No Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. [P]eople will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
-Neil Postman
Dystopia has long been a creative playground for real warnings from fictional settings, sweeping across a range of imagined futures: Huxley’s Brave New World seduces its citizens into docile compliance through cheap pleasure and perpetual distraction, while Orwell’s 1984 crushes them with overwhelming surveillance and ever-present fear. Countless variations—societies undone by ecological collapse, runaway algorithms, or mass infertility—have given us a broad genre exploring dark futures that offer a cautionary lesson for errant denizens of the present.
These myriad visions vary in their methods of control, but they are united in the shared premise that gears of oppression set in motion by human nature can be wielded to strip entire populations of meaning and control. Increasingly, though, the public fixation with dystopia feels less hypothetical: polls finding record-low trust in institutions, historically high levels of self-reported loneliness, and emerging angst toward a relentless, ever-present force capturing and monetizing our every waking hour have all fueled a growing feeling that dystopia is already here.
In his 2018 book Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker tackles this rising sentiment with an argument that has since taken hold among the intelligentsia and the elite: despite widespread perception of a world deteriorating, things are actually better than they have ever been.
Enlightenment Now’s attention to subjective well-being is palpably secondary.1 It arrived at its conclusion predominantly by synthesizing data collected on several dimensions of objective well-being including life expectancy, rates of violence, and economic growth. I already have questions. How do we know these are the categories that correspond with human flourishing? If these objective measures don’t line up with public sentiment, in what way is the world better? Does that not suggest they’ve failed to capture what is needed to support subjective well-being?
They don’t, in fact, appear to line up. In the years since Enlightenment Now, when asked in Gallup’s Mood of the Nation surveys “In general, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time?” responses oscillate between 18% and 38% satisfaction.2 Of late, a full 78% of Americans are dissatisfied with the country’s “moral and ethical climate,” 73% are dissatisfied with public education, 72% are dissatisfied with the size and influence of corporations, and 69% are dissatisfied with income inequality.3 And yet, Pinker’s barometer remains wildly positive.
The adage “the map is not the territory” comes to mind. But that adage doesn’t seem to have currency with a mentality singularly focused on the question, “but what do peer reviewed, IRB-approved studies of narrow metrics administered almost exclusively to American college students have to say?”4 Anything that can’t be analyzed within this paradigm isn’t worth knowing. “The map is not the territory” has been replaced with “do not attempt to make sense of the territory; the only things that are true are what our cartographers put into these maps.”
Pinker’s faith in the modern priesthood of truth cartographers (of which, not coincidentally, he is one) is so strong that when the priesthood’s map of human happiness conflicts with the actual territory, the response is that we’re all simply wrong about our own subjective well-being and need to be educated on the matter.5 His attitude here is not unusual. It follows from a broader sentiment popular among the economic and cultural elite that truth itself should be institutionalized.
This is core to the story of our dystopia: modern society demands we subordinate our agency and judgment to sterile institutions that dictate a narrow, hollow set of values, purposes, and uses for agency. But before we can diagnose or offer solutions, we need a better understanding of the territory that constitutes genuine well-being.
The Hard Problem of Well-Being
What makes a fulfilling life is one of humanity’s most eternal questions. I won’t claim a full answer, but if our modern priesthood of institutional science has come up so short, the next place to look is back to cultures and ideas with lasting, time-tested success.
Cultures accumulate wisdom directly from the human experience. Those that miss the mark don’t last. Cultures develop maps, yes, but any culture or practice that survives for thousands of years, at a minimum, has something figured out about the territory. And looking for themes common to all these successful cultures and practices can help us get to a high degree of confidence on some of the fundamentals.
As it turns out, the most enduring cultures and practices (predating peer review by millennia) converge on a few core ideas.
There Are Virtues and it is Good to Cultivate Them. Some traits and practices lead to happier, more fulfilled humans in healthier societies. A culture can maintain its own health, and the well-being of its members, by encouraging the cultivation of those traits and practices. Hinduism defines virtue around dharma, that which sustains the universe. Buddhism formalizes virtue in service of dharma as The Noble Eightfold Path. The Greeks contemplated and debated competing frameworks of virtue ethics that endure today. The Abrahamic religions juxtapose holy virtues with sin, the temptations of our nature that we succumb to at our peril.
What commonalities do we find among these virtues?
We have a responsibility to better the world we live in, and those that we live with in it. Almost every tradition praises values centered around duty and obligation. Confucianism (a philosophy with widespread influence on East Asian cultures even today), Buddhism, and Hinduism all preach our obligations to others as a core value. Christianity dictates that we “give justice to the weak and the orphan.” Islam demands justice and charity. Judaism preaches tikkun olam, or ‘repair the world.’
Obligation is mediated by duty. We owe the greatest duty to family, friends, community—those closest to us in whatever hierarchy defines our society. Duty lends itself to an internal locus of control over a practical sphere of influence. This is required to direct our agency to service.
We have a responsibility to better ourselves and to temper our desires in accordance with our responsibilities to the world and to others. Buddhism teaches that desire is the source of suffering. Daoism emphasizes balance and avoiding extremes while Greek philosophers gave us Epicurean moderation and the Stoic emphasis on living in accordance with nature. The Abrahamic religions all warn of the evils of greed and unchecked desire.
Impotence, incompetence, and cowardice serve neither the self nor the world. Strength is celebrated, but importantly mediated by these other virtues. Seen in the light of service, responsibility, and moderation, strength is less a tool for domination and more a tool to wield in service of the Good. This strength is not just physical. In Buddhism, mental fortitude is a core virtue to cultivate. Hinduism preaches the need for physical and spiritual strength for personal empowerment. The Abrahamic religions teach that strength of mind, body, and spirit are essential to effectuating justice.
We Must Find Our Proper Place in a Greater Whole. A structural observation of universal virtues is that they emphasize our contextual, not absolute importance in relation to a greater whole, and they optimize the individual’s ability to serve that greater whole. Every enduring culture agrees. What ‘you’ are is fundamentally defined in the context of the larger world you are living in and contributing to. Buddhism names Nirvana, a state of perfect oneness with the universe, as the highest form of consciousness. Hinduism names Brahman as the ultimate reality, and its core prescription is realizing the self in relation with that ultimate reality. While Hindus have many deities, they are all fragments of the greater truth that is ultimate reality, the supreme god.
Moving west, the idea is concretized as a single entity. Although he has many names (Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah, God), he is one being. But Abrahamic theology does not divorce this single entity from the whole of existence, or from the self. God is being itself and we are made in the image of God.
The Individual Still Matters, and Has a Few Core Needs. Our place in the greater whole implies a noteworthy corollary— as part of the great whole, which is self-evidently important, we also have importance. Every successful tradition develops values and practices to care and provide for the individual. In Greek philosophy, moderation promises sustainable pleasure over a lifetime. In Abrahamic traditions, a day of rest is necessary to recharge and recenter the self.6 Work for worldly gain, pursuit of status, and all other manners of productive enterprise need a pause button. Eastern traditions give us yoga, meditation, and mindfulness as practices to connect with greater purpose while nourishing the self.
Everywhere, we see similar contours take shape: Virtue has an important role in self-actualization. It is meant to be cultivated (1) to be of use (2) toward a meaningful aim bigger than ourselves. It helps us identify the right purpose and gives us the agency to strive toward it. These are the cornerstones of feeling like a full adult human. Purpose is the ‘why,’ the orienting principle for life itself. Agency is the ability to effectively act toward that purpose.
What’s Wrong Today?
As individual beings, we need to feel some meaningful choice and ability to contribute in our own way to a purpose that gives us meaning. Today, we are stripped of both purpose and agency, methodically, by a total inversion of the virtues synthesized by millennia of accumulated wisdom.
Gone is duty and obligation. Self-interest is the foundational paradigm we use to make sense of individuals and their interactions with one another, and the codified engine of the most significant agentic force in modern society: corporations.
Gone is the community where duty and obligation were directed. Workplace culture is our primary connection to other adults. Gone is the entire idea of obligation in accordance with duty. The taxes collected from the work we do are sent to an esoteric State that administers that money in increasingly ineffable ways, replacing wholesale the agentic act of giving.
Gone is our agency to contribute to a greater good. With no community to care for, we are offered only national politics and intractable (by design) policy standoffs. We have no agency to meaningfully act toward these ideas. All we have are institutions to appeal to, asking them to act for us.
Gone are shared history, national identity, local community, and anything that could be the foundation for a greater whole in a cohesive society to provide people a meaningful connection to it. Religion, another possible foundation for this connection, has waned as well. Identitarian political groups capitalize off this void, selling a corrupted and corrupting alternative more interested in dominating out groups and consolidating national political power than the day-to-day lives of adherents.
Gone is the quest to find one’s place in a greater whole. The individual is an atom, or at most part of a nuclear family. Because the atomic individual is prime, purpose and agency are meant to seek pleasure and avoid pain for that individual. We seem to have forgotten that without commitment to something outside ourselves we are aimless, without moderation pleasures become hollow, and without the voluntary suffering that comes with striving we cannot build competence and self-worth. Without competence and self-worth, we cannot contribute to any meaningful or worthwhile enterprise.
Time is our fundamental resource. We trade it for tangible resources, for the pursuit of status, for the fostering of connection, and for whatever else we are oriented toward. Without purpose we trade time haphazardly, meaninglessly. Without agency, our time is taken rather than traded, and we are not individual, conscious parts of a dynamic whole. We are cogs in a machine. If we are cogs in a machine, we are replaceable by any other cog that can be molded to do the same work, animate or otherwise. If we are replaceable by inanimate cogs, where is our worth derived? How does our humanity fit into a greater whole?
Cogs are only useful inside machines, and we call the machines we fit inside ‘institutions.’ Today’s institutions have consolidated immense power and have quite effectively become the guarantors of a society of cogs without purpose or agency by institutionalizing every aspect of our lives.
The Institutionalization of Everything
Humans are institutionalized starting at ever-younger ages, to the point where modern parents now call daycare for their babies and toddlers ‘school.’ The Political Left’s platform to address the difficulties of parenting is to universalize the institutionalization of those babies and toddlers. (I am not even sure what The Political Right’s platform to address the difficulties of parenting is.)
Most of childhood has been institutionalized. Students are given an absolute authority to obey, and that authority wields the weight of the institution. These students don’t resolve disputes. They appeal to an authority within the institution who does. They sit in seats all day, rewarded for docility and passivity. They don’t set goals or orient their own purpose. They are given assignments—discrete hoops to jump through designed and meted out by the institution. These assignments replace free play, a practice well-known in developmental psychology (and to every parent in human history until about 30 years ago) to be necessary for developing agency and competence in children. In 1990, elementary school students in the US typically enjoyed 60 to 90 minutes of recess every day. Today, the average recess per day is 25 minutes. Free, unstructured time has given way to structure and control.
In virtually every aspect of life, this kind of regimented control by an institutional authority has crept in. Birth is staged in a sterile hospital bureaucracy; baby’s first days are inundated with a flood of institutionalized bureaucratic hoop jumping (a reminder early on that the State’s acceptance of your role as parent is conditioned on a rubric). Childhood is rationed through standardized curricula designed to teach to standardized tests, which prepare students for even more institutionalized schooling. Travel requires a near-total surrender of legal rights to both private and governmental authorities who subject you to queues, scans, interrogation, and pat downs. Romance filters through dating platforms’ matching algorithms. Friendship is flattened into a social graph for Big Tech to mediate and monetize. The effect is a kind of soft expropriation: our time, relationships, and identities are routed through professional gatekeepers whose institutional logic—optimize, monetize, mitigate risk—quietly, inexorably sanitizes the messier, freer rhythms that make life feel lived rather than consumed.
It’s no wonder most young people today report not knowing how to make friends or find partners outside of the structure and guidance of institutions. It’s also no wonder that mental health issues have risen dramatically in recent decades to unprecedented levels. We are not designed for lives confined to rigid, sterile institutions. We are not wired to find happiness in perpetual childhood, where an omnipresent authority lays out your choices, arranges your human connections, and curates the structure of your days.
All of this is fundamentally anti-human, and the result is a system that molds a raw population of agentic people into docile cogs who do not know how to exercise agency or form purpose outside of the institutions erected to leverage them as “human resources.” The cogs constitute a machine of ever-increasing complexity, a machine nominally and paradoxically said to be serving human needs. That machine consumes both agency and purpose. And the engine of that machine is in an office park adorned with cubicles.
Cube Farms and Corporate Sharecropping
Work for a company in exchange for a salary is the fundamental engine of modern society. Everything from your health care to your social life (such that it is) revolves around the immense (and growing) gravitational force of the workplace. That force controls greater and greater shares of society’s wealth, giving it massive influence over the aims of our time and effort each day of our lives. Our foundational human needs for purpose and agency are leased wholesale to these corporations.
This modern workplace should not be conflated with ‘capitalism.’ Capitalism is the idea that every individual should legally and in-practice own their own labor, and should be able to freely exchange that labor how they see fit.
Corporatism was the strategy that arose to collect, capture, and control that labor in institutions of concentrated power. The modern Republican Party loves to call itself ‘The Party of Lincoln,’ but the actual Party of Lincoln in its time saw wage labor as a temporary condition and necessary evil to amass the personal capital required to be a free adult. In fact, in political propaganda leading up to the Civil War, Southern propagandists often compared Northern wage workers with Southern slaves to argue the North had its own form of slavery.7
This political conception of wage work as a temporary tool to buy freedom was the prime selling point of the enterprise, and Lincoln’s own rejoinder differentiating it from slavery. But that conception is starkly juxtaposed with the wage work of today. The modern workplace is designed to ensure your exchange of labor never amasses you the freedom to leave. The political and social realms likewise envision an entire life spent earning your living from an employer, until you retire decrepit or die working.
All of this is justified to the modern (small ‘l’) libertarian ethos because, at every step of the way, you are ‘voluntarily’ choosing to work. But how voluntary is our work when our childhoods are designed to strip us of agency and make us reliant on institutions for stability and direction, when fewer, larger companies control more and more of the economy, and when providing for our own needs directly with our own productivity happens less and less, in favor of exchanging money earned working for the services of others.8
Admittedly, the idea that we are increasingly stripped of freedom by modern careers is counterintuitive. Calling back to Pinker’s map of increased human flourishing, it is certainly true that the world today is richer than it has ever been, and Americans are the richest group of all. This point is regularly deployed to shut down any argument along the lines I’m making here. And it’s usually effective, at least on the surface. We remind ourselves that, yes, we have so much and are so fortunate and maybe it really was absurd to question the system supposedly designed to serve us and make us rich.
And yet, even when we tell ourselves all of this, even when we accept it on the surface, something remains off. No void fills, no feeling of agency rushes in. We sublimate ourselves to a grind that the culture insists will provide us with everything we need while ignoring the unease building inside us when those unnamed needs aren’t met.
Eventually, we crave outlets. And today, those outlets have been meticulously engineered (by many of the same corporations that provide our wage work) to siphon everything they can from us, give nothing of real value in return, and trap us in a vicious cycle that makes true escape less and less likely.
Digital Escapism and the Attention Strip‑Mine
Without grasping that purpose and agency is what we lack, we turn to escapism to fill the void. But the technology of modern escapism is just architected to devour more. As work took over more of our lives, technology advanced to make us more isolated than ever. An increasing share of our time is spent working (even at home, where a portable screen with push notifications keeps us ever on-call) and turning to digital escapism for microbreaks that fill in the remaining minutes of our days. A vanishing share of our time is spent with friends and family. Isolation has been steadily growing for decades, but the pandemic accelerated it dramatically.
When we aren’t in the office, we are at home, and in our hermetically sealed homes we are all ‘consumers.’ Amazon delivers your household goods and your toys. DoorDash brings your takeout and even your groceries. Countless apps branded ‘Social’ provide the facsimile of connection modernity has to offer.
This consumption is the primary way we contribute to the economy. If GDP is the one greater good modernity has on offer, the exercise of agency toward that purpose is consumption. And now we have the Attention Economy. Easy, cheap, frequent consumption of content. You can’t even remember what you read or saw after an hour of doom scrolling, and you probably didn’t even realize an hour passed. But the hour is gone just the same.
This is the true cost of the Attention Economy. Work bleeds into escapism. Our attention wanes, our drive halts. We are consumed by our limitless consumption of nominally ‘free’ content. ‘I don’t pay for content.’ But you do, and the cost is high. We all say “I don’t have time for anything anymore.” But where does that time go? The one fundamental resource we have is taken from us, and we are hard pressed to say what we got in return.
Our last fading bit of agency was to choose which content we passively consumed. But even that is gone now. Most web traffic today comes from smart phones, and most of that comes from a few apps. Our last vestige of autonomy, choosing the content we passively consume, is surrended to an algorithm.
In the brilliant ‘You Are Not A Gadget,’ Jaron Lanier notes the shift that happened in online platforms over the past 30 years:
“Individual web pages as they first appeared in the early 1990s had the flavour of person-hood. MySpace preserved some of that flavour, though a process of regularized formatting had begun. Facebook went further, organizing people into multiple-choice identities while Wikipedia seeks to erase point of view entirely. If a church or government were doing these things, it would feel authoritarian, but when technologists are the culprits, we seem hip, fresh, and inventive. People accept ideas presented in technological form that would be abhorrent in any other forms.”
Personality, flavor, perspective, agency. All of these things are sapped from modern internet “Platforms.” The internet was institutionalized. Over time, any differentiating features between the few institutions on offer are massaged out to reach more users, to capture more attention, to take more from us. TikTok validated a model and now we have Shorts on YouTube, Reels on Instagram and Facebook, and those same clips on Twitter feeds woven between 280 character diatribes.
Even long-form news articles are increasingly consumed in the bandwidth of a Tweet. Studies consistently show the majority of people only read the headlines of news stories, which not insignificantly are written by marketers, not journalists.9 Those headlines are Retweeted, discussed in Reels, and become the news. We express joy at the headlines we already wanted to believe, and we perform outrage at the headlines we didn’t. Our relationship with the internet today is short dopaminergic hits, ad nauseum, throughout the day, to fill in every uncomfortable moment where we would otherwise be alone with our thoughts or our work. The average person today looks at their phone 144 times a day, for a total of 4 and a half hours of screen time.10 This is where our time went.
The last two places on the internet with anything to offer a longer attention span are YouTube (whose UI is shifting bit by bit to give more prominence to Shorts) and Podcasts. Because of this, there is no shortage of news headlines (and probably the articles, but nobody is reading them to find out) painting both as dangerous hotbeds of radicalization. It’s best to keep doomscrolling your TikTok feed instead.
And all of these Platforms are fueled by ads. Thus completes the ensnaring cycle of our modern dystopia. We work jobs we don’t want for long hours we wish we didn’t have to give up, to make money that we are convinced to spend while mindlessly consuming what we erroneously believe to be an escape. The ads are the point. The purpose of everything you read and watch is to capture your attention and keep you spending money, which requires you to work longer hours in a job that is no longer getting you a single step closer to freedom.
There is a temptation to regard these ads as a nuisance, an annoying roadblock to tolerate for the stuff we want to consume. But these companies aren’t stupid, and if they pay close attention to anything, it’s money. Businesses track a metric called Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) to know how much revenue they can expect to take in for every dollar spent on ads. The most common cited target ROAS is 4:1 and some studies have pegged the actual average ROAS across all industries in the US at approximately 3:1.
Last year in the US more than $500 billion was spent on advertising, yielding a return of about $1.5 trillion in additional revenue from advertising. Very few people seem to think advertising works on them, but most of us can’t be right.
And this is just specific revenue linked with specific ads. There is no way to quantify how much more we spend because of the general, pervasive force of consumer culture (which the barrage of ads in all domains of life contributes to). We are conditioned to define ourselves by the things we buy. We are conscious of being judged or just left out for the things we don’t buy. We come to believe the things we buy will make us happy, finally. But the dopamine hit comes from the act of buying, and it quickly wears off until the next time we buy again. There is no limit to the amount of money companies will take from you in the pursuit of happiness. And there is no dollar amount that will actually get you there.
All of this contributes to something very important to modern economies: the velocity of money. Investors and companies both benefit from a higher velocity of money. It is said that consumers benefit, too, but in what way? Clearly, we get more stuff for less money. But is that intrinsically good? If you can have any widget you want delivered overnight with your Prime membership for an affordable price (and you can Buy Now, Pay Later to make any price affordable!) but you don’t need that widget, and you won’t even want it anymore a week after you buy it, how did you benefit? And what if you’re caught in a loop, continuously doing this in search of something you’ll never find?
But while the disposable widgets we have to be convinced to want are more affordable than ever, the things we actually need—housing, education,11 health care—are more expensive than ever. The number one cause of bankruptcy in the U.S. is health care costs. The only reason student loans don’t have the top spot is that, legally, they aren’t dischargeable in bankruptcy.
This makes us feel unable to provide for ourselves, and powerless. We spend even more on frivolities to regain what little control and power we can. The results of our lifelong institutionalization are on full display: hedonic pleasure is our only meaning, GDP is the only greater whole, and consumption is our only agentic activity toward those ends.
None of this ever makes us happier or more fulfilled, but we are continually told it will, and so we continually try. We know something is wrong, but because so much of this is habituated and ‘just part of life,’ we fail to put words to the problem. Around we go, again and again: still no purpose, still no meaning, all of our time taken from us, and nothing to show for it.
Escape, not Escapism
To escape our modern dystopia, we have to reject these modern maps drilled into us by institutions committed to stripping us of agency and conforming us to a hollow higher purpose without meaning.
Escapism will not set us free. Escapism is a fantasy, a habitual pattern of activity within a constrained system that temporarily lets you forget you are in that system. The reason escapism is appealing is that it gives us something that can be accomplished in the time horizon of the modern attention span. But escapism keeps us inside the dystopia.
To reclaim agency, we must reject permanent institutional wardship. You can just do things. Minimize (or eliminate) time spent on any platform with (1) infinite scroll, (2) an algorithmic timeline, and (3) a business model whose core metric is your “time on platform.” For me, Twitter is the last platform I use that fits this description. I still have my account and some mutuals I genuinely enjoy and get meaningful interaction with. But I have deleted the app from my phone, and I blocked the website from my phone’s browser. That means any time I engage with Twitter, it is deliberate, and the cost to my time is clear.
To move past the compulsive obsession with things, we need to shed the nudges that reinforce our identity as “consumers.” Pay for the ad-free version of any service you value, and stop using ad-supported services you wouldn’t pay for. If you aren’t willing to pay, it isn’t worth doing. And it certainly isn’t worth doing for the hidden cost of all your time, attention, and willpower. Consume deliberately, in moderation, and ensure the costs are clear to you.
Remember that spending money does not make you free. Having money does. Detach your identity from purchases. Buy things you need. Don’t eliminate discretionary spending entirely, but try a cooling off period before purchases, or a leisure budget, or some other practice to curb consumption. Start thinking of money that you keep as buying you freedom. I started adulthood poor and have gradually made more money every stage of my life.
Spend your free time intentionally. Find (or pick back up) hobbies that actively engage your mind, rather than passively consume. If you have a leisure budget, prioritize spending it on things like this — things where you consciously choose to spend the time, that require active thinking and doing, that let you recharge from responsibilities, and that ideally come with a community. A piece of advise that’s suited me well: if you work with your body, recharge with your mind; and vice versa.
When you do passively consume, do it with intentionality, not burning bits of time throughout the day. Prioritize longer form content. If you think a 30 minute video is too long, realize that you spend far more than that on shorter content without consciously making the choice to. With intentionality, you choose the time you spend and make it a treat you feel like you can earn, rather than something bad you feel vaguely guilty for doing that disappears all of your time.
Experience time with your own thoughts. Boredom is not a bug — it’s a feature. Inspiration will not hit scrolling a content feed. You will be amazed what your mind can do when it is not overwhelmed with constant empty consumption.
The goal is to use our agency, even in leisure, and to regain the attention span to help us do it. Ours is atrophied, but it can be rehabilitated.
With agency in hand, we need coherent purpose to direct it. And to reclaim purpose, we must embrace the time-tested wisdom that we are not meant to be atomized, and a meaningful life grows from finding our place in a greater whole. Reconnect with friends, family, and community. This is what we have been missing.
Only you can identify your higher purpose, but it will flow from finding your proper place within a greater whole. Your proper place is the place that honors your individual traits and allows you to exercise agency in a way that feels durably meaningful.
And when you do, it will feel like “an illicit act of rebellion” against modern institutionalism, like you got away with something:
It felt mischievous, almost illegal. The feeling resembled pulling off a heist. It reminded me of the excitement, the nervous feeling in my stomach I felt when my friends and I stole the doors off the classrooms at our high school as part of a senior prank. Sowing the seeds, covering them lazily with my bare feet, watching for rain and crows…it all felt like an illicit act of rebellion.12
Experience time with other people. Dunking on Twitter is not connection. Neither is scrolling the manufactured lives presented on Instagram. We lost community, but the raw materials are still there. Communities don’t span continents and they’re not dictated by legislatures. They’re the culture that emerges from real people and the connections we form with them.
Be less afraid to talk to strangers. Be less prickly to strangers who talk to you. (We aren’t broken. We’re just out of practice.) Keep up with your neighbors. Attend block parties. If there aren’t any, maybe plan one. If you attend church, get to know your congregants. If you have a hobby, look for people to share it with. Make time with friends regular and organic. Don’t relegate it to the adult version of playdates. Make time with family sacred and intentional. If you have a household, avoid nights with everyone on the couch, silently looking at their phones and scrolling in their own atomized world. Do not limit visiting relatives outside your household to holidays.
The time and attention required for these new meaningful priorities necessitates a hard look at our relationship to work. Escaping consumerism means we spend much less money. We can work less, change careers, or save more money to build more options for the future.
Work is not bad, and working hard does actually bring people meaning and satisfaction. But warping all aspects of life around work is bad. If we’re lucky, the work we do can be in direct service to the greater purpose we identify with. For most of us, though, it is primarily (if not exclusively) the thing we do to provide for ourselves and our families. It is backwards to allow that thing to become the point of our lives.
Don’t let your employer own your time and attention all hours of the day and night—or if you do, ensure you understand the trade and that it serves your higher purpose in the final analysis. If undue sacrifice is a non-negotiable where you work, make a plan to leave. If you are thinking of making that change, consider your own business. If planned and executed properly, this is the ultimate freedom. It also has positive effects on your community, and can elevate you to a position to community-build. There are risks, but those risks are often overstated,13 and we are far below historic levels of self-employment today.
Even if you don’t go into business yourself, make an effort to support those who do. Paying a little more for something you can get cheaper from Jeff Bezos may seem like a sacrifice, but this assessment fails to take into account the hidden costs. The reason a historically small number of corporations control an unprecedented share of the total economy, the goods we can choose from, and the jobs we can work, is because we voted with our dollars for that to happen.
Hidden costs are lurking everywhere in the story of our modern dystopia. Less agency was the price we paid for cheaper widgets. Less purpose was the price we paid for rejecting time-tested wisdom in favor of quick, easy dopamine hits. Less belonging was the price we paid for elevating self-interest as the basis for society and the human connections that form it. All of this helped increase the velocity of money, but it didn’t serve us.
Our way out is to identify and refuse to pay the hidden costs; to make choices that pay off some time after an artificially limited attention span loses the plot; to reclaim our agency, build our communities, value our friends and families, find our meaning and purpose within a larger whole we feel identified with, and exercise our agency in service to it.
Our way out is to move, bit by bit, toward a society built for people.
One chapter of the book focuses on subjective, self-reported happiness (and even there it falls back to objective measures at times), while the rest focuses on objective measures. His handling of the subjective side gives it short shrift, failing to address, for example, the clear trend in the US over the past decade of decreased self-reported happiness with ever-increasing GDP. He also ignores potential issues with distribution of self-reported happiness. Indeed, as self-reported happiness in the West has diverged further and further from Pinker’s objective measures, his decision to devote 95% of his book to those objective measures becomes more glaring.
See https://news.gallup.com/poll/1669/General-Mood-Country.aspx
See https://news.gallup.com/poll/656114/americans-state-nation-ratings-remain-record-low.aspx
Among other structural flaws, more than two-thirds of all modern social science studies are conducted using exclusively college students, typically either there mandatorily for a class assignment or to receive extra credit. (https://slate.com/technology/2013/05/weird-psychology-social-science-researchers-rely-too-much-on-western-college-students.html)
Pinker does make a good point in service to this argument: modern media is biased toward the negative and fuels our fear, neuroticism, and more. But this could not account for the massive discrepency at issue. Hysterical news is less effective on happy people. And people who are already less happy are more likely to overestimate any number of negative objective measures—a well-known psychological phenomenon.
Of the Abrahamic religions, only Judaism observes what we would consider a proper Sabbath. Christianity shares the language of Sabbath, with a similar ethos but less stringent practice. Muslims do not observe the Sabbath. Jumu'ah, the weekly day of prayer, has similar functions, and in many Muslim countries is a day of rest.
It is worth noting that wage labor of that time bore more of a resemblance to slavery than wage labor today does. As companies grew and amassed power, they devised ways to trap employees in their work up to and including company towns with armed militias, which became the sites of multiple armed conflicts.
When you calculated that your time was worth more than the cost of house work and started paying for that service, what you didn’t factor in was the hidden cost of losing the ability and will to tend to your own home.
See, e.g., https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/social-media-users-probably-wont-read-beyond-headline-researchers-say
See https://www.consumeraffairs.com/cell_phones/cell-phone-statistics.html#:~:text=Mobile%20phone%20usage%20and%20habits&text=On%20average%2C%20cell%20phone%20users,2%20hours%20and%2054%20minutes.
We shouldn’t “need” higher education—unless the goal is a specific career where that education is genuinely relevant—but society is structured to severely disadvantage anyone who opts out. It sure looks like we’ve manufactured a system of indentured servitude.
From ‘A Trick Played on Despair,’ published on an excellent Substack for anyone who feels the scarcity of purpose in modern life.
The oft-cited figure is that “90% of small businesses fail.” The truth is that about half of new small businesses close within 5 years, but of those, a third were running successfully at the time of closure and the owner either retired, sold off the business, or just closed shop without residual debt. That does leave a real chance of failure, though, and the numbers vary a lot by industry. If you are considering self-employment, doing your homework here is more than just hoop jumping!