social anomie and alienation aren’t great. if most people in the world don’t know what they want to do with their lives, that is a bad thing. but you know what’s worse? that same social anomie and alienation happening behind closed doors, with the threat of what you’re ‘supposed’ to do hanging over your head.
if you’ve ever met a group of single mormon women in their late ‘20s, you’ll know exactly what i mean. fuck, if you’ve met a group of mormon women in their late ‘20s in general you’ll know what i mean. there’s this pervasive sense of quiet desperation: “i don’t know what i wanted out of life, but it wasn’t this.”
even the women who did everything ‘right’- got married between the ages of 18 and 20 to a young man they met in college after he served his mission, had between 2 and 5 children, live as a homemaker in a nice house in the suburbs, go to the temple/pray/read their scriptures regularly, go to church every week- even they are unhappy. they say things like “i could have been anything i wanted, but i chose to raise children”, or “i wanted to be a [vocation] but god had other plans for me”. and behind closed doors, they take xanax or get high on pain meds and try to deal with the responsibilities they’re stuck with.
they did everything they were ‘supposed’ to do, but it wasn’t what they really wanted. so they’re miserable and alienated and feel alone, even though they ‘have’ a strong faith community and a society that encourages/strongarms them into a particular social role.
i honestly think alienation isn’t a problem isolated to the modern-day West. it’s just that after 1918 people started talking about it, because the War and the Flu destroyed everything people knew about how things ‘should’ be. if you’re stuck in a world you can’t change, surrounded by people you hate? no shit you’re going to feel alienated and isolated, whether you’re a mediaeval dirt farmer or a ‘20s jazz swinger or a Silicon Bay programmer.
i also think that some of our problems with anomie are caused by a) having too many vocations you can pursue while b) systematically devaluing every single one of these vocations. it’s harder than ever to decide what you want to be when you grow up, and literally everyone in a kid’s life is going to try to push them away from stuff that could be meaningful.
want to be a firefighter/policeman/construction worker/lumberjack/fisherman? those are blue-collar jobs, they’re icky (and if you happen to be unlucky, you get told you can’t do them ‘because vagina’). want to be a baker/florist/tailor/chef/nurse? those are blue-collar jobs, they’re icky (and if you’re unlucky, you get told you can’t do them ‘because penis’).
want to be a writer/artist/filmmaker/actor/puppeteer? “good luck saying ‘you want fries with that?’!”, with a side of ‘that’s for girls/boys’. want to be a scientist/programmer/engineer/doctor/astronaut? good luck being told ‘you’re not smart enough’, with a side of ‘you can’t do this if you have a vagina’.
want to be a professor? a homemaker? a stay-at-home parent? an entrepreneur? a stripper? a lawyer? no matter what you pick, you’re gonna get shoved away from it in ways both big and small.
our society as it currently exists is designed to funnel people into white-collar office work. and while that kind of work is necessary, a) a lot of it doesn’t actually provide any value and b) most people do not find it very satisfying.
an author i like coined the term ‘voker’- someone who does what they love for the love of the thing. right now, it’s very, very hard to be a voker- because of the pressures of capitalism, because sexism, and because our society does not value Love Of The Thing, it values Joyless Work.
i suspect if we made it easier to be a voker, a lot of our problems with social anomie would dissipate like smoke on the wind.
This train of thought is…important, and very much worth talking about. Probably I’ll spit out several responses, over the course of a while, as thoughts come to me.
First round:
i also think that some of our problems with anomie are caused by a) having too many vocations you can pursue while b) systematically devaluing every single one of these vocations.
This is 100% accurate. But it’s not like the problem boils down to Vocations vs. White-Collar Office Work, with the latter thing being some sort of special socially-favored activity that gets total approval from all corners. Literally every job is devalued, including white-collar office work.
If you’re a regular middle-management type, lots of people will look down their noses at you for being a soulless boring drone whose existence is wholly meaningless, just like it was back in the ‘60s. If you’re a high-flying financier or CEO, lots of people will tell you that you’re the worthless parasitic scum destroying society. If you’re a Tech Innovator type…I don’t think you need me to list all the widespread nasty stereotypes about Silicon Valley douchebags.
(And, even in other fields, the mechanisms of devaluation go well beyond the ones you list. If you’re an unsuccessful artist, yes, you’ll hear lots of “want fries with that?” jokes – and if you’re a successful artist, people will line up around the block to explain why your work is terrible / weak / socially-destructive.)
@bambamramfan is wrong about a lot of things, but he’s right about this: most people aren’t super-thick-skinned, most people don’t have the wherewithal to deal well with scorn, and a diverse complex society with wide-open high-bandwidth communication channels means that everyone is getting the world’s scorn pumped directly into his brain.
Your parents expect one thing of you, your (potential) mate(s) another, your kids a third, and already you’re totally fucked, even before you start factoring in “any friends you might have” or “the internet.”
The “everyone should be a voker, and that will solve our problems” idea is super dangerous, but…that’s for another time.
It occurs to me that part of why I’m so anti-tight-knit-communities and anti-identity is that I link those things with immunity to scorn.
This may be psychologically unrealistic. It probably is.
But on the other hand, people really don’t care about scorn from “those people over there.” If you tell a random suburban American that Bangladeshis are filled with contempt for his life choices, they will not care.
(Hell, if you tell a partisan Republican that The Libs are filled with contempt for his choices, he will often react with glee).
My resistance to community is a refusal to accept judgment from anyone except the friends that I have specifically chosen to give that power to. I’m not part of your “community” and I don’t have to accept your judgment. Because until I’ve decided that I trust your judgment—you, in particular—then you’re one of those people “over there”.
Hrm.
In the broadest sense, humans are actually very bad (thus far) at correctly calibrating their brains in response to “this person is far away [literally or metaphorically] and doesn’t matter to my life.” This is, in large part, an incomplete-adaptation-to-a-rapidly-changing-environment thing. Different people are better or worse at managing the calibration – and I suspect that, as such things go, you and I both are extreme outliers in terms of ability-to-think-of-people-as-not-mattering (without having to resort to horrible hacks like verminization*) – but I don’t think anyone is really excellent at it in an absolute sense.
*And, let’s be clear, verminization is a hack designed to achieve exactly this.
On the plus side, this means that your bleeding compassionate heart will sometimes respond to depictions of far-away suffering people with psychological modules that were designed for dealing with community members whose goodwill is a matter of long-term relevance to your welfare.
On the minus side, it means that when a Bangladeshi leaves you a comment on telling you that you should delete your blog and then kill yourself, it can be hard for many people to muster up a healthy level of indifference. People who are talking to you are obviously right there, and maybe they’ll start building coalitions against you!
In a practical sense, I suspect that community – “real” community, anyway – is overall a tool that does more to allow for this kind of thinking than to inhibit it. No one is an island, not really, but if you are very sure who “your people” are then you’re likely to have an easier time dismissing anyone who falls outside that circle. The most neurotic people-pleasers are those poor souls who think that everyone they encounter is a potential friend, ally, and rival all at once.
Identity is definitely a tool that allows for this kind of thinking. “I yam what I yam, I know what I yam, and I have no interest in being anything else” is one of the most solid possible foundations for ignoring social and cultural pressures.