Stories We Tell

Prizes and awards are not for those who have won them, as they could have simply been structured as private gifts to fulfill that purpose. Their intended recipient is rather the audience, nudged to look up to the deed that is being celebrated through ceremony. The ritual’s purpose appears closer to that of impressing upon viewers the worth of a certain practice, and in doing this, modulating culture.

The race to gain status in the reference frame of the contemporary zeitgeist is at the same time experienced as highly individualistic from within and seen as highly homogeneous from without.

Individually, one aims to make it by trying their best to emulate the heroes of today’s stories, perhaps that of the wealthy business owner who navigated turbulent markets to bootstrap their venture, or that of the public figure who garnered a sizeable following by consistently creating engaging content. We sense these as feats of personal achievement.

At the same time, the competitive pressure to perform can turn a community of individuals into something as featureless as the theoretical model of an ideal gas. Apply pressure to a volume of gas particles and you predictably get them to individually move around by themselves, some of them moving faster by sheer chance. Some predictable percentage of entrepreneurs will reach an acquisition deal as a result of the competitive pressure applied to the whole sector, but the math would have worked out just as well with a slightly different selection. The macroeconomic results are so predictable that countless accelerator programs invest in large cohorts knowing that, statistically, a few of them will make it.

The sheer irony of predictable group dynamics that depend so strongly on the narrative of the individual bent on setting themselves apart from the group; the sheer irony of differentiating oneself from the group being enshrined as a group norm.

Show me the personal lifestyle and I will show you the belief system that happens to accommodate it. And so I wonder, which one came first?

The saying goes that all progress depends on those who are unreasonable, because they persist in trying to adapt the world to their vision instead of more reasonably trying to adapt themselves to the way things are.

In other words, all initiatives conducive to progress first come across as unreasonable. Of course, that does not entail that the converse holds. It is not the case that any unreasonable practice is inherently conducive to progress. It could as well be a mere stunt intended as contrarian just for the sake of standing out.

That said, if we do assume that a progressive initiative implies an unreasonable one, then we can still infer the contrapositive: the claim that if an initiative is not unreasonable, then it is also not conducive to progress. The only pathway to advancing the way of things then is to be unreasonable, even if that is far from being a guarantee. On the contrary, being unreasonable might as well prove to do more harm than good.

And so that leaves us with a puzzle. Observing ourselves being perceived as unreasonable in one or more avenues of life, we might just be on track to do more harm than good. But at the same time, in doing so, we would be observing ourselves taking the only gamble that can yield genuine progress. Is your particular gamble worth it then, or should you rather fold and play it safe? Only time will tell.

The spell of jobs still retains its vigorous hold, and how could it not? So irresistible the allure of knowing one’s place along the grand axis of monthly income. So crisply ordained by the market’s own volition, crisper evidence for predestined success than what the Calvinists could ever hope for. It would not be all that surprising if our cultural obsession with climbing the corporate ladder persisted well past the complete mechanization of the economy. We could be sitting in a natural reserve for humans and would be bragging about our latest made-up titles, probably.

The probability that the content you come across is tuned to the metrics being selected for by the platform is proportional to the probability that an optimized piece of content would reach you in the first place. And so of course the ads you see tend to be for high-margin products somewhere rather than the neighborhood shop, because the platform allows companies that spend the most to reach the furthest. And of course the clips you see tend to be visually arresting rather than subtle, because the platform pushes content that induces screentime further.

But this expands beyond what isolated algorithms enable to what society enables. And so of course it is more likely to hear the takes of some big firm’s owner on recent developments than those of an artist, as money affords indefinite reach in our society. And similarly, it is more likely to encounter works by that artist who creates legible and self-contained works, as they are easiest to share widely as discrete bites of content.

But the insidious part of promoting the commercial and the superficial is not so much the fact that it is these that become popular, but the fact that we get to equate this induced reach with what is right and worthy. It reinforces the notion that greed is an inherent part of human nature rather than something to be stigmatized and that community work is what you do when forced to make up for your mistakes rather than something to be celebrated. Messing with what content is pushed into virality can profoundly, irreparably distort the stories we use to make sense of the world as social animals.

At some point in our lives, usually as we are wrapping up our studies and so are forced to leave behind the shielding social license of being a mere student, we start breathing in the unfiltered air of the zeitgeist. Once outside the psychological quarantine of school, we notice the flowery scent of possibility, but also the corrosive fumes of expectation.

As we step into these elements, each of us develops an immune response of our own. Perhaps it involves antibodies of the form “this is the harsh reality of the world, after all,” or those of the form “you first need to play along to be able to change anything.” Or perhaps they take the form of “surely the best you can do is tend to your own garden” or “you will get time to look into what interests you once you make it.”

The belief system that crops up to conceptually undermine anxieties seems to rival the tenacity of our immune system in physically breaking down pathogens. Packed in a blue pill so concentrated, it can make it feel right to focus on small pleasures even when one is acutely aware of the fact that the world is in dire need of attention. But why get out of bed in the morning after all, if not to push for realizing your values in the world?