The Perils of the Rich

[andrewducker]

This was originally a comment to the journal of gomichan

We live in a fantastically rich world, whereby we have incredibly safe protected lives, access to foodstuffs that Kings would have problems getting hold of, access to technology that people 150 years ago would consider magic, and legal/social systems that are pure utopia compared to 99% of history.

We've also removed most of the risk in life, and most of the meaning.

It's not surprising that people feel directionless, lacklustre and unsure of what to do with their lives, when there are almost no direct threats to us. We don't need to work that hard and we're constantly told by all the media around us that money is not the answer, and success is not the answer and (frequently) love is the answer to all of our problems.

The problem being that (a) love isn't the answer to most problems and (b)what with people nowadays frequently expecting the world on a plate and the inalienable right to be themselves at all times, the compromises necessary to create a workable relationship don't exactly come naturally.

In my experience, it tends to be the smarter people who are subject to this anomie. This is because they're capable of shedding the cultural baggage that provides people with meaning in their lives. They think too much, and realise there isn't an intrinsic reason to keep them going. Many people can then produce their own reasons, but to many (and sometimes to me) producing your own reasons to live by seems like playing a game when you wrote the rules- not totally satisfying and too obviously arbitrary.

Another thing smart/creative people tend to do is to wonder about what lies outside the possibilities they have. To try and reach out for more. Realising, then, that society isn't set up for people like you, doesn't help to maintain a feeling of chirpiness. If you never think about your lot in life, and just get on with it, assuming the people in charge know what they're doing, then you're probably not going to have such existential problems.

Modern society is obsessed with education. Both because it's an excellent way of increasing productivity and because it's viewed as a right. I sometimes worry that educating too much of society to too high a level will lead to too large a chunk of society being unwilling to live within its constraints. A small chunk of society pushing at the edges of it leads it into interesting new places. A majority of society pushing against the constraints could just lead to the whole thing falling apart. Or possibly to its transformation into some new, better and more free. Which one remains to be seen.

I highly recommend reading Brave New World, in which Huxley talks about the problems of designing utopia, about how you have to design it around people, and build in goals and meaning and drive, or the people grow bored and the whole thing falls apart.

Goddamn I'm rambling on today.

Comments

does not compute!

[broin.livejournal.com]

'We've also removed most of the risk in life, and most of the meaning.'

There is no logical flow there. Why does risk necessarily relate to 'meaning'?

Apart from that, great stuff. Nice writing. About time too. :D

Re: does not compute!

[andrewducker]

Oh, the risk and the meaning being removed is just coincidental. Well, probably not actually coincidental, as people find meaning in conflict (either finding success or survival or whatever), but I didn't mean to actually draw a connection.

Oh, and cheers. (blush)

Re: does not compute!

[broin.livejournal.com]

Goodgood, I'd hoped you weren't making that connection. =)

Re: does not compute!

[gomichan.livejournal.com]

Actually, I can see a connection there. Meaning is a process, not an object. Throughout most of history, there have been a few obvious meanings available; things like 'to glorify God' or 'to keep my children from dying' -- now that reason and wealth have, between them, removed those easy answers, we have to actually look for meaning, it isn't thrust upon us. Granted the meanings we find are, I think, far better than the ones that were once too big to see past, but there's no automatic struggle to give rise to an automatic meaning.

Re: does not compute!

[broin.livejournal.com]

I suppose I wonder is happiness particularly acheivable, then. If I can live in a house, and eat cheap food (and don't need to worry about finding shelter, or catching a mammoth) and don't recognise I'm living in a near-Utopia... at what point will I be content? How great do things have to be? I can buy a loaf of bread with change I could find in the *hoover*. That's amazing.

Maybe it's a biological thing. If our brains are built to find meaning, and to feel uncomfortable unless we're looking for meaning, maybe we need to just flip that switch off, and be content with what we have.

Scratching an itch

[andrewducker]

We seem to have certain inbuilt itches to scratch. Some of them are absolutes "be safe, eat food, have sex", and others seem to be more relative "have sex with prettier people than we did last week, have more stuff than the next person over, be stronger than the guy next door."

We've pretty much satisfied the basic ones. The relative ones are going to be with us pretty much permanently, because we'll always want cooler stuff than the next guy, always be jealous of his cuter girlfriend, etc.

I mean, when I played Doom, it was fucking fantastic. Now? Wouldn't get a second look. I've had better than I was happy with, and I won't be happy again until I have even better.

Well, actually, that's not true. I spent ages playing Worm, and Tetris, and Collapse, all of which are very basic. But certainly it's very easy to be envious of the cool stuff.

Re: does not compute!

[gomichan.livejournal.com]

I suspect that both happiness and dissatisfaction are more intense than they were in the ill-defined olden days we're referring to. The waveform is the same, but we've increased the amplitude. Whereas my grandmother, at my age, might have had a day that included smiling at a song on the radio and then lying awake for an hour wondering what it would be like to move off the farm into the city, my matching day involves rolling my head back in near-orgasmic ecstacy at the cathedralesque complexity of a song in my headphones, and being utterly unable to sleep because of all the places I could live and won't. It's all the same stuff, but it's bigger now.

And to be honest, I like it like that.

Re: does not compute!

[mcgroarty.livejournal.com]

The things you list sound like goals. This seems valid -- perhaps one's meaning and one's goals are the same thing.

Running with that, it's been claimed that people changed from looking for goals to looking for roles in the second half of the 20th century. When most goals can be accomplished at light speed, or are so far-fetched that they're deemed all but miserably impossible - when the middle ground containing goals which might take a moderate amount of time is so empty - a change from goal-seeking to identity-seeking must be inevitable. It boils down to trying to adopt some kind of identity when the underlying mechanism that would normally -form- an identity has been all but made obsolete.

It's scary to think that the more we progress toward "fast or never," the more we lose self and instead search for a prescribed role and the facade of self-identification and meaning that comes with it. We're fast becoming programmable machines.

[mcgroarty.livejournal.com]

I'll go a little abstract with a perspective exploration.

You talk about smart and creative people suffering.

In my mind at least, the difference between "smart" and "creative" is small. Both concern themselves with making conceptual connections in order to better organize thinking and provide new perspectives that extend thought.

But smart people focus on the connections themselves in order to refine the navigability of thought concepts, whereas creative people explore the related concepts as groups or simply spring from connection to connection without stopping to understand how the connections were made in order to find new and unexplored areas.

So, smart people experience frustration when they can't extend their knowledge and abilities to navigate to new territory, where creative people experience their frustration with merely not having visited the territory long enough to bring something back.

Given all that, I wonder which does more damage - being upset at not being able to bridge a river, or being upset about not being able to visit the other side?

Smart

[andrewducker]

I tend to think of intelligence as "The ability to recognise patterns and use them in a predictive manner." and creativity is "The ability to extend those patterns in ways that provoke thought and emotion."

Obviously, the hard-minded "Must find the pattern and nail it down" kind of mind doesn't usually mesh well with the "lets wander about the fringes of things and see what turns up" kind of mind, but when both turns up together, you've got a real genius.

Re: Smart

[mcgroarty.livejournal.com]

I think our definitions are nearly identical.

And the purely creative types can be obnoxious at times, but they're also a joy to learn from. I've had some friends who seemed quite nearly insane for their grasp of random concepts without any real stable base. These have generally been artists, though one just seemed to want to live in a world of random thoughts about video games, and another had a passion for grain elevators, of all things.

The grain elevator guy had literally hundreds of photos of the things which he loved to break out and show you. A grain elevator isn't that exciting a thing until you have someone who really cares about them show them to you. Many of the pictures he'd taken were just beautiful, for the way he set up the shot, and the way the world looked around it. He'd learn of a new grain elevator, drive hundreds of miles to go and photograph it, then make a note to go back and look at it in different weather or lighting conditions, and the difference between the discovery photograph and the "right time" photograph was mind blowing.

He didn't consider himself a photographer or an artist. Just a grocery stock man who likes grain elevators. But I think I learned more about art from him than from any artist or book.

[blackmanxy.livejournal.com]

Many people can then produce their own reasons, but to many (and sometimes to me) producing your own reasons to live by seems like playing a game when you wrote the rules- not totally satisfying and too obviously arbitrary.

Exactly the problem I come to again and again. I've talked to people about it before, and so many people tell me the only 'meaning' in life is the meaning you create. But the fact that it's not satisfying seems to rather disprove the notion that you can really create/control what's meaningful to you.

Nice analogy, by the way. I think I'll use that.

Thanks

[andrewducker]

Yeah, it just doesn't seem satisfactory. I can fool myself for weeks at a time, but I keep coming back to it.

I'm hoping to eventually come up with a solution, but nothing is jumping out at me.