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One of the problems is that with so much around us - food, opportunity, data, sensation - our ancient behaviours haven’t had time to adapt. Before, the smartest learnt to take want they can during times of scarcity, now the smartest are learning to exclude what is non-essential.
Baudrillard: “In periods of scarcity, absorption and assimilation are the order of the day. In periods of abundance, rejection and expulsion are the chief concerns. Today, generalized communication and surplus information threaten to overwhelm all human defenses.”
What I’m saying is that in previous times, that which was bad for us was obvious & real. It was clearly dangerous like the wolf or the rat & we learnt to fight them accordingly. However what is bad for us now looks good & feels pleasurable (porn, cakes, feels). We have to adapt.
Our current dangers are over-abundance (junk food, porn) and over-positivity (never being told we are wrong). The violence of positivity does not deprive, it saturates; it does not exclude, it exhausts. Depression, ADHD, and burnout all point to excess positivity, not negativity.
Our world long ago moved from one of discipline to one of kindergarten-level positivity. Gone are the asylums, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories. It has long been replaced by another regime, a society of gyms, yoga studios, offices, banks, airports, juice bars and malls
We no longer live in a disciplinary society. We live in an achievement society - a tyranny of positivity where everyone is told they are unique and can do anything. Where doubt and hesitation are seen as weakness.
Disciplinary society is a society of negativity. It is defined by the negativity of prohibition. Achievement society is overwhelmingly positive - we are told we can and should try anything. Obama’s “Yes we can” and Nike’s “Just do it” epitomise society’s positive orientation.
Prohibitions, commandments, and the law are replaced by projects, initiatives, and motivation. Disciplinary society is governed by “no”. Its negativity produces repressed madmen and criminals. In contrast, achievement society creates depressives, losers and sociopathic strivers.
Why did society move from a negative disciplinary one to a positive achievement one? Think of the old anti-slavery argument. It’s about capital and production. Free Men are more productive than slaves. Capital wants to give us the illusion of freedom to make us more efficient.
It is not the excess of responsibility and initiative that makes one sick, but the imperative to achieve: the new commandment of late-modern labor society. The gig economy (hey @0x49fa98!) hasn’t made us independent business owners, it’s turned us into hyperactive rats.
The complaint of the depressive individual, “Nothing is possible,” can only occur in a society that thinks, “Nothing is impossible.” Depression is the sickness of a society that suffers from excessive positivity. It reflects a humanity waging war on itself. We are our own slaves.
Excessive positivity also expresses itself as an excess of stimuli, information, and impulses. It radically changes the structure and economy of attention. Perception becomes fragmented and scattered. I’m going to now share a secret with you...
Remember your teachers and bosses telling you that “multitasking” was something laudable? That we modern men are better than our predecessors because we can multitask so much in our digital age. They lied to you. Multitasking isn’t evolution - it’s devolution.
Multitasking does not represent civilizational progress. Do you know modern people are not the only ones capable of multitasking? Multitasking is common among wild animals. It is an attentive technique indispensable for survival in the wilderness. Multitasking is regression.
An animal busy with eating must also attend to other tasks. It must hold rivals away from its prey. It must constantly be on the lookout, lest it be eaten while eating. At the same time, it must guard its young and keep an eye on its sexual partner. It’s always busy.
Wild animals are forced to divide their attention between various activities. That is why animals are incapable of contemplative immersion - they are either eating, fighting or fucking. This is why squirrels never built the pyramids.
We owe the cultural achievements of humanity to deep, contemplative attention. Boredom & free time are the wells of creativity. Culture depends on an environment in which deep attention is possible. If we are constantly active (online or offline) contemplation becomes impossible.
Nietzsche knew this. He knew that humanity ends in deadly hyperactivity when every contemplative element is driven out. The Last Man reigns supreme at the end. Here’s one of his quotes about this:
“From lack of repose our civilization is turning into a new barbarism. At no time have the active, that is to say the restless, counted for more...”
“... That is why one of the most necessary corrections to the character of mankind that have to be taken in hand is a considerable strengthening of the contemplative element in it.”
Exhaustion and barbarity. That’s what the multitasking of our positive achievement society is creating. This might not be so bad to our mental wellbeing if we still had religion and an ultimate goal, but we don’t. All this frantic busyness is for nothing except self-glorification
Life has never been as fleeting as it is today. Not just human life, but the world in general is becoming radically fleeting. Nothing promises duration or substance. Given this lack of purpose, nervousness and unease arise.
Belonging to a group or tribe might benefit a people that works for the sake of its kind to achieve something (Hello Jews and Chinese!). However, the modern western ego stands utterly alone. Even religion has run its course. Leftism tries to replace this but it’s unfulfilling.
The general lack of purpose beyond oneself is reinforcing the feeling of fleetingness and emptiness. It makes life bare. Work itself is a bare activity. The activity of bare labour corresponds entirely to a bare life. All that remains is material status flaunting.
People who suffer from depression or burnout syndrome develop the same symptoms as caged wild animals. They are entirely apathetic and can no longer even recognize physical cold or the orders given by guards. They are like Bartleby the Scrivener from Melville’s short story.
What leads people to this depression? It’s the hyper-activity of what positive capital has twisted them into. They react immediately, yielding to every impulse, email, Facebook Like and new Netflix show. Chasing every rainbow results in total exhaustion.
Think back to my wild animal analogy. Hyper-activity leads to an abrupt switch into hyper-passivity; now one obeys every impulse or stimulus without resistance. Instead of freedom, it produces new constraints. It is an illusion to believe that being more active means being freer.
Today we live in a world that is very poor in interruption. Our phones are always on. Emails constantly arrive. Social media is always there. The rests and “between-times” are lacking. Acceleration is abolishing all intervals - and we are told that this is a good thing!
The person who believes they can do anything - who wants a picture perfect child, high-flying career, a pristine Instagram page and a tight body built from 20 weekly yoga classes - has been conned by positivity into a prison of narcissism. Burnout or depression closely follows.
Without doubt, or without people telling us “no”, we just follow every urge or impulse. Again, this isn’t freedom, it is the acceleration of capital transforming us into more efficient machines of production and - more importantly - consumption.
The positivization of the world means that both human beings and society are transforming into autistic performance-machines. And sociopathic status seekers are the biggest victims. They aren’t winners. Narcissistic self-referentiality is just leading them faster to exhaustion.
Sociopathic status seekers often think they’re smart, but most of them are just busy fools. Their constant calculating means they can no longer think for themselves. Hyper-activity is actually hyper- passivity because you are not thinking, you’re just following capital’s commands
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