A brief survey of modern human misery

Why are the vibes so bad? Human nature, amplified by many modern things

AI generated: ‘an infinite series of dark gears’

Human consciousness prioritizes awareness of problems. Consider using a tool that you’ve used countless times before, driving your car, riding your bike, cutting with a knife. You don’t put a ton of conscious attention into using that tool while you’re using it. Now consider what happens when that tool breaks. The broken tool leaps out of the background as a distinct object of awareness. You suddenly have to think about how to use it, what’s wrong with it, how to fix it. Then, after you fix it, it goes back into the background again as something you can use without thinking about. The same is true of other problems, job problems, relationship problems, etc. Things we get right fade into the background. We spend our days thinking about what’s wrong with our lives, and as soon as we fix one problem another problem replaces it because that’s just what consciousness does. 

Human beings crave superiority. It is reassuring to know that there is a hierarchy in the world and that we are higher up on that hierarchy than someone else. Superiority makes us feel farther away from death. It is the feeling of a zebra running away from a lion as a slower zebra falls behind and is caught in the carnivore’s claws. We delight in each other’s failure, in watching people fall from grace. When everyone is focused on someone else’s problems then they aren’t focused on ours. 

Our craving for superiority gives us an attachment to our misery, a surprisingly rich source of this superiority. Victims are morally superior to their abusers and oppressors, so we are incentivized to see ourselves as victims. Shame is a paradoxical manifestation of this - when we feel shame we feel superior to the worst versions of ourselves, manifesting our moral superiority through our awareness of our worthlessness.

Our craving for superiority drives us to declare our lives more significant than the lives of all other humans who have ever existed. If we can’t point to the importance of our individual accomplishments to justify this, we imagine ourselves as living through some extra-important historical era that makes our lives significant by default. We are living through the end times, ‘late-stage capitalism’, or something. Our problems today are more problematic than any other problems before. There has never been a worse time to be alive. This world will not go on without us. 

Technology empowers us to get what we want, and market forces allocate resources to satisfying human desires without judgment. So, for better or for worse, all of the above has been dramatically amplified by consumer technology. 

Democratic politics, too, amplifies these facets of the human condition and provides new domains for their manifestation.

Democratic politics incentivizes the losing team to generate dissatisfaction and blame it on the winning team, in the hopes of frustrating their efforts and making them more likely to lose the next election. 

Democratic politics creates a space where rival groups seek to destroy each other through legislation. In previous centuries you might have seen enemy kingdoms invading and plundering each other - now those same patterns play out as hostile groups seek to pass laws to punish and diminish each other. No matter who you are, there is some group out there which is getting up early and staying up late figuring out ways to make your life worse. 

Democratic politics has led to a blossoming of ‘activism’, people who believe that humanity is inert and irredeemable without their righteous intervention. 

Activism incentivizes extremism and catastrophization. “Things are getting better” does not drive donations or volunteer activity. Groups who assert catastrophe the hardest will be at the front of the line for government handouts when activists win a legislative majority. 

Activism incentivizes a vision of helplessness that can only be relieved by putting activists in power. “You are miserable, and all of your misery is caused by these evil people, and you are helpless to stop them on your own. Your only hope of relief is through my power. Help me rule over all and your enemies shall tremble before you, by my command.”

The distortions of activism are amplified by social media algorithms, which profit off of activist efforts even when the activists themselves despise the companies that create them.

Social media incentivizes engagement. Posts that evoke urgent misery drive more engagement than posts which do not, so the internet is full of urgent misery.

Social media incentivizes digestibility. Urgent misery is simple. Nuance takes time to process and as such is disincentivized. 

Social media can be hijacked by generative AI used by hostile actors to heighten social unrest. The Soviet Union could never have its way with CNN, but China can run countless AI chatbots on social media to shift the conversation.

The people who are most active on social media are those with minimal responsibilities, people without devotion to long-term projects like careers and families. Irresponsible people are irresponsible because they can’t be trusted with responsibility, either because they are too young and haven’t had time to mature or because they’ve consistently demonstrated untrustworthy behavior and haven’t gotten the memo that they need to change their ways. Irresponsible people lack the felt sense of effectiveness and belonging that can only come from long-term growth and accomplishment. So, much of our culture is now generated by and for miserable people, people who seek recognition and belonging and vindication in their misery. We are all juvenile by default, and social media culture now works hard to keep us that way.

What began as a recognition of the equal moral dignity of all individuals has morphed into the assertion of equitable outcomes for all identities. Your existence is first and foremost understood as an instance of social categories, social categories that are defined by their historical conflict with other social categories. We now have people cobbling together their preferences to declare themselves members of new and exotically oppressed identities who are entitled to the highest levels of attention and compensation. There are people alive today who believe that the world does not worship Taylor Swift hard enough, that high culture conspires against Swifties, that if you don’t think that her art surpasses Bach and Shakespeare then you are proof that the devil is real.

In sum: we are miserable because we love to be miserable, and everything from consumer culture to technology to democratic politics is dedicated to producing and distributing more and more and more of what we love.

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Here’s the thing: the problems of democracy, technology, and market economies are good problems to have. They are the problems that we get to have. We are lucky to have the problems of democracy rather than the problems of tyranny, the problems of technology rather than the problems of material helplessness, the problems of the market rather than the problems of centralized planning. The issues arise because democratic politics causes problems that are not resolvable through more democratic politics. The same goes for technology, for activism, for markets, for every modern phenomenon that we use to beat ourselves up.

What, then, can we do about this situation?

Accepting the intrinsic misery of the human condition is a good place to start. Downstream of that, rejecting the incentive structures outlined above. 

Delete TikTok. Read old books. Read books written by and for the people you have thought of as the enemy. Become capable of describing your enemies on their own terms. Become capable of describing yourself from the outside, at least a little bit. Be slow to seek salvation through legislation. Figure out how much money you want to lead your ideal life and figure out how to do work that contributes much more than that to others. Build skills over long periods of time. Build committed relationships that endure. Become worthy of people’s trust. Find meaning in multi-generational projects. Tell a different story about your life, about your pain. 

Come to see that no one moment of suffering is truly unendurable.