Boomers, pt. 6, The Penultimate Installment
(Hand to god!!)
We were talking, last time (linked below), about the state of dissatisfaction and anxiety people are forced into despite our society having (putatively) ascended beyond scarcity, subsistence, privation, etc. The silver lining I offered is that this sense of inadequacy is not as much any individual’s fault as they/we are made to believe: it’s innate, and therefore isn’t indicative of any moral deficiency.
Unfortunately, these would-be good tidings aren’t made clear to us - quite the opposite: rather than being given the tools/support to manage our human condition in a healthy way, allowing us to find contentment, inner peace, community, etc., we instead see distrust, envy, and extreme individualism explicitly encouraged; exploited. Unsurprisingly, this creates a greenhouse for anxiety, self-loathing, insecurity, and all the rest; creating a vicious cycle. Mercifully, the folks calling the shots are kind enough to offer us an antidote to all of that troublesome stuff with their other hand, in the form of lots and lots and lots (and lots) of: little gadgets and nicknacks and Goods and Services and micro-transactions and Flash Sales and monthly subscriptions and Free 2 Day Shipping and myriad of other variations of retail therapy:
We’ve discussed all of this previously; here’s the first installment, if you want to start from the beginning:
We’d wondered (in one of our earlier entries), though, if the luster had, maybe just slightly, started to fade: we know that novelty works as a distraction for a while, but not forever. Just think: did we really feel 5 times happier with the iPhone 5 than the original one? Or 13 times as happy with the 13? And even if we did, did that not fade away far quicker than we’d have expected, leaving us baying for the next model before its specifications had even been announced? Indeed; the flip side of humans being so resilient/adaptable is that we reset to homeostasis quite quickly… for better or worse: on one hand, we can weather some impossibly trying circumstances that, to an outsider (or even to ourselves, in retrospect) might seem unthinkable. This same skillset also means, however, that we come to take for granted luxuries and comforts that we would have thought we’d never grow tired of. Like the guy who gets angry because the plane wifi went down mid-flight: flying through the air at 700 miles an hour? A miracle of engineering that seemed impossible until just a couple of generations ago? Who cares. You told me there would be wifi, so I expect to fucking have wifi. So you’d think some diminishing marginal utility would kick in re: all this “Oooh… should I get the A16 Ultra Chip©? Or the new A17 Turbo Chip©?” nonsense. You know: one ice cream cone is awesome. The second one is… still pretty good, but not quite as refreshing. By the fifth, six, and seventh, you’re at best figuratively sick of ice cream - but very likely also literally sick. (Who knows, though. Looks like iPhone sales have stayed impressively consistent, so the gravy train is still running fine for now. Joke’s on us.)
Well, although it may not quite apply to the majority just yet, since we’re clearly still at the “enjoyment” stage based on the chart linked above, I think the “All-You-Can-Eat-Ice-Cream” metaphor is kind of apt regarding the way we talk to each other and how we see/interact with the rest of the world. The “ice cream,” in this case, can represent concepts like: material comfort, opulence; the general umbrella of “Ultimate Consumer Choice™” 42 types of iPhones, 89 varieties of peanut butter, etc. Let’s not get bogged down with specific definitions here; let it be abstract, a ~feeling~ …
Anyway: it’d be quite easy (in our lactose-laden metaphor) for some self-important onlooker or other to weigh in (upon witnessing our compulsive cycle of ice cream gluttony/self-loathing/nausea) with commentary like:
“How dare you be so wasteful - there are people who would kill to have unlimited ice cream!”
Or perhaps:
“How dare you speak ill of ice cream - for it is the one true measure of what makes a country great! Your forefathers sacrificed their lives to give you unlimited access to vanilla, pistachio, Moose Tracks™, Cookies’n’Cream - you name it! They’d be rolling in their graves if they knew how ungrateful you were.”
(You’ll notice echoes here of our Boomer Cartoons from a few episodes ago. Underlying sentiments that amount to: Kids these days need to shut up/stop biting the hand that feeds; e.g. How about you focus on the positives? You should be thanking us for giving you 73 brands of soda, not wasting everyone’s time by asking for things like affordable health care.”
The “So, if I don’t want 12 ice cream cones, I’m a traitor?” dilemma ties in with what we were saying last post about how understanding things on an intellectual level doesn’t mean you can actually implement them in practice: You may very well know that someone in Africa would kill for a chance to have this ice cream cone, but that doesn’t make the prospect of eating it right now any less nauseating.
All pointing each other’s ingratitude out serves to do is make us feel better about ourselves and to make the “ingrate(s)” in question feel guilty. Oh - and, not least, it does absolutely nothing to make any meaningful improvement to those we use as pawns (i.e. those who would kill to be in our shoes, et. al) in this point-scoring game. Not incidentally, it also distracts us from the fact that these sorts of talking points (about how it’s every citizen’s patriotic duty to become a veritable Augustus Gloop) are espoused by those who directly stand to gain from continued, unquestioning ice cream consumption.
The trouble is that we were already trending towards “out of touch” with each other; but any kid born in the last decade or two into [anything close to] material comfort has no idea what going from “No Smartphones Exist” to “Smartphones Exist” was like; from “phones do not have cameras” to “every phone has a camera.” They only know unlimited ice cream; over-saturation. They’ve more than likely had access to a touch-screen smartphone/tablet since birth, which is fucking insane - however vast and easily accessible the internet’s knowledge base, we must remember that online/digital exposure is not a substitute for real world experience. As technology gets more immersive and stimulating, though, it’s going to get easier and easier to fool ourselves into believing that this isn’t the case.
One argument I’ve heard is that many parents don’t have a choice; they are busy, stressed, working multiple jobs, and need to be able to keep their children distracted and pacified. I can’t debunk this, or anything. How depressing to be trapped in a vicious, predatory cycle like this - it reminds me of how Wal-Mart jimmy-rigged a nice little system whereby they got away with paying their employees so little that they’d have to rely on foodstamps, but by having destroyed the local competition the only place the workers could use those foodstamps was the Wal-Mart itself. Even better, the company managed to avoid paying into public welfare schemes/medicaid by avoiding tax loopholes.
Although this dystopic thing is undeniably awful, I don’t think it’s the case across the board (I’m not buying the “there’s no other option” from anyone who works a white collar job.) In any case, I do think it’s the responsibility of any parent today - especially, those who are educated and above the poverty line - to do their best to educate themselves on all this and to hopefully limit their kids’ screen/internet exposure as much as possible.
Which brings us, at long last, to our titular swingers from pt. 1…. next time
