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Chesterton's Fence Repair Co.'s avatar

You mention insecurity, which is indeed at the root of it. Think about the guys in High Fidelity. Why do they endlessly obsess over musical taste, question each other’s taste, sneer at the taste of others? Because they have erroneously mapped onto “taste” the drive to acquire useful knowledge and skills. Ordinarily, young people in the prime of their lives should be acquiring the skills and knowledge of their people, in order to contribute to the survival of the group. A primary motivator in acquiring such skills is the desire for status, and young people get that need satisfied by developing those skills, proving their worth and mettle, and, often, going through an initiation ritual. Now you are an adult of our tribe — a vital member of the group who helps us survive in a difficult world.

In our society, though, we have made many people somewhat vestigial. Nobody is really that critical to our mega-tribe’s survival, and the ratio of really important positions to people who could do them is alarmingly low. Many people are left with a deep, gnawing sense of uselessness. It’s a profound insecurity that the vast majority of our ancestors never dealt with.

The solution? I must just need to acquire MORE of the skills and knowledge that my culture says it values! To prove my worth I should carve out a niche. I’m the one who knows about cult rock 45s! I’m the one who knows which books signal the wrong sort of ideas! I AM THE ONE WHO TWEETS.

All this activity is completely fruitless, of course (analogous to what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs”), but it momentarily salves the anxiety.

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Matt Arnold's avatar

This is, again, the transition between the third and fourth stages of adult cognitive development. Stage four of cognitive development has an internal structure of justifications, where stage three cannot process the world through anything but popularity contests.

That $300,000 education you mentioned used to solidly provide a transition from three to four, up until poorly-understood pseudo-postmodernism undermined it in the humanities. (Although it could not do so in STEM, which is why STEM majors took over the world.)

At the risk of every one of my comments here being repetitious, this is yet another reason I would like very much to know what you think if you read Robert Kegan. It seems to have explanatory relevance for every topic you tend to discuss most often. "In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands Of Modern Life" examines the transition between stages three and four specifically.

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