Transcription
I've been thinking lately about how much energy and time people spend trying to experience life correctly. Like, apparently, there's some invisible customer satisfaction survey that we're all supposed to be filling out internally at all times. Go. It goes something like this: "So, how are you finding your experience with consciousness?" And if your answer isn't something like, "Great. Thanks. Absolutely loving the slow collapse of, uh, institutional trust and, uh, the neurological effects of checking my banking app," then the assumption is that something has gone wrong specifically inside you. Probably it's your mindset, right? Maybe you just need to wake up at 5:00 a.m. and listen to a podcast hosted by a guy with the emotional energy of a hostage negotiator for LinkedIn.
Because, you know, modern culture has it's developed this incredibly sophisticated ability to take systemic exhaustion and rebrand it as a personal wellness issue. "Are you burned out? Can't afford housing?" Well, have you tried a cold plunge or, uh, manifesting a little harder? "Feeling vaguely insane after spending 10 hours a day staring into a glowing rectangle that's engineered by behavioral psychologists and advertising companies?" Well, h sounds like you have a gratitude problem, my friend.
And look, to be fair, some of it is you, okay? I'm not saying that human beings are powerless or that every bad decision is just capitalism wearing a fake mustache or something. All right? Some people genuinely do self-destruct in ways that deserve a little personal accountability, right? But so the thing is, there's a difference between taking responsibility for your life and being systemically psychologically manipulated into accepting responsibility for conditions that no individual person could realistically solve alone. Which, look, as far as I'm concerned, that's one of the most impressive scams modern civilization has, uh, ever pulled off. I mean, you know, let's face it, that's next-level organizational talent. You know, if you're convincing millions of exhausted people that their exhaustion is evidence of poor personal optimization instead of a fairly rational response to living in what increasingly feels like an emotionally malfunctioning airport terminal.
So, all right. There's a, there's a sociologist by the name of Irving Goffman who basically spent his career making people mildly feel mildly uncomfortable at social gatherings by pointing out that all social interaction is essentially theater. Acting. And now, he wasn't trying to be poetic about this. I, he meant this pretty literally. That, all right, when you walk into a room, right? Any room. A job interview, a first date, uh, maybe it's a family dinner where everybody's collectively pretending certain topics don't exist. In these situations, you are putting on an act. You're performing, um, you're managing impressions and, and you're basically calibrating a version of yourself in real-time based on the audience in front of you. And everyone else is doing this too, at the same time, without coordination. So, think of it like, um, like it's a low-budget play where nobody got the same script, right? And if you, you know, take a moment and sit with this for about 30 seconds, it's, you're probably going to find it's both fascinating and, uh, deeply unsettling, especially if you've recently been on a Zoom call.
So I think what Goffman was describing in the 1950s when he was writing about this, you know, this has only become significantly more extreme since then, obviously. Because I mean, the number of stages has multiplied beyond anything that he could have reasonably accounted for. So now you're not just performing at, at home or at work. Uh, now you're performing on social media, in group chats, email, uh, dating apps, comment sections, and so on and so forth. And of course, let's not forget the extremely delicate art of the "seen but not anxiously looking" text reply. Yeah. Um, you know, I'd even suggest that there's, there's a performance to not be, there's a performance to not performing. It's a kind of, um, this is like a kind of curated authenticity, I guess. And it has this, um, casual effortlessness that still somehow requires three lighting attempts and a mild identity crisis. Yeah, this is, this is where we're at nowadays. And you know, essentially, this show, it just never really ends. And there's, there's no backstage anymore. There's no time out for any of this. It's just 24/7 this is going on.
And what I find interesting about this, and also somewhat bleak in a, a modern fluorescent-lit way, is what this does to a person. When the performance becomes so continuous and ingrained that you start to lose track of which version is actually you. At which point you might even start to wonder if the self even exists at all. But that's a whole another conversation that we're not going to have here. So the gap between the presented self and the experienced self, it eventually, it gets wide enough that you, you stop being able to just casually cross it. And at that point, you're not just easily stepping from one room into another because it starts to feel more like there's just, there's two separate tenants renting the same nervous system. But the thing is, you don't become fake. Exactly. That's too simple. Um, you just become, I guess, unclear with yourself. Which I think that's its own specific kind of fatigue. That's the kind of fatigue that doesn't announce itself properly. It just shows up as like mild dissociation while answering emails or something and thinking, um, wait, am I the person who wrote this, or am I just the, uh, spokesperson?
Okay, so Erich Fromm, a psychologist writing in the mid-20th century who apparently had a gift, the gift of foresight, uh, he had this this concept that he called the market personality. And so the basic idea is that modern people increasingly experience themselves the way a product experiences itself. Which is to say, in terms of how it, how they're being received, you know, whether they're landing well, whether their particular combination of skills and appearance and, um, their personality is currently competitive in the relevant market. Which sounds rather clinical, I guess, when you put it that way. But look around LinkedIn for like five minutes and tell me it doesn't describe exactly what you're looking at. So at some point, the question shifted from "Who am I?" to "How am I being perceived?" And somewhere in that shift, a lot of people lost the thread of the original question entirely.
And the modern version of this has gotten especially strange because now you don't just market yourself at work. You market yourself everywhere, all the time, thanks to technology. So your hobbies become content, your opinions become like, um, a brand position. Uh, your mental health, your mental health journey, I guess, becomes like, um, an aesthetic. I mean, even your, your breakfast becomes a story beat in this ongoing narrative of "You, the Product," available across all platforms. I, um, I saw someone recently describing their burnout as part of their "healing era." Which, okay, on some level, fair enough. Healing is real. Um, but also they turned their exhaustion into, they turned it into like a content category. So it makes me wonder, at what point does the performance of recovery replace the actual recovery? I mean, you know what I mean? It starts to get kind of convoluted. Now, I think there's something considerably disorienting about living in a moment where even the act of dropping the performance is part of the performance. So, from, uh, called this the alienation of the self. I would just call it exhausting. But then again, I'd argue that our concept of, of the self doesn't really exist in the first place.
Anyway, okay. So Krishnamurti, who I do mention from time to time on this channel, uh, he had this idea that psychological suffering increases when we refuse to honestly observe what's actually in front of us. Not analyze it or reframe it into something more palatable. Just, you know, looking at it clearly without flinching. And this actually maps pretty directly onto something that I find thoroughly irritating about modern culture, which is this, uh, this habit of gaslighting yourself about the conditions of your own life. So practically speaking, you're, you're tired. You're exhausted, right? And the, the culturally approved explanation for that exhaustion is probably something like this: "Well, it's your sleep hygiene," or "It's your, maybe it's your protein intake," or "I don't know, it's the, uh, maybe it's just the tragic inconsistency of your meditation practice." And look, it's not that those aren't real issues. It's just that why is it that we automatically go to those things rather than the much larger culprit, which is, you know, systemic and, uh, commodification of everything? I mean, it couldn't possibly be the 14-hour screen day or the, uh, underlying existential anxiety from living on a planet that seems to be held together increasingly by toxic positivity and corruption and lies and, uh, war and duct tape. No, couldn't be any of these things.
You know, I don't believe that there are as many mentally ill people as the establishment would have us believe. Even though there certainly are a lot of people who are medicated, thanks to the ongoing efforts of the, uh, pharmaceutical industry. I think the truth is that most people are having completely understandable reactions to genuinely, you know, genuinely absurd conditions. And the failure to make that distinction, what that does is it keeps locating the problem inside the person rather than inside the situation. And that is doing real damage. I mean, it's great for the pharmaceutical industry, but it's very bad for everybody else.
Now, the, the thing is, you know, modern life has gotten very sophisticated at this rebranding process. So what happens is the systemic exhaustion becomes a personal wellness issue. Uh, and I find the, um, I guess what I like to call the manifestation industrial complex particularly impressive here because, you know, it's this idea that economic despair is fundamentally, it's just a visualization problem. You just, you know, your own success and happiness, well, you just don't want it bad enough, right? I mean, isn't that the narrative that we keep hearing? And look, I'm not saying that the inner work isn't important and doesn't matter. It absolutely matters. And it's not easy. But I think that there is a difference between truly useful self-examination and spending, I don't know, $17 or whatever on a journal that asks you to write down three things that you're grateful for while your rent gets go go goes up for the fourth consecutive year.
And look, this, this is coming from someone who I like writing journals, okay? And there are things about the wellness industry that I think are good. Don't you know, don't get me wrong. Um, you know, the brutal honesty about your actual circumstances, it isn't pessimism or negativity. It's, it's accurate perception. And Krishnamurti would probably say that's where any real change actually starts.
All right. So, I want to be clear about something before this tips into territory, it's, it's not trying to reach, um, because there's a version of pretty much everything that I've been saying that slides into doomerism. You know, that's this is the position where everything's terrible, right? And nothing matters and the appropriate response is just to lie on the floor and wait for the credits to roll. Right? And contrary to what some people may believe, that's not what I'm after here. I guess if you know, you know.
So, all right. There's a Jungian analyst named James Hollis who writes about adult psychological development and he does this in a way that doesn't make you want to immediately leave the room or fall asleep, I guess. So Hollis had this idea that genuine maturity, it involves relinquishing fantasies of certainty. Not giving up, relinquishing. There's a difference. Um, because giving up, that's passive, right? Relinquishing is actually a lot harder because that requires actively letting go of something that you've been holding on to. So this is basically the fantasy that life is supposed to feel stable and, uh, you know, coherent and emotionally manageable most of the time. And that at, at some point, ideally, you'll arrive at a version of yourself where you have your sufficiently together. And so what he suggests, and what I find somewhat useful rather than just abstractly true, is that once you stop spending energy maintaining these fantasies, something becomes available that wasn't before. And it's not certainty. It's just, it's, it's a kind of clarity about what's actually here.
Brutal realism, it's not nihilism. You know, nihilism says nothing matters, so why the hell bother, right? Brutal realism says things are difficult and weird and, you know, usually absurd, and you're, you're going to engage with them honestly anyway because the alternative, which is really just a great deal of energy in avoidance, where you know, where you're performing in a state of, of I guess, forced optimism while the building's on fire, that's actually more exhausting than just admitting and facing where you are.
So there's a, a Jesuit priest named Anthony de Mello who wrote about awareness. He wrote about awareness in a way that I would imagine would have made a lot of other Jesuits very uncomfortable. And, uh, so one of his central ideas was that a huge amount of human suffering, it doesn't come so much from reality itself. It comes from our resistance to seeing reality clearly and honestly. So de Mello noted that there's something, I guess, strangely liberating about true honest observation and just seeing what's actually there without immediately trying to improve it or or spiritually sanitize it or, uh, I guess, you know, package it into into her morning routine or whatever. Which I, I realized might sound at first like wellness retreat language or something, you know, the kind of thing you'd see, uh, printed on a beige wall next to cucumber water. But I think de Mello meant something actually quite a bit more uncomfortable than that.
Because genuine awareness, it means noticing the act, acknowledging it, admitting it, right? And then just, just putting it down for a minute. Dropping it. And I find that there is something almost, something almost physically relieving about doing that, about, you know, about having conversations when nobody's putting on an act. It takes vulnerability. It's almost kind of scary these days. And, you know, I, I guess where you, you can finally be in a situation where you can admit, I don't know, maybe confusion to someone who can actually admit it back to you. Where you can laugh at something completely absurd without immediately trying to reframe it as, as a growth opportunity or something along those lines.
So I think that there, there is something deeply relieving about no longer trying to turn existence into like a motivational seminar that proclaims to have all, you know, provide all the answers. And, you know, maybe this is what brutal realism actually offers. It's not about answers, or faux optimism, or any of that. It's just permission to stop pretending the situation is something other than what it is. To just let yourself acknowledge it, as uncomfortable as that may be, and sit with it honestly. Maybe, uh, you find the occasional dark humor in it. I mean, that works for me anyway. And just, I guess, just keep going regardless and see how that starts to change things, with or without the gratitude journal. And with that, I guess that's all I have for you today. Thanks so much for listening.