The Perils of the Rich
Apr. 1st, 2002 12:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewduckerThis was originally a comment to the journal of ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
gomichanWe 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.
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Re: does not compute!
Date: 2002-04-01 11:00 pm (UTC)Re: does not compute!
Date: 2002-04-02 02:26 am (UTC)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
Date: 2002-04-02 02:32 am (UTC)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!
Date: 2002-04-02 02:17 pm (UTC)And to be honest, I like it like that.
Re: does not compute!
Date: 2002-04-02 08:26 pm (UTC)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.