 while doing so, but eventually we will still have replaced a piece of forest by a slab of concrete, and in the process destroyed life and made the world uglier.
The "loss of meaning" results from the awareness that what we're doing is not just pointless but evil, and we have no alternative.
We have high stress, lots of convenient unhealthy food, lots of noise and light, long hours, and the awareness that the planet is getting more hostile to human life. Of course we're biting and scratching each other, performing self-harm, and not reproducing.
People have identified that both the traditional roles - child rearing and working very hard all day - are not much fun. Human society and morale doesn't cope well with hedonism. There aren't obvious alternatives. I don't see how a specific social theory could overcome these practical realities. Unusually, I don't really see economics as a factor here - everyone is, by historic standards, absurdly wealthy. Even most poor people.
Materially, maybe , but judging by the way people live in rural communities even today, it's closer to the truth that they were happier overall, as they had a social support net, more socializing than they can handle and more time in nature. It's a qualitatively different life than urbanized domestication
My wife and I currently suffer from the more socializing than we can handle.
But this requires people to care for religion, which again is a self imposed change people have decided on.
We can criticize Reagan and thatcher till the cows come home. However to claim we are living in their utopia is false. Their utopia was highly religious and would not allow the shifting social norms we have seen in the past few years. The article is actually quite irresponsible in only bringing up thatcher and Reagan's economic revolutions while failing to bring up the sexual revolution.
Self-imposed? People can't just choose to beleive in God, and most religions like their adherents to sincerely beleive in their stuff.
Americans have a clear religion and its god is money.
Also, I'll point out the religious belief is basically inherited. A lot of the problems we see today are the previous generations refusal to pass on values and attitudes passed on to them.
Social alienation is the source of much mental illnesses. Poverty itself isn't the source of most people's misery. Our society is our preservation matrix. If we cannot reproduce or at least contribute to something beyond ourselves that bears the promise of persisting, we are left alone with death.
This lonely dance with death, which I have danced for years as a poor housebound reclusive, can cause a disintegration of mind. I suspect the brain tries to rewire itself so it can find a new interpretation of life...one in which it finds a way of surviving in isolation. Many delusions can arise as a result. Also, mystical and religious experiences are common under such conditions. I've experienced them. Many strange things happen to the mind when we feel like we are connected to nothing that will preserve us. It's an unnatural, or abnormal state, which humans cannot ordinarily adapt to. We are microrganisms part of the macroorganism of society. Being alone is utterly abnormal and the brain isn't equipped to deal with it.
American culture makes the poor feel like trash. That's why so many of us become crazy lunatics, drug addicts, or vengeful people. It's the social alienation and isolation that condemns most of us.
However, this condition is not limited to the poor. Even rich people feel alienated. In fact, wealth often turns every relation into a suspicious one--is she just using me for my money? Everyone craves the sense of belonging that comes from genuine love, but it's hard to find. So we see many wealthy people, famous people, the most connected, also feeling disconnected.
Rich or poor, what matters most is feeling connected. We have a connectivity problem. One that leaves many individuals left alone to dance with death. This is what is causing the modern malaise above all things...however, the material conditions discussed by the author ultimately contribute to this disconnection.
Love is the answer, but this solution is so profound that we can hardly comprehend it. In the absence of understanding, we spend billions on psychoactive drugs and label people as "mentally ill" instead.
It seems to be the hyper-online types that reject traditional values that are the most depressed and apocalyptic in their mindset. Myself - I look outside and the sun is shining, my kids are playing, everything is good in the world to me.
Some people don't have this family structure. Many come from broken homes with no good role models to look up to. They mimic their parent's maladaptive behaviors and end up in bad relationships. The degenerative cycle repeats. Many of these broken homes were the result of economic devastation or cultural disruption. Instead of going to church, for example, many families stayed home and watched T.V., completely degrading their social skills.
Also, some people think about the bigger picture. It's great that your mind can rest within the bounds of your backyard. Less parochial types can be more apocalyptic because they are thinking where we are headed. If we look back, we see the most apocalyptic events ever endured by mankind--the great world wars. If we look forward, we may see the potential of even worse things happening.
What makes matters more difficult is that comments like yours can be interpreted as saying that you are well made, have good values, have a square head on your shoulders, and others have something wrong with them. They aren't "traditional," like you--that's their problem. If only they embraced traditional values, they would be set right--put on the straight and narrow, like you. This is really an oversimplification of what's happening to some people. Material and social conditions affect how people develop.
It's easy to look at a person from a ghetto and say, "If only they had good values, all this would clear itself up. It only they believed in working hard, they would pull themselves up by their bootstraps and seize the day." I wonder why we can't whisper these magic words to people and solve their problems.
Edit: Hyper-online types are clearly looking for a connection they don't have in real life. The internet is almost like a honey pot for these types. Their rejection of traditional values may simply reflect their lack of faith in it because they saw their parent's bad marriage, or it may reflect a rebellion against the old order which seems to have failed them. Liberalism in particular is a home for lost souls looking for forms to express their discontent. It too is a honey pot for these types.
It’s another to actively reject traditional structures like hard work and family. There is a sizable cohort of online-types that actually thinks society would be better if the government ran everything, work was outlawed, rich people went to jail, and all manner of extremely insane ideas that they blame their own problems on. They actually think the world is ending because of global warming, democracy is under attack, and doom scroll every day reading horrible nonsense that will never happen.
I would argue the human condition is to think everything is failing and the apocalypse is coming at any moment. This a frequent phenomenon throughout history and every generation has this narrative. However instead of religion now it’s environmental destruction but I see that as another type of religion.
Narcissism is rampant throughout society and no one wants to feel any pain or have to struggle whatsoever for success. We live in the greatest time that ever existed and some people are more miserable than ever.
I choose to be happy and appreciate what life offers rather than despair at things I can’t control and ultimately don’t matter.
I understand that from your position, things are great. But not everyone is living under the same material conditions as you. Desperate people, who feel crushed by the system, call for extreme measures--like complete government control a la communism.
Ultimately, you have a vested interest in maintaining your worldview because it secures your serenity. Unfortunately, this unwillingness to address the grievances of others and to ignore the material reality that proves that this is not the best of times for many people, will set you up to be blindsided by the furious subterranean forces building up under the guilded surface of this country.
It is far easier today than ever to get material support with food stamps, section 8 housing, the EITC, food banks, and things are so good that we literally can’t stop the poor masses from illegally crossing our borders in order to live here.
There is a fever dream in the woke / intellectual left in America that some long struggling proletariat will rebel. This is against the ethos and culture of America as a bootstraps, capitalistic nation that even the leaders of the Democratic Party have to bluntly reject socialism (see Nancy Pelosi’s shouting at the question).
My wife is Vietnamese and her parents were boat people. The entire extended family despises democrats and specifically faults their hatred of meritocratic education as a sticking point. The left has no idea what minorities really think because the party is run primarily by rich white people who exist in an echo chamber.
America is the land of opportunity. It will continue to be so provided we do everything we can to stop the deranged, intolerant, anti-business left from ruining what makes our country the best in the world.
Also, many corporations are pushing for central government too. Walmart now is a private company. In the future it may be "The Glorious Walmart of the New People's American Union." In other words, large corporations have the potential of becoming a part of the government and retaining their status...plus the untouchability of being an arm of the government. I would say we've been set up for this.
So what may happen is this. Large institutions may use the proletariat to overthrow the middle class and institute oligarchic collectivism, like 1984. It happened in China, and clearly the elites have no qualms about their system--given our utter economic interconnectedness with them.
I have a half dozen coworkers who value family, church, and hard work. Most of them are stress-eating themselves to death. They binge shop on Amazon, buy cars and houses they can't afford or enjoy, and generally seem to hate going home at the end of the day. I've seen them beg to be allowed to come back into the office, so they can escape their family. They seem to have loveless marriages, and dread the weekend.
I don't agree that traditional values is the cure for all humanity's woes. Perhaps some of these people you talk about would be happier with a traditional life, but then perhaps some people with a traditional life would be happier with something more freeing.
And perhaps there's many more dimensions at play, not just values.
Do your friends value an integrated life? Community? Leisure? These are the traditional values missing and they're so missed even so called conservatives have forgotten they exist.
Even if you simulate an economy where every participant starts out with the same amount of money, and all trades are completely random, over enough trades the participants' wealth will still end up in a power-law distribution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_rich_get_richer_and_the_po...
It seems to be built into the world.
Why not simply make sure that life is comfortable on the tail end of the of the curve and call it a day? The simple fact that so far only war makes the curve flatten suggests that this is not a curve we want to flatten. Nobody comes through a war feeling good.
> Define 'comfortable'.
Hot and cold running water, a toilet, shower, electricity and internet, shelter, medical care (not dying of easily curable diseases, for example.)
Really, IMO, the baseline is what folks at the Google campus have. If everyone in the world had that QoL as a baseline I think we could declare victory and go home.
> Why not simply make sure that life is comfortable on the tail end of the of the curve and call it a day?
Is that "that's not enough"?
Where are you going with this?
True, but more so today than 50 or 100 years ago.
Did it get better when somebody was steering? hitler was a strong and popular leader. Democracy is about people being self-governmed, not about having a strong leader
Individualism is the ultimate goal of this Enlightenment era that we are still part of. The goal was to take away the power from the monarch and the collective, and empower the individual, and our civilization is succeeding at it, but our politics do not adapt. There is a reason why social democracy is unpopular in europe now: younger generations realized it was an unsustainable ponzi scheme. Our future is individualist, but our politics is hopelessly centered on the worship of The Leader
But like... very few people sitting here arguing that e.g. a right to decent healthcare isn't a thing we want; that education shouldn't be accessible to as many people as possible; that we shouldn't provide public services such as libraries, parks, and sports centres for all; and in a bunch of places there's a general feeling that the pendulum swung way too far against welfare, in the bid to force people to work, that it's now not helpful for the people it was meant to help.
It appears the person you're replying to lives in Germany; so do I. The parties (e.g. the FDP) here which would like to tear down what Germany has built have a minority of the votes compared to those which have social democratic or broadly neutral policies.
Or did you mean something else?
It was a stroke of genius to call what we have now in most of the world "democracy", as in "government by the people", when it's anything but that.
However, until we get there, the current system is quite good at maintaining a stable society with increasing gains in technological development and social welfare. It is far from perfect or ideal, and it is full of lies, but until we have something better that is tangible and real, and not just theoretical, I wouldn't touch it.
Sadly we don't have anything to replace them with at the moment, and we're just a hair away from some societal and political event to convince people that this very charismatic leader has all the answers and we should vote for them.
It's hard to see it (and admit it to oneself) because of recency bias and thinking this time it'll be different, that we're smarter than our ancestors but history tends to repeat itself.
Another thing is that people must feel that their participation does have an effect.
One more aspect is that most of the decisions is not a popularity vote but must be based on knowledge and science. Average people can’t make that choices unless you have extremely well educated population.
Overall, a simple introduction of a technology which will enable more direct democracy is not enough. We need more ground work which will promote individuals with certain values and behaviors.
However, I also do believe that introducing such technology might accelerate that ground work.
Most people would reject the idea of a city voting what everyone's compulsory dinner will be. But when it comes to zoning and building codes, that's already grey area.
One issue is that current states have accumulated too much power . A second one is that individual rights need to be untouchable. But otherwise i think our current representative systems are just fertile grounds for corruption.
And if you think this is some unreasonable edge case you must remember that humans are beings guided by emotion as much as reason, the whole COVID panic and hysteria that happened just two years ago has enough examples that emotion will trump reason even in situations that aren't even that dire.
The only relevant political movements that advocate against social democracy are mainly extreme right wing. Even those are not growing - and usually collapsing afterwards - because of their individualistic approach to society but because of their appeal to people that feel migration is not good, that climate change doesn’t exist, etc.
Also, every time I read about “social democracy being a Ponzi scheme” along the demographics argument I feel an urge to remember that social democracy isn’t only the pensions system. Healthcare, education, infrastructure aren’t Ponzi schemes neither feasible from a pure individualistic approach.
Well, social democracy is also the welfare system, and it also requires high social trust, and it also incurs debt for future generations.
I may be wrong, but i think social democracy was only possible during the (not so brief) moment of the boomers.
I think social democracy can work but it’s hard and requires huge discipline from government and people. Also, it seems much easier to introduce in smaller countries.
Edit: I actually place great faith on coming generations. The kids are alright.
If we are in a Rome scenario, the good news is that we probably won't live long enough to see the real collapse.
Very few of the "lost arts" were truly lost. I could have gone to the democratising effect of the rise of Islam, where much "lost knowledge" was recovered in due course but that's a whole other story (depreferencing inheritance over functional ability)
The key point for our functional decay as a society might be the ubiquitous rise of cynicism combined with increasing joins over gerontocracy and kleptocracy.
https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f... is good
Putin thought he could be that horde. He is failing, and failing badly, in Ukraine.
I take slight issue with this framing. Why is there an implicit assumption that these really smart kids end up working at these places because they’re deluded that money and status are all that provide happiness? I’m sure there are lots of people on HN that work at these places/know lots of people that work at these places, and I’m willing to bet that a significant portion choose to work there because it’s intellectually stimulating for them. Sure, you can argue that too much value accumulates to these jobs for reasons outside of their control, but I think the assumption that that’s why they’re doing it is wrong.
This also ties in with the article’s mention of the general public resentment towards tech, see how widely used the derisive term “techbro” is used in online discussions. There’s this perception that everybody in tech is only in it for the money, and they enjoy using their smarts to exploit everybody else. I’ve been hit with this from people I know personally, and it’s insulting.
Even people in the top 10% are making basically nothing. This was taken two years ago, but I would suspect the current situation is the same or worse. I'm not sure how to fix this, but I think something should be done. People in the top 1% or 0.1% should make more per month than someone in the top 10%, but the difference shouldn't be this stark.
Maybe slightly less skewed but these sorts of networks seem to promote a winner-takes-all situation for each differentiated subsegment.
who says that the payout distribution has to follow the power law? And even if it does naturally, OnlyFans doesn't have to just let it happen. They could take a bigger cut from the larger accounts, and distribute it such that the payouts are more linear.
I see this same argument made about Tinder, from guys who can't get laid.
You realize it's just a platform don't you ? Those are real human beings on the other side of that screen. OnlyFans can't choose for the humans on the platform.
Communist systems have consumers who make choices, too. Soviet citizens were perfectly free to choose which goods to queue up for.
The payout distribution is proportional to the number of subscribers, which follows a power law.
>And even if it does naturally, OnlyFans doesn't have to just let it happen. They could take a bigger cut from the larger accounts, and distribute it such that the payouts are more linear.
How is taking a larger relative cut from the content creators bringing in the most traffic a good (much less optimal) business decision?
https://twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1335725267340251137
are you really going to want to start an account on that site? Your comment seems to align with typical capitalist motives: focus on short term gains, ignore everything else.
If I thought it would benefit me and was worth my time, then yes? Is the implication one shouldn't try to earn extra income because someone else earns more?
>Your comment seems to align with typical capitalist motives: focus on short term gains, ignore everything else.
That's somewhat of an ad hominem. Anyways I'm all ears if you have a superior evidence-based economic model, instead of selling utopia.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Redistribution_of_income_and_weal...
There is not only one power distribution, there is a whole set of them.
Onlyfans has a very low barrier to entry and being better than a 100 other people isn't all that hard, assuming you have the body for it and the marketing chops.
I don't understand why you'd want a company doing the government's job, that's what taxes are for.
We've probably got more poor people today than were alive then in absolute numbers, and our wealthy are orders of magnitude more wealthy. And the situation is much more stable.
Actually, many wars and rebellions in history have been due to some kind of inequality, whether perceived or real, when individuals or groups were motivated to fight to seek redress. And wars are very much unstable.
Consumer debt has fallen since the peak in 2007-2009 or so.
https://i0.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/...
Rather spending seems to be driven by the wealthy, upper-middle class, who don't need as much debt to consume and boost the overall economy.
Now politics feels like pantomime, with both parties bickering over social issues while neither has the political will to meaningfully affect the economy. Curtis: “Online psychodramas create waves of hysteria that make it feel like the world is transforming. In fact, nothing actually changed in the last four years. Trump made himself a pantomime villain, and we booed rather than imagine an alternative.”
Agree. I think the power of the federal government to affect change peaked in 2001-2008 or so, first with massive buildup homeland security and defense apparatuses following 911, and then in 2008-2009 during the financial crisis . After that the federal government has significantly stopped having influence as far as policy is concerned. Rather, much if its power is through administrative functions, like the FBI , NSA, IRS, SEC, etc.
Money became our religion, and now money is starting to run dry, as the world’s largest economies slow in their growth. Both democracies and dictatorships are in a moment of crisis.
Money is like a religion, but scant evidence to suggest it's running dry. As stocks and home prices boom since 2020, there is more wealth than ever before.
Purchasing power hasn’t changed in the past 40 years, according to the Pew Institute: “Today’s real average wage (that is, the wage after accounting for inflation) has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And what wage gains there have been have mostly flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers.
Again, you have to look at the top 10% or so. That is where the purchasing power is coming from...stuff like Disneyland tickets, NFL tickets, lifted trucks, expensive elective cosmetic procedures, home renovations, and so on.
All meritocratic platforms are winner-take-all, with the top 1% of performers collecting a vastly disproportionate share of rewards. Look at Substack and Onlyfans. This is not a conspiracy engineered by anyone: when anyone is allowed to compete, a small percentage of people tend to capture most of the profit.
It's been like this for a long time, and recent trends have only accelerated this. The Ivy League is more importent and competitive than ever before; Covid has not changed this at all. Same for top 50 schools overall. Same for high stakes testing, math competitions, top tech & finance jobs, etc...everything more competitive and difficult. More people applying, fewer people getting in. Winners get bigger and bigger, whether it's top Substack content creators or Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon.
The American dream, the idea that anybody could make a good living for themselves and their family through nothing but hard work, has become far less realistic. You know the Steinbeck line about how Americans think they’re temporarily embarrassed millionaires instead of exploited proletariat. But they don’t believe that anymore, do they?
It's still realistic if you have a high IQ, choose a good career, and have good work ethic...people in tech, consulting, finance, healthcare, law, etc. making record income even after accounting for student loan debt and inflation. (The so-called school to career STEM pipeline.) Reddit 'FIRE' subs are full of such individuals, in their 20-40s, doing just that, with not uncommonly millions of dollars. But for those at the middle/left-side of the IQ distribution, maybe not so much. They tend to rely more so on lottery-like systems of success/promotion compared to more meritocratic ones. https://greyenlightenment.com/2022/03/19/losers-iq-and-the-l...
This clearly isn’t true, since people obviously aren’t free: they’re controlled by socioeconomic circumstances.
And also biological constraints, like again, IQ. But I have also read many stories on Hacker News and Reddit of people born in the lower-middle class or worse circumstances rising up due to high intelligence and getting scholarships and landing decent-paying jobs.
Good article...a lot of food for thought.
The problem is that productivity is growing too slowly.
Fixing the problem requires far more technology and automation than we have delivered.
The problem is that human capital has saturated for many people. This is borne out by stagnating gains in education.
If productivity gains occur mostly because of technology with little human input, then that further bifurcates society between owners of that technology and everyone else. This does not help alleviate the modern malaise.
People are quick to point out the dropping of the gold standard, the end of cheap fossil fuels, the neoliberal economic changes, etc. that all occurred during the 1970s, and those all matter. But there's another factor which is that educational outcomes began to stagnate.
I don't think returning productivity growth to the postwar rate would have as much of an effect as it did then, because more of the productivity growth would be because of technology with concentrated ownership rather than broad gains in human ability.
Quote is in number 14 if anyone wants to read it themselves. You'll also see that the Ayn Rand quote mentioned in the sibling comment comes with critical commentary.
Re: testability
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mf0fLKjCKHA&t=73s
"So then the people who don't do psychedelics say 'well this is something it's like channeling or all this other stuff'. No it isn't, because we are not like those people. I mean, I maintain this rigorously, that our bit is intellectual rigor, not airheadedness. We're willing to put as much pressure on the ideas as you want we just believe in fairness. So, that it's not ipso facto that there's no such thing as elves. It's that if you think there are elves, prove it to me! Well, then the problem is that the skeptic, the critic, says, 'well the notion that are elves is just, you know, you're sadly deluded. You're living in your own private Idaho.' But then, you say, 'well, the proof of the pudding is a 15-minute DMT trip. Are you willing to carry on this criticism after having made the experiment, sir?' I mean, we're not like UFO enthusiasts. We're not telling you to stand in cornfields in the dead of night and pray. No, no, this will work! This will work on you, you the reductionist, you the doubter, you the constipated egomaniacal father-dominator. It'll work! And they say at that point 'You know, you are a menace, is what you are!'.
Is possible to think some parts are good and other parts not so good?