I feel sorry for You. There's nothing in Your toolbox that will be of any help in that regard. No disrespecting Your efforts. Sometimes Your best just doesn't work out. Bwahahahaha...
Perhaps this is a purely o line thing, which is reassuring. But what isn't reassuring is that online may be metastasizing and impacting offline. That has certainly been the case with politics.
Also, effort as a mental health practice. Yes in a sense you are working toward an external goal (work deadlines, team support, whatevs) but also an immediate internal release from self-obsession and future-tripping.
Preach brother. I think millennials were the worst offenders of this. So many post recession articles on how it’s not your fault you’re hopelessly in debt or overweight or generally unhappy because society, man. Maybe it was good for clicks but the rent is still due on the first, and I think people who took to the doomerism mindset put themselves at a significant disadvantage in career, personal health, and dating arenas.
Growing up in the 90s, it seemed like you "should" be able to do almost anything for your "job." Like the musical Rent. Artists should get to live in NYC for free because.... "everything is rent." ??? That doesn't even make sense. I thought the characters were so cool when I was 13, only to grow up and empathize with the landlord. :(
Seriously. Not surprising that the doomerism articles seemed to always be written by journalism majors living in NYC. I always wanted to write back- you could have majored in business and moved to Charlotte or Dallas or Phoenix and you’d probably have a down payment saved on a house by now and be much less miserable and pessimistic
I just read the Coffey piece and thought the best part was the last line, which she didn't write:
"Clare Coffey currently resides in Idaho."
She didn't have to mention that in her essay because she knew Gawker would do it for her... just in case the people she's trying to reach needed one possible solution spelled out for them.
I saw Rent in my 20s and I wound up wondering why everybody was crapping on Benny, who had been enabling them forever.
That said, I reserve the right to love Rent because of the relationship between Angel and Tom Collins and the fact that my great aunt, 78 at the time, also loved it. A month later she was dead of cancer. (Those characters WERE a bunch of deadbeats, though, lmao)
Nice point. For me it matches with the overall trend of outsourcing feelings. Sometimes it's crowdsourcing, sometimes it's just translating personal issues into systemic ones, sometimes it's medicalizing things. But it's always about not really dealing with your shit. (and of course, a lot of times those things are really really hard to deal with, but yeah...)
"sometimes it's just translating personal issues into systemic ones"
Yes. Fantastic piece by Freddie but I think there are a lot of unspoken corollaries to identity politics, culture war, and other political issues. It could be true that the system has fucked you over via systemic bias/nationalism/NAFTA/sinister Democratic machinations/sinister Republican machinations/whatever-your-personal-boogeyman, and also still be true that there are a lot of things you can do within that context to significantly improve your odds of success. A lot of people seem to think that acknowledging this somehow constitutes denying the larger problem, which I've never understood. The powers-that-be wounded you and you respond by...finishing yourself off with a self-inflicted blow, to spite them? They're fine with that, so maybe try taking care of yourself instead. Easier said than done sometimes, I realize, but necessary just the same.
This is one of the things that kicked me off the woke path, maybe 10 years ago. In particular, I had a black co-worker who was trying to work her way through med school while also raising two young children. She would talk sometimes about the fancy house she would one day buy, once she was earning a doctor's income.
Meanwhile, I was spending too much time on an activist blog by a middle-class white woman, who was getting deeper and deeper into this kind of belief, that The System will not allow you to succeed if you're not a straight white able-bodied cis male and anyone who tells you otherwise is Oppressing you. And eventually I made the connection - how is (co-worker) supposed to achieve her goals, if not by hard work? If she sits down and waits for society to become perfect, she'll be waiting forever.
One of the things that kicked me off the woke path: one of my kids (a white male) is best friends with our neighbor, who is a black female. They’ve been friends since they were 4. If we applied these metrics and ideologies to their friendship, the friendship would cease to exist.
This is one of the great, unabashedly positive elements of hip-hop culture: viewing adversity and disadvantage as obstacles to be overcome by personal strength. If you come from nothing and nobody helped you, it just proves that you're better when you make it. This attitude can get so intense that rappers start to sound like Reaganites.
The trend of systems thinking applied to individual lives really messes up your worldview and interpersonal relationships. CRT as a legal theory is interesting and not wholly useless; it offers an interesting way to consider law. CRT as a way of calculating privilege and power between two friends sucks a bag of donkey dicks, but people are doing it all up and down the internet.
I think this distinction is the most important but least understood source of fractiousness around this whole debate. I'd love to read an essay about it if you want to write one.
Great piece. What irks me is that this is sort of complaint is often paired with the claim that if you are OK, if you are working hard and working towards some worthwhile end, or if God forbid, you're actually thriving, then you must be part of the problem. As if success were enough to make you politically suspect. And no one believes this, because the making these claims the loudest are all desperate to be successful at something.
But I guess the nature of online life today. You're either "anti-work" or you're "hustle culture." Or you're hustling but loudly proclaiming that you're not, so that if you fail, you'll have plausible deniability.
And while all of this is happening, more of the population is getting squeezed in really profound ways: higher rents, lower real pay, lower quality governance, more credentialism, so on and so forth. Being individually successful is suspect in some circles, but the quality of communal life is deteriorating. I wonder, what's going to be left?
It’s not much different than 25 years ago. In college specifically and among 20 somethings generally a certain arty bohemianess is fashionable. But that soon crashes into post college economic reality that working for an arts non-profit isn’t all that great.
And if you don't have rich parents then that's the point at which you realize your artistic ambitions are best served by getting a job that pays well enough for you to do them as hobbies...a tale as old as time...
This is a great piece and the advice is sound. It worries me how much of the messaging young people hear these days is, essentially, "give up".
People have been railing against the concept of "grit" recently and they seem to be making the same error Freddie points out here: yes, we as a society have a bad habit of asking people to respond to problems that require collective solutions with rugged individualism instead and no, you can't just out-hustle diabetes or depression - we do, in fact, need universal healthcare. But, in the absence of the holistic solutions we seek, the individual does, indeed, need at least a little grit.
The odds are stacked against you; try anyway. The alternative is defeat. Self-selected defeat.
The odds are *evenly stacked* against *all-a* us. And it's *always* been easier to give power to somebody else so they can screw up Your existence, rather than taking more responsibility for what You did to end up where You are, right?
Evenly stacked, I say, because nobody survives in the long term. I think if people looked at the commonalities of the human experience, there wouldn't be so much contention between individualism and communalism. That's just me.
Ironically, I feel even fantasies of better worlds often pushed by younger people who recognize the worst of capitalism's excesses fall into that witless rise-and-grind model. I think of crypto and its "[blank]-to-earn" model: "Don't you wish you were compensated for consuming idle pleasures like watching videos or playing video games?"
The answer these people seem to have for getting fleeced is to somehow convince others that every second of their waking hours is actually valuable and worth real world currency so it must be productively used to earn, which is the real evil of capitalism I guess - the grind stops at eight+ hours. Never mind that the "earning" is of fake digital money that has value only so much as can be inflated and hyped up by the very same people feeding you this tripe.
You write so well, and are so right-minded, Sir, I hate to criticize. The fundamental problem I have with Your views is Your delusions about Marxism. You can out-debate me, no question. But common-sense will tell You what You more-or-less "said" in this fine essay.
"Sometimes this attitude specifically takes the form of complaints about work, meaning the exchange of labor for wages, specifically. And indeed, if you’re a Marxist you recognize that this exchange is inherently exploitative. But work, itself, the act of laboring, is not a vestige of capitalism but of human existence."
If You work, and You *FEEL* like You're being exploited, it can mean a couple (or more) things: You've never worked in a good business. You don't know that most businesses are good. That if the U.S.A. was Marxist, You'd *STILL* be exploited. Doesn't matter who owns the business, if You're in a mood to *feel* exploited, You will.
It's mathematically impossible:
"from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" and
"everybody can get the same outcome, if we're all given the same opportunities." Sorry, but true.
What You, Sir, don't get is that even if the U.S.A. were Marxist, people would still be born on third base. What Marxists seem to count on is that "they'd" be in position to be on third base, more than everyone would somehow end up on third base, right?
"The simple fact of the matter is this: you are embedded in a system in which you do not control your own destiny, yet you must work to achieve better outcomes rather than worse regardless. Adult life, very often, consists of recognizing that you can’t control what happens next, and then setting about to try and control it anyway. Because while you may never be able to exceed the potential that is forced on you by chance and parentage and timing and the system, you can certainly fail to meet that potential."
You see, I read something like that and shake my head. Because there is, mebbe, nothing more outstanding You've written in this essay.
This is a Law of Nature. It doesn't matter *WHAT* the system is. Capitalism? Marxism? This is still true. To me, anyWay, this is a Spiritual (if not Religious) Truth. You do NOT, and canNOT, have complete control over *anything,* let alone something in the future. *Nobody* has that good-a crystal ball, right?
I could reread the article, and quote most-a it as being right on the money. The only other fault I can see in the logic/emotions/intuitions is that You blame the problems on Capitalism. Without considering the problems that will necessarily still be around if Marxism was in placed.
People, as a general rule, prefer to complain than work to improve themselves, right? You're lucky, Sir Freddie, that You weren't raised that Way. In addition to the other lucky breaks You got. Which most people *do* get but pass on by. AFAIK, it's roughly 50% "luck" and 50% hard work. ICBW.
TYTY again for this essay. Sorry if this is too long.
TY for Your reply, KT. I'm probably not following. Sorry.
I didn't say that real well, probably, because I just type what comes out. Perhaps this is better tho, surely, You'll find some way to disagree anyway, right?
--------------
*Most* people who feel like they're being exploited really *aren't.* Although there are, apparently, some forms of human trafficking in slave labor, most everybody in this country is allowed to quit their job, and find something different. *Not* saying that's always easy to do, but a lotta people won't make the *effort* and would just prefer to say they have no choice and are being "exploited." Granted, not everybody has *good* choices.
I dunno exact percentages, but my impression is that *most* people who claim they are being exploited are prisoners of their own minds. People who aren't just naturally tend to do better. I've been on both sides of the teeter-totter. Sometimes it's difficult to say if health problems are *determining* Your future until after the fact.
If anything i wrote was a defense of Marxism, it was just my poor writing. What I've described above is still gonna happen in a Marxist system of government, right? Anybody can *say* "well, it won't happen as much.* My guess is that it will be the same amount of "exploitation" or, more likely, *more.* ICBW.
Well, Older-Sister trained me to get coffee for Mom first thing in the morning. She pawned it off on me soon as she could. I never knew, and never told Younger-Sister to do it. Was I exploited? I just thought I was stupid and naive, not exploited.
I started working when I was 15 at $1 an hour. Even back then that was below minimum wage. Never dawned on me. It was all I was worth at that age for one thing.
I guess I was real lucky nobody *told* me I was being exploited, or I would-a learned something stupid, AFAICT.
I explained elsewhere (mebbe above) that apparently we still have a form of chattel slavery occurring in this country. Don't mean to minimize it.
But get real for a moment, if that's possible. How many people who claim to be exploited, or claim other people are being exploited, refer to chattel slavery? So, therefore, yeah being exploited is a feeling, more than anything else, AFAIK.
So capitalism sucks because some people are born with advantages, e.g. due to their parents' money. Well, I was born in a socialist country. There, your birth mattered even more. Not only were you and your life chances sorted according to your class origin, but personal connections, whether your parents' or your own, were even more important than in capitalist societies.
Of course, capitalism and socialism aren't the only options. We could go back to feudalism or aristocracy or a theistic society.
They will use a magic sorting hat ala Harry Potter. Each 6 year old puts on the hat. The hat informs the fearless leaders how this 6 year old will best benefit "society" and that's that.
Michael Alberts is one of the few people who heard this critique and decided it was legitimate lol. Most of his work since the New Left has been dedicated to answering this question. I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, but I respect the effort and disposition.
Two other works I’ve heard try to tackle this are Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution and Women Under Socialism (the second half at least). So, I wouldn’t say no one ever thinks about it… but it’s definitely something people want to stick their fucking heads in the sand to avoid…
Yeah. I've never really understood people who complain about the unfairness of connections yet advocate for more centralized control. The more central the control, the more connections will matter. That's just human nature.
No society is completely fair, as that is unattainable. But I would rather be in one where I don't have to be born as Nancy Pelosi's cousin to have any chance of getting ahead.
And I'll further add, these discussions often gloss over just what level of "success" we're talking about. Manhattan hedge fund manager and writer for the New Yorker? Yeah, most people never have a shot at that under any circumstances. But if success is defined as an accountant in Topeka or an attorney in Jacksonville, etc., success becomes a lot easier to attain. And these are successes.
I think the centralization of cultural discourse makes people more likely to think in terms of the extremely rarefied elite level of "success" as being the only one. If you're following New Yorker writers on Twitter and reading about hedge fund managers all the time, you're going to be thinking about that world and imagining that you're a part of that game.
If you're going to the county fair or the town rotary club, you might have an easier time thinking about "success" in terms that are actually attainable for you. This is one of the big psychological benefits of deliberate localism.
And there's also the uselessness of concentrating on such rarefied levels. We're talking about so few positions that only 1 in a million (or something along those lines) can hold them as a matter of sheer mathematics. Of course, the vast, vast majority of us will be on the outside looking in. This is not news.
Yep, a pleasure of a career as a professional in a small city in flyover country is there's no strata of uber-rich folks above me.
The folks in NYC complaining about the finance and hedge fund managers aren't mistaken; it's genuinely an issue. However much you may want or work for something and whatever you may bid, there's always a strata of folks who can outbid you for it. It's especially an issue once you have kids. Those folks can bogart the most coveted positional goods -- school spots, cultural activities, coaching or training, etc. -- and they throw off the pricing for everything you'd like to avail yourself of and provide for your family; you can be talented and busting your bum as a professional and find yourself unable to provide the life you'd like for your family.
Not an issue where I live! We have one excellent school; I can afford to send multiple children to it. No cultural activity is out of my price range, and politicians raising funds do not look past me; to the contrary, the modest donations I can afford to make can get me on the board of prestigious local institutions - the fine art museum, the symphony, etc. - and political candidates of all office levels come to fundraisers I hold.
I'm not bragging or advising everyone do this. There's definite, obvious drawbacks to living here vs. a large coastal city. However, in this aspect I prefer it quite a lot versus when I lived in the city, and versus my friends who have stayed there and do not enjoy nearly my quality of life.
"But some people work in the cobalt mines at least part-time under socialism. Luxury cyborg space communism will have to wait." I'd take this even further. The mythical luxury space communism will still need part time cobalt miners.
But for it to feel as "luxury" as people imagine, you'd need to have a hidden class of the population who do all the work.
The closest thing we'd get to that ideal is one where you have one part time job that's just posting or doing market research (aka the type of jobs that wouldn't feel like jobs) and another part time job where you're on a hard clock for 15 hours a week or so working in the cobalt mines, so that your devices can keep functioning.
And in this world, maybe at some point people say "maybe I don't like my screens and internet enough to justify how much I dislike the cobalt mines." Then things get really interesting.
Anyway, I hold that hypothetical in my head as a reminder that the "work-free" future really isn't plausible but workers' democracy (aka socialism) is extremely plausible.
I think that last is pretty easy to say, as long as it's always some nebulous concept of "it'll be way cool" undefined in some nebulous future. Don't talk about plausible until You can draw a picture of it and figure how to get there from *where we **are**.*
My grandpa worked in a literal mine at age 14. Well, at the top of the mine (they wouldn’t let him go down in with his father because he was too young). He eventually retired as a radar engineer for Hughes. His military service and training gave him the necessary skills despite having never gone to college.
Believe it or not, this kind of path is still an option. If you have the capability and the determination, the military still provides top-tier training in all sorts of fields. You do however have to be willing to serve in the military, which vast numbers of people are not, and not merely because they are conscientious objectors.
You make a *great* point, Erin E. IMO, mandatory national service in the military, or some other form, would be desirable on a number of fronts.
More to what You "said," I think the vast majority of kids these days wouldn't be willing to serve in the military, and virtually none of them would be able to honestly say it's because they're conscientious objectors. ICBW, 'course. TY again.
Military service can both boost a sense of belonging AND temper the desire for war. I'd wager most people aren't so gung ho about warfare if they're the ones on the ground.
Incidentally, I sometimes summarize my political beliefs as "If a lot of other jobs were as structured, guaranteed, and remunerative as jobs in the military, the world would be a way better place."
Truth. If socialists can find an organizing principle as simple yet affecting as "serve to defend your nation," perhaps it would work. Most military jobs have very little to do with actual warfare.
I'd like to add to that by saying that the military seems to be a workplace with qualities that people in the military take for granted and people outside the military don't know they're missing.
Part of it is the structured hierarchy, but also of course how the premise of why you're all doing it (serve and defend your nation) is so simple that people don't need to think about it and remind themselves of it all the time. You don't have constant questions about what that actually means. I think that's important. I think that many people from an intellectual or liberal background really shoot themselves in the foot.
In college, I associated deliberation and constant questioning and self-criticism with success. I think a lot of liberals (I'm basically a lib) also develop this way. However I do feel like I've started to see how much that shoots you in the foot outside of college. You can have a multimillion dollar nonprofit where the educated employees, who associate nuance and deliberation and self-criticism with success, can miss the boat on a lot of things because they lack the clarity of purpose/lack of overthinking that I think defines most happiness and also most strategic success.
Freddie has written about clarity of purpose, I believe (maybe? Or maybe I’m attributing my own brilliant thoughts to him because #patriarchy ?) but regardless, yes. This is what religion and military service and whatnot give to people. A fairly uncomplicated mission statement. Of COURSE thinks can and do go haywire from there, but if you have an easily digestible core principle, you’ve got a bedrock. This is why I’m a fan of liberalism. Freedom to do and think as you wish as far as your freedom abuts your neighbor’s right to the same. We can argue about how that plays out till the cows come home, but if we can’t even agree that freedom of speech is our bedrock, then what’s the bedrock? That’s why I have such a problem with so many contemporary political movements.
I think that basically all of us feel something similar about that bedrock - no matter who we blame for it or who we think should fix it, or how we think it should be fixed, we feel like something bad happened and now that bedrock is gone. It used to be a cultural thing that you felt comfortable assuming about people... that we all have the same ideal of freedom. It does feel like it's gone now. My personal theory (and I don't think anybody's theory is totally right including mine... we're all proverbially blind and touching different parts of the elephant) about who's to blame is that right-wing Americans did it first, and that liberal/progressive Americans, who have an inferiority complex and always see the Right as stronger by default, decided that they had a license to do it too. Essentially this consensus emerged that we all deserve the right to our own niche of punishing others rather than our own niche of having people agree with us. I hate it.
Anyone who approaches life as a vending machine where you put in virtue and get out happiness is just going to get hurt. That's the way of "deserving", and I don't know what that means. Alex Jones doesn't deserve his fantastic wealth, we might say, and those Sandy Hook kids didn't deserve to die, but what does any of that mean? Jones is still rich and those poor kids are still dead.
Myself, I don't expect much from this world in the way of justice, except for what human beings make for ourselves. THAT'S where we can put our virtue.
Great piece! I think one of the fastest ways to hurt our mental health is to get caught up in and ruminate over fairness, because life is not fair. The destructive effects of grudges about fairness are apparent not only in conversations about capitalism, but also in all kinds of privilege talk. Think of the frequent complaint, “It’s not my job to educate you.” But if we refuse to share our thoughts and experiences because “it’s not fair,” how will anyone ever learn, and how will things ever get better? If we choose to focus on our outrage that other people have it easier, instead of feeling grateful for the ways we are lucky, we only hurt ourselves.
I personally think there are times when "it's not my job to educate you" is and should be well-taken. But I agree with you (and Mari).
A lot of the time (possibly a majority of the time?), we're talking about people who assume a posture of "I'm going to teach you something" and when another asks for details, they get the "it's not my job to teach you."
What makes it even more exasperating is that most of the people complaining online have been treated *less* unfairly by capitalism than a lot of other Americans. I'm sure there are also people at the bottom of the ladder who hurt themselves by blaming all their problems on social injustice--which in their case is actually closer to the truth, although it's still an unproductive way of thinking. But those aren't the people Freddie is writing about.
Great point, Mari. Comparing ourselves to others often leads to misery, or at the least doesn't bring contentment. This is something I know yet it remains difficult to put into practice. Still a worthwhile goal.
Lol... Sorry, You've failed miserably in that last, as far as I'm concerned.
I feel sorry for You. There's nothing in Your toolbox that will be of any help in that regard. No disrespecting Your efforts. Sometimes Your best just doesn't work out. Bwahahahaha...
Nice try. But You need to reread what I wrote. Your efforts to disrespect me are futile, because I don't expect or need external validation.
That's an exercise doomed to futility. The people I am guessing you would most like to discomfort are beyond your means to discomfort them.
I live in a gated community with security guards. Good luck getting anywhere close to me.
Nah, life is too good.
Perhaps this is a purely o line thing, which is reassuring. But what isn't reassuring is that online may be metastasizing and impacting offline. That has certainly been the case with politics.
Also, effort as a mental health practice. Yes in a sense you are working toward an external goal (work deadlines, team support, whatevs) but also an immediate internal release from self-obsession and future-tripping.
Preach brother. I think millennials were the worst offenders of this. So many post recession articles on how it’s not your fault you’re hopelessly in debt or overweight or generally unhappy because society, man. Maybe it was good for clicks but the rent is still due on the first, and I think people who took to the doomerism mindset put themselves at a significant disadvantage in career, personal health, and dating arenas.
Especially since Gen Z are shaping up to be capitalism's feral children. I compare it to the generation born before and after the nuclear apocalypse.
Gen 1: "We have to ear lizard again? My life sucks."
Gen 2: "We get to eat lizard? My favorite!"
> rent is still due on the first
Growing up in the 90s, it seemed like you "should" be able to do almost anything for your "job." Like the musical Rent. Artists should get to live in NYC for free because.... "everything is rent." ??? That doesn't even make sense. I thought the characters were so cool when I was 13, only to grow up and empathize with the landlord. :(
Seriously. Not surprising that the doomerism articles seemed to always be written by journalism majors living in NYC. I always wanted to write back- you could have majored in business and moved to Charlotte or Dallas or Phoenix and you’d probably have a down payment saved on a house by now and be much less miserable and pessimistic
I just read the Coffey piece and thought the best part was the last line, which she didn't write:
"Clare Coffey currently resides in Idaho."
She didn't have to mention that in her essay because she knew Gawker would do it for her... just in case the people she's trying to reach needed one possible solution spelled out for them.
I live in a not-very-metropolitan area of NC. Different worlds.
David Rakoff and "I paid my fucking rent" springs to mind.
I saw Rent in my 20s and I wound up wondering why everybody was crapping on Benny, who had been enabling them forever.
That said, I reserve the right to love Rent because of the relationship between Angel and Tom Collins and the fact that my great aunt, 78 at the time, also loved it. A month later she was dead of cancer. (Those characters WERE a bunch of deadbeats, though, lmao)
Nice point. For me it matches with the overall trend of outsourcing feelings. Sometimes it's crowdsourcing, sometimes it's just translating personal issues into systemic ones, sometimes it's medicalizing things. But it's always about not really dealing with your shit. (and of course, a lot of times those things are really really hard to deal with, but yeah...)
"sometimes it's just translating personal issues into systemic ones"
Yes. Fantastic piece by Freddie but I think there are a lot of unspoken corollaries to identity politics, culture war, and other political issues. It could be true that the system has fucked you over via systemic bias/nationalism/NAFTA/sinister Democratic machinations/sinister Republican machinations/whatever-your-personal-boogeyman, and also still be true that there are a lot of things you can do within that context to significantly improve your odds of success. A lot of people seem to think that acknowledging this somehow constitutes denying the larger problem, which I've never understood. The powers-that-be wounded you and you respond by...finishing yourself off with a self-inflicted blow, to spite them? They're fine with that, so maybe try taking care of yourself instead. Easier said than done sometimes, I realize, but necessary just the same.
This is one of the things that kicked me off the woke path, maybe 10 years ago. In particular, I had a black co-worker who was trying to work her way through med school while also raising two young children. She would talk sometimes about the fancy house she would one day buy, once she was earning a doctor's income.
Meanwhile, I was spending too much time on an activist blog by a middle-class white woman, who was getting deeper and deeper into this kind of belief, that The System will not allow you to succeed if you're not a straight white able-bodied cis male and anyone who tells you otherwise is Oppressing you. And eventually I made the connection - how is (co-worker) supposed to achieve her goals, if not by hard work? If she sits down and waits for society to become perfect, she'll be waiting forever.
One of the things that kicked me off the woke path: one of my kids (a white male) is best friends with our neighbor, who is a black female. They’ve been friends since they were 4. If we applied these metrics and ideologies to their friendship, the friendship would cease to exist.
This is one of the great, unabashedly positive elements of hip-hop culture: viewing adversity and disadvantage as obstacles to be overcome by personal strength. If you come from nothing and nobody helped you, it just proves that you're better when you make it. This attitude can get so intense that rappers start to sound like Reaganites.
The trend of systems thinking applied to individual lives really messes up your worldview and interpersonal relationships. CRT as a legal theory is interesting and not wholly useless; it offers an interesting way to consider law. CRT as a way of calculating privilege and power between two friends sucks a bag of donkey dicks, but people are doing it all up and down the internet.
"CRT as a way of calculating privilege and power between two friends sucks a bag of donkey dicks...."
This sentence made me smile this morning. Thank you for that!
Then my work here is done! This is why I toil.
"sucks a bag of donkey dicks, but people are doing it all up and down the internet"
Your browser history is more interesting than mine.
I think this distinction is the most important but least understood source of fractiousness around this whole debate. I'd love to read an essay about it if you want to write one.
This is why I subscribe. Thank you. There's more wisdom in this piece than I've seen in a long, long time.
Great piece. What irks me is that this is sort of complaint is often paired with the claim that if you are OK, if you are working hard and working towards some worthwhile end, or if God forbid, you're actually thriving, then you must be part of the problem. As if success were enough to make you politically suspect. And no one believes this, because the making these claims the loudest are all desperate to be successful at something.
But I guess the nature of online life today. You're either "anti-work" or you're "hustle culture." Or you're hustling but loudly proclaiming that you're not, so that if you fail, you'll have plausible deniability.
And while all of this is happening, more of the population is getting squeezed in really profound ways: higher rents, lower real pay, lower quality governance, more credentialism, so on and so forth. Being individually successful is suspect in some circles, but the quality of communal life is deteriorating. I wonder, what's going to be left?
#BalladOfAGrinder
It’s not much different than 25 years ago. In college specifically and among 20 somethings generally a certain arty bohemianess is fashionable. But that soon crashes into post college economic reality that working for an arts non-profit isn’t all that great.
And if you don't have rich parents then that's the point at which you realize your artistic ambitions are best served by getting a job that pays well enough for you to do them as hobbies...a tale as old as time...
This is a great piece and the advice is sound. It worries me how much of the messaging young people hear these days is, essentially, "give up".
People have been railing against the concept of "grit" recently and they seem to be making the same error Freddie points out here: yes, we as a society have a bad habit of asking people to respond to problems that require collective solutions with rugged individualism instead and no, you can't just out-hustle diabetes or depression - we do, in fact, need universal healthcare. But, in the absence of the holistic solutions we seek, the individual does, indeed, need at least a little grit.
The odds are stacked against you; try anyway. The alternative is defeat. Self-selected defeat.
LOL! Bless your cynical little heart...
The odds are *evenly stacked* against *all-a* us. And it's *always* been easier to give power to somebody else so they can screw up Your existence, rather than taking more responsibility for what You did to end up where You are, right?
Evenly stacked, I say, because nobody survives in the long term. I think if people looked at the commonalities of the human experience, there wouldn't be so much contention between individualism and communalism. That's just me.
Bingo!
Ironically, I feel even fantasies of better worlds often pushed by younger people who recognize the worst of capitalism's excesses fall into that witless rise-and-grind model. I think of crypto and its "[blank]-to-earn" model: "Don't you wish you were compensated for consuming idle pleasures like watching videos or playing video games?"
The answer these people seem to have for getting fleeced is to somehow convince others that every second of their waking hours is actually valuable and worth real world currency so it must be productively used to earn, which is the real evil of capitalism I guess - the grind stops at eight+ hours. Never mind that the "earning" is of fake digital money that has value only so much as can be inflated and hyped up by the very same people feeding you this tripe.
You write so well, and are so right-minded, Sir, I hate to criticize. The fundamental problem I have with Your views is Your delusions about Marxism. You can out-debate me, no question. But common-sense will tell You what You more-or-less "said" in this fine essay.
"Sometimes this attitude specifically takes the form of complaints about work, meaning the exchange of labor for wages, specifically. And indeed, if you’re a Marxist you recognize that this exchange is inherently exploitative. But work, itself, the act of laboring, is not a vestige of capitalism but of human existence."
If You work, and You *FEEL* like You're being exploited, it can mean a couple (or more) things: You've never worked in a good business. You don't know that most businesses are good. That if the U.S.A. was Marxist, You'd *STILL* be exploited. Doesn't matter who owns the business, if You're in a mood to *feel* exploited, You will.
It's mathematically impossible:
"from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" and
"everybody can get the same outcome, if we're all given the same opportunities." Sorry, but true.
What You, Sir, don't get is that even if the U.S.A. were Marxist, people would still be born on third base. What Marxists seem to count on is that "they'd" be in position to be on third base, more than everyone would somehow end up on third base, right?
"The simple fact of the matter is this: you are embedded in a system in which you do not control your own destiny, yet you must work to achieve better outcomes rather than worse regardless. Adult life, very often, consists of recognizing that you can’t control what happens next, and then setting about to try and control it anyway. Because while you may never be able to exceed the potential that is forced on you by chance and parentage and timing and the system, you can certainly fail to meet that potential."
You see, I read something like that and shake my head. Because there is, mebbe, nothing more outstanding You've written in this essay.
This is a Law of Nature. It doesn't matter *WHAT* the system is. Capitalism? Marxism? This is still true. To me, anyWay, this is a Spiritual (if not Religious) Truth. You do NOT, and canNOT, have complete control over *anything,* let alone something in the future. *Nobody* has that good-a crystal ball, right?
I could reread the article, and quote most-a it as being right on the money. The only other fault I can see in the logic/emotions/intuitions is that You blame the problems on Capitalism. Without considering the problems that will necessarily still be around if Marxism was in placed.
People, as a general rule, prefer to complain than work to improve themselves, right? You're lucky, Sir Freddie, that You weren't raised that Way. In addition to the other lucky breaks You got. Which most people *do* get but pass on by. AFAIK, it's roughly 50% "luck" and 50% hard work. ICBW.
TYTY again for this essay. Sorry if this is too long.
TY for Your reply, KT. I'm probably not following. Sorry.
I didn't say that real well, probably, because I just type what comes out. Perhaps this is better tho, surely, You'll find some way to disagree anyway, right?
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*Most* people who feel like they're being exploited really *aren't.* Although there are, apparently, some forms of human trafficking in slave labor, most everybody in this country is allowed to quit their job, and find something different. *Not* saying that's always easy to do, but a lotta people won't make the *effort* and would just prefer to say they have no choice and are being "exploited." Granted, not everybody has *good* choices.
I dunno exact percentages, but my impression is that *most* people who claim they are being exploited are prisoners of their own minds. People who aren't just naturally tend to do better. I've been on both sides of the teeter-totter. Sometimes it's difficult to say if health problems are *determining* Your future until after the fact.
If anything i wrote was a defense of Marxism, it was just my poor writing. What I've described above is still gonna happen in a Marxist system of government, right? Anybody can *say* "well, it won't happen as much.* My guess is that it will be the same amount of "exploitation" or, more likely, *more.* ICBW.
I'd hafta guess, myself. I never felt that way.
Well, Older-Sister trained me to get coffee for Mom first thing in the morning. She pawned it off on me soon as she could. I never knew, and never told Younger-Sister to do it. Was I exploited? I just thought I was stupid and naive, not exploited.
I started working when I was 15 at $1 an hour. Even back then that was below minimum wage. Never dawned on me. It was all I was worth at that age for one thing.
I guess I was real lucky nobody *told* me I was being exploited, or I would-a learned something stupid, AFAICT.
I explained elsewhere (mebbe above) that apparently we still have a form of chattel slavery occurring in this country. Don't mean to minimize it.
But get real for a moment, if that's possible. How many people who claim to be exploited, or claim other people are being exploited, refer to chattel slavery? So, therefore, yeah being exploited is a feeling, more than anything else, AFAIK.
So capitalism sucks because some people are born with advantages, e.g. due to their parents' money. Well, I was born in a socialist country. There, your birth mattered even more. Not only were you and your life chances sorted according to your class origin, but personal connections, whether your parents' or your own, were even more important than in capitalist societies.
Of course, capitalism and socialism aren't the only options. We could go back to feudalism or aristocracy or a theistic society.
It's weird how people never think about how allocation and working decisions would be made in true socialist countries.
Allocation and working decisions will be made in utopia, by definition. *Gotta* be an improvement, right? /s
They will use a magic sorting hat ala Harry Potter. Each 6 year old puts on the hat. The hat informs the fearless leaders how this 6 year old will best benefit "society" and that's that.
Michael Alberts is one of the few people who heard this critique and decided it was legitimate lol. Most of his work since the New Left has been dedicated to answering this question. I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, but I respect the effort and disposition.
Two other works I’ve heard try to tackle this are Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution and Women Under Socialism (the second half at least). So, I wouldn’t say no one ever thinks about it… but it’s definitely something people want to stick their fucking heads in the sand to avoid…
Yeah. I've never really understood people who complain about the unfairness of connections yet advocate for more centralized control. The more central the control, the more connections will matter. That's just human nature.
No society is completely fair, as that is unattainable. But I would rather be in one where I don't have to be born as Nancy Pelosi's cousin to have any chance of getting ahead.
And I'll further add, these discussions often gloss over just what level of "success" we're talking about. Manhattan hedge fund manager and writer for the New Yorker? Yeah, most people never have a shot at that under any circumstances. But if success is defined as an accountant in Topeka or an attorney in Jacksonville, etc., success becomes a lot easier to attain. And these are successes.
I think the centralization of cultural discourse makes people more likely to think in terms of the extremely rarefied elite level of "success" as being the only one. If you're following New Yorker writers on Twitter and reading about hedge fund managers all the time, you're going to be thinking about that world and imagining that you're a part of that game.
If you're going to the county fair or the town rotary club, you might have an easier time thinking about "success" in terms that are actually attainable for you. This is one of the big psychological benefits of deliberate localism.
Good points.
And there's also the uselessness of concentrating on such rarefied levels. We're talking about so few positions that only 1 in a million (or something along those lines) can hold them as a matter of sheer mathematics. Of course, the vast, vast majority of us will be on the outside looking in. This is not news.
Then there is the Joseph Heller quote about a billionaire he knew: “I have something he’ll never have.” “Enough.”
Yep, a pleasure of a career as a professional in a small city in flyover country is there's no strata of uber-rich folks above me.
The folks in NYC complaining about the finance and hedge fund managers aren't mistaken; it's genuinely an issue. However much you may want or work for something and whatever you may bid, there's always a strata of folks who can outbid you for it. It's especially an issue once you have kids. Those folks can bogart the most coveted positional goods -- school spots, cultural activities, coaching or training, etc. -- and they throw off the pricing for everything you'd like to avail yourself of and provide for your family; you can be talented and busting your bum as a professional and find yourself unable to provide the life you'd like for your family.
Not an issue where I live! We have one excellent school; I can afford to send multiple children to it. No cultural activity is out of my price range, and politicians raising funds do not look past me; to the contrary, the modest donations I can afford to make can get me on the board of prestigious local institutions - the fine art museum, the symphony, etc. - and political candidates of all office levels come to fundraisers I hold.
I'm not bragging or advising everyone do this. There's definite, obvious drawbacks to living here vs. a large coastal city. However, in this aspect I prefer it quite a lot versus when I lived in the city, and versus my friends who have stayed there and do not enjoy nearly my quality of life.
"But some people work in the cobalt mines at least part-time under socialism. Luxury cyborg space communism will have to wait." I'd take this even further. The mythical luxury space communism will still need part time cobalt miners.
But for it to feel as "luxury" as people imagine, you'd need to have a hidden class of the population who do all the work.
The closest thing we'd get to that ideal is one where you have one part time job that's just posting or doing market research (aka the type of jobs that wouldn't feel like jobs) and another part time job where you're on a hard clock for 15 hours a week or so working in the cobalt mines, so that your devices can keep functioning.
And in this world, maybe at some point people say "maybe I don't like my screens and internet enough to justify how much I dislike the cobalt mines." Then things get really interesting.
Anyway, I hold that hypothetical in my head as a reminder that the "work-free" future really isn't plausible but workers' democracy (aka socialism) is extremely plausible.
I think that last is pretty easy to say, as long as it's always some nebulous concept of "it'll be way cool" undefined in some nebulous future. Don't talk about plausible until You can draw a picture of it and figure how to get there from *where we **are**.*
My grandpa worked in a literal mine at age 14. Well, at the top of the mine (they wouldn’t let him go down in with his father because he was too young). He eventually retired as a radar engineer for Hughes. His military service and training gave him the necessary skills despite having never gone to college.
Believe it or not, this kind of path is still an option. If you have the capability and the determination, the military still provides top-tier training in all sorts of fields. You do however have to be willing to serve in the military, which vast numbers of people are not, and not merely because they are conscientious objectors.
You make a *great* point, Erin E. IMO, mandatory national service in the military, or some other form, would be desirable on a number of fronts.
More to what You "said," I think the vast majority of kids these days wouldn't be willing to serve in the military, and virtually none of them would be able to honestly say it's because they're conscientious objectors. ICBW, 'course. TY again.
Military service can both boost a sense of belonging AND temper the desire for war. I'd wager most people aren't so gung ho about warfare if they're the ones on the ground.
Yeah, I know I wouldn't be. Too old now tho, so there is that.
Hey don't be so hard on yourself. The olds are useful as cannon fodder!
I rarely laugh out loud since nobody around. TYTY.
Incidentally, I sometimes summarize my political beliefs as "If a lot of other jobs were as structured, guaranteed, and remunerative as jobs in the military, the world would be a way better place."
Truth. If socialists can find an organizing principle as simple yet affecting as "serve to defend your nation," perhaps it would work. Most military jobs have very little to do with actual warfare.
I'd like to add to that by saying that the military seems to be a workplace with qualities that people in the military take for granted and people outside the military don't know they're missing.
Part of it is the structured hierarchy, but also of course how the premise of why you're all doing it (serve and defend your nation) is so simple that people don't need to think about it and remind themselves of it all the time. You don't have constant questions about what that actually means. I think that's important. I think that many people from an intellectual or liberal background really shoot themselves in the foot.
In college, I associated deliberation and constant questioning and self-criticism with success. I think a lot of liberals (I'm basically a lib) also develop this way. However I do feel like I've started to see how much that shoots you in the foot outside of college. You can have a multimillion dollar nonprofit where the educated employees, who associate nuance and deliberation and self-criticism with success, can miss the boat on a lot of things because they lack the clarity of purpose/lack of overthinking that I think defines most happiness and also most strategic success.
Freddie has written about clarity of purpose, I believe (maybe? Or maybe I’m attributing my own brilliant thoughts to him because #patriarchy ?) but regardless, yes. This is what religion and military service and whatnot give to people. A fairly uncomplicated mission statement. Of COURSE thinks can and do go haywire from there, but if you have an easily digestible core principle, you’ve got a bedrock. This is why I’m a fan of liberalism. Freedom to do and think as you wish as far as your freedom abuts your neighbor’s right to the same. We can argue about how that plays out till the cows come home, but if we can’t even agree that freedom of speech is our bedrock, then what’s the bedrock? That’s why I have such a problem with so many contemporary political movements.
I think that basically all of us feel something similar about that bedrock - no matter who we blame for it or who we think should fix it, or how we think it should be fixed, we feel like something bad happened and now that bedrock is gone. It used to be a cultural thing that you felt comfortable assuming about people... that we all have the same ideal of freedom. It does feel like it's gone now. My personal theory (and I don't think anybody's theory is totally right including mine... we're all proverbially blind and touching different parts of the elephant) about who's to blame is that right-wing Americans did it first, and that liberal/progressive Americans, who have an inferiority complex and always see the Right as stronger by default, decided that they had a license to do it too. Essentially this consensus emerged that we all deserve the right to our own niche of punishing others rather than our own niche of having people agree with us. I hate it.
To coin a phrase “first, tidy your room”
Anyone who approaches life as a vending machine where you put in virtue and get out happiness is just going to get hurt. That's the way of "deserving", and I don't know what that means. Alex Jones doesn't deserve his fantastic wealth, we might say, and those Sandy Hook kids didn't deserve to die, but what does any of that mean? Jones is still rich and those poor kids are still dead.
Myself, I don't expect much from this world in the way of justice, except for what human beings make for ourselves. THAT'S where we can put our virtue.
For a deep and meaningful sound bite, I go to Clint:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuvEJ-U1UDc
Great piece! I think one of the fastest ways to hurt our mental health is to get caught up in and ruminate over fairness, because life is not fair. The destructive effects of grudges about fairness are apparent not only in conversations about capitalism, but also in all kinds of privilege talk. Think of the frequent complaint, “It’s not my job to educate you.” But if we refuse to share our thoughts and experiences because “it’s not fair,” how will anyone ever learn, and how will things ever get better? If we choose to focus on our outrage that other people have it easier, instead of feeling grateful for the ways we are lucky, we only hurt ourselves.
"Think of the frequent complaint, “It’s not my job to educate you.”"
IME, that's not a complaint; that's someone being an asshole who first spews dogma that they themselves cannot explain or justify. Example:
1st person says: "What a beautiful day."
2nd person retorts: "Beautiful days are racist imperialist white supremacy"
1st person says: "WTF are you talking about?"
2nd person retorts: "It's not my job to educate you. Do better."
1st person thinks: "Christ, what an asshole"
I personally think there are times when "it's not my job to educate you" is and should be well-taken. But I agree with you (and Mari).
A lot of the time (possibly a majority of the time?), we're talking about people who assume a posture of "I'm going to teach you something" and when another asks for details, they get the "it's not my job to teach you."
So much this.
What makes it even more exasperating is that most of the people complaining online have been treated *less* unfairly by capitalism than a lot of other Americans. I'm sure there are also people at the bottom of the ladder who hurt themselves by blaming all their problems on social injustice--which in their case is actually closer to the truth, although it's still an unproductive way of thinking. But those aren't the people Freddie is writing about.
I am yet to meet an animal that felt sorry for itself.
You haven’t seen my dog after a bath 😉 (but I get your point).
Great point, Mari. Comparing ourselves to others often leads to misery, or at the least doesn't bring contentment. This is something I know yet it remains difficult to put into practice. Still a worthwhile goal.