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Notes -
My True Life
In my early twenties I was a Marxist, which now in retrospect I realize was not very cool of me. Ironically, what helped me to snap out of it was reading none other than Das Kapital, but not for the reasons you might think - not because of its shabby economics, a field that mystifies me to this day really. What helped me to snap out of it was his account of Victorian England, the industrialization, which, if there's any truth to that account, was a truly awful time and place to be a human. The sources Marx drew on seem legitimate to me to this day and in general it seems like the restructuring of the system chewed through people, wrung them dry, and treated children as disposable material. Marx is at his best as a sociologist, not as an economist; the picture he painted is vivid; it stayed with me and throughout the years this part specifically finally let the cognitive dissonance chew a hole in my worldview: my life is nowhere near as hard as it was during Victorian era. It's actually pretty good. So I started questioning whether I really wanted a violent revolution. Destroy the current social order for what purpose exactly?
Tracing that train of thought backward, I realized over time that I became a leftist during a pretty hard time in my life. My wife and I moved to Canada and suddenly I was separated from my family and friends. I was looking for a job as a self-taught junior software engineer with a bachelor's in a very unrelated and non-technical field, with little experience under my belt - needless to say, I was getting rejected a lot. I also realized that culturally we were pretty different from Canadians and that my language skills, while passable, weren't really all that stellar. I always enjoyed making my friends laugh and now my particular style of humour wasn't landing that well. They say that moving countries is perhaps the hardest thing one can do and I took that warning for granted - my mental health cratered, fell of a cliff. I became a leftist during that time in my life and with hindsight it's of course trivial to conclude that I was unwittingly looking for the cause of my misery and decided capitalism was to blame, not the surrounding circumstances, (or me, *wink wink*). The system was preventing me from living my true life.
Well, even during those years, even though I was subjectively not feeling very good, my life wasn't that bad. I found a job eventually, we became part of a new social circle. I learned how to make people laugh in Canada too (you need to add "I'm joking", completely dry poker face doesn't work). As I restored my mental health, the belief that a revolution is necessary withered away and with it I realized that nothing was really preventing me from living the way I wanted. My true life was the life that I was living then and there. But let's look closer: what did I think my true life entail? What did I think I would be able to do in a shiny new system that I couldn’t do then? I don't think I had a coherent vision: I was playing video games, reading philosophy, watching movies, and learning to play guitar (sounds familiar?), but it felt tremendously important to me to live my true life. I told my wife that when she becomes a professor I want a year off from my job to at least have a taste of this true life. So maybe it just meant do the things above, but without the anxiety of holding down a job at a company where I witnessed some truly ruthless layoffs? Do the things I wanted and not feel depressed? A hilarious detail: I was never delusional about communism requiring people to work more and have less choice. I just thought that communism would provide us all with some sort of meaning in a better way than capitalism can provide now.
I don’t think I was alone in feeling that having a job - and the precarity that comes with it - is something that happens to you. A lot of normies believe that a job is an unavoidable tax on your finite time on Earth and the job ultimately keeps you from whoever you really are. Think about the following archetypes: the software engineer who calls himself a musician, the accountant who's true calling is travelling the world and absorbing other cultures. "I was born in the wrong era" - you heard this one, haven't you? They are all expressing the same underlying conviction: my true life is somewhere else, and all of this isn't it. "My job isn't me. The system is built in a way to steal my time from me."
Circling back, for me, what came first, before any ideology, before any hardships and demanding, unusual circumstances, was crashing full speed into life with the pedal to the metal. I imagined myself as destined for great things even though I hadn't achieved anything special in or outside of school. Despite that, I still thought I was special. Everyone - parents, teachers, friends - told me I was smart, and naturally, what logically follows from being smart is only success and no hardship at all. I learned that I deserve something for being smart. First good grades (plausible in middle and high school, if you know how to appear smart), then a good job (out of this world fantasy). In reality, I mistook appearing smart for being smart, mastered the former, and thought it was a substitute for the latter.
It turned out that real life is hard work, paying the bills, boredom, groceries, job searching, compromise, family obligations, limited time, limited talent. What stung most was that life punished all those years I spent fucking around instead of learning how to study - or even learning how to do things in general. I blew off school and never learned how to learn until after I finished school because I'm "naturally smart," as everybody I'd fooled told me. Then, in this sorry state, I stumbled onto a realization: I hadn’t failed by grinding League of Legends and never challenging myself. No - I'm oppressed by the cruel system that is capitalism.[^1] And thus I was saved from discovering that I was nothing special. My new comfortable reality was that I just wasn't living my true life due to circumstances entirely outside my control.
The ideology came later, and it came as relief. "I deserve something better than drudgery and job precarity." The explanations involving capitalism and oppression were entirely post-hoc - in exactly the same way that, as @FtttG argues, climate change is a post-hoc rationalization for not wanting kids, for one reason or another.
I've collected several attempts to explain why people become woke or leftist, and none of them ring true to my experience:
These frameworks aren't necessarily wrong for everyone. Let me be clear: I do think earnest leftists exist. I can say with 100% certainty that there's a guy who's into Marxism because he really thinks it's the best economic system anyone ever devised - but that's a sort of special interest for odd people. And there are people who are woke because they have strong care/fairness intuitions, the way Haidt describes. But there's a reason your average anarchist talks first about the injustice of the system, not about the logistics of a post-revolutionary anarchist society. They perceive themselves to have been personally wronged by the system, which is why we need to tear it down. This shift in focus is a perfect defence mechanism against confronting your own failure to flourish. None of the frameworks above capture the main psychological movement. They capture the contents of their beliefs, they describe the behaviour but they completely fail to address the mechanism behind the beliefs.
The Last Psychiatrist (TLP) and Lasch already described all of this (more precisely than I can put in a comment here) and they are much closer than any of the frameworks above, in addition to being hardly unknown in the rationalist circles. I believe they are much closer to generalizing the modern condition, so it's sort of baffling for me that the main societal-level idea of narcissism isn't taken more seriously here - or at least, I'm not seeing its impact. To summarize for those who are skeptical or unfamiliar: TLP's concept of narcissism isn't vanity - counterintuitively, he doesn't use the word in the colloquial sense. In his parlance, it's the protection of a self-image that was never tested against reality. The ideology - whether Marxism, wokeness, or just a vague "the system is broken" sentiment - functions as what TLP would call a defence against change. It's not that these people hold wrong beliefs you need to argue them out of. The beliefs are are better understood as load-bearing walls protecting them from a conclusion: that they are ordinary, that they wasted time, that the life they have might be the life they built through inaction.
My own snapping-out-it wasn't a fully conscious decision. Having kids turned out to be one of my major sources of meaning - just as it was for @gog. But it was really a series of events that made it impossible for me to avoid the conclusion that my life is basically a normal life, and the "true life" I was yearning for doesn't need to be provided by a third party. I must create it myself.
If TLP's and Lasch's diagnosis is right and I think it basically is, then the culture war as it is typically waged - arguing with people about their beliefs, debunking their claims - is largely beside the point. You're not going to argue a narcissist out of a defence mechanism - it's tantamount to trying to convince someone that they are not a good person, because those beliefs are essentially what makes them a good person. So, narcissists' beliefs aren't the disease - they're the symptom and that means the leverage points are the conditions that produce the narcissism in the first place.
So, TLP rarely talks about those conditions directly, but extracting from his posts and my own observations, I'd point to four factors:
If there's a key to winning the culture war, it's not separation from the left - not civil war - as some propose. The key lies in addressing these four conditions, whatever that entails - that is a much more fruitful field for discussion than endlessly pointing out exactly how the leftists/wokies are weird and incorrect and willing to lie and don't get me wrong, they are all of those things and they do lie, but so what? The rationalist and the subsequent The Motte / culture-war milieu established that thousands of times over and we are no better off for it. Clearly defining the cause (or, at least, one of the most important causes) of the culture war is cultural narcissism as defined by TLP and Lasch at least makes it possible to move forward with imagining solutions. Acting on this part specifically will lead to the complete victory even if narcissism is but a one of the overall causes of the social splitting. I'd like to believe that the causes have to be addressable, even if some believe they aren't really. Maybe we don't even know what's missing in our analysis?. Maybe I don't even know what the hell I am talking about when I bring up the collapse of obligation-based identity? But if it's a hard problem (perhaps the hardest) doesn't it deserve more of your attention than endlessly filling the book of grudges?
P.S. This generalizes beyond wokeness or communism. It's more of a "our culture is shaped like this through and through", which is why I'm sort of obsessed with trying to understand how to foster agency in myself and in my kids.
I'd argue the reason why many young Americans become rabid leftists also have a lot to do with the student loan bubble and the US healthcare system being the peculiar shitshow that it is.
Instead of speculating, just ask them: "What radicalized you?"
Rabid political activist are absolutely eager and willing to share their origin story, many such confessions are easily found online.
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If that were true, in countries with free or near-free higher education and/or with nationalized healthcare the youth would be significantly less leftist than in America. I don't think this is the case though? Are European students much more right-wing than US students?
Also, young people do not have a lot of exposure to the healthcare system, especially the most problematic parts - expensive, long-term, multi-faceted health problems that require dealing with the shitshow bureaucracy in all its glory. They may have heard from someone it's a problem, but they have not experienced the problem by themselves.
Let's turn this question around.
Look at countries where the youff is "significantly less leftist" than in America. By whatever definition of non-left you want - less LGBTQ+? more religious? more nationalist? more pro free market?
Do these countries have super expensive education and health care, or is this all non relevant to the question, and "left" or "right" orientation comes from somewhere else?
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I came to the same conclusion as you pretty much from reading too much TLP and observing the fervor and insanity in (American) politics that subsumed what felt like the whole internet since 2016.
However, I'm also of the conclusion that these four conditions can't be addressed. So what's to be done?
We don't parent kids properly, assuming you live somewhere with a curriculum that has to go through frequent and regular change, there's plenty of money in shilling parents a false bill of goods, and many don't even get to kids at all. Although it's been pointed out fairly frequently that woeful parenting has been almost the norm for as long as parents have existed, the increasing speed of technological and societal change has likely decreased the amount of useful information and knowledge relevant to kids passed down from their parents.
We don't have life scripts because again, things change quicker than any script can be written and people don't update their priors fast, if at all. As recent as ten years ago tech was seen as the golden path, and it was, for a bit, now it isn't unless you're the top 0.1% or in India.
Literally every company on earth that sells things to consumers and not other businesses has an incentive to define consumption as identity construction. If Apple and Starbucks didn't teach you anything, the age of broadcast television should have; products are sold and marketed as if they're aspirational lifestyles. And in the modern era of targeted data harvesting, increasingly, products are sold and marketed entirely off of how they make the consumer feel about themselves.
And obligation-based identity basically doesn't exist anymore, outside of those tied to careers with very strong definitions of those obligations, like being a professional soldier or doctor. The social structures that provide obligations have all been torn down, in many cases eagerly, by people who didn't like those obligations in the first place.
Legislate around these things? There's no single piece of legislation that would tackle any of them individually. The closest thing I could think of is a mandated period of compulsory military service, but from a quick survey of people who've been through it and live in countries with this system, it's not viewed very positively either and would likely fail in any sort of government where it's on the ballot.
But have we actually tried anything? Is this really a lost cause when most people aren’t even aware of the problem? I think awareness and mindshare matter which is why we should write about this more and explicitly, but as for more concrete ways of creating meaning and agency:
People like parenting books. Maybe we should write one? Even if it’s only targeted at our shared rat/post-rat spaces? Or target it at the red tribe, for example, and pitch it as “how to raise an agentic child.” I got a parenting book as a gift a while ago. It’s about developing the baby’s right hemisphere of the brain - my mom regrets that I never got into math - and there’s a set of exercises in there, and I swear I’m not bullshitting you, aimed at developing precognition and a “sixth sense,” because the right hemisphere is responsible for that sort of magic, I guess. The author is also extremely incredulous about skepticism: “If you don’t think this is true, you are a SCIENCE DENIER.” He even offers a sort of Pascal’s wager for the exercises: “Even if you don’t believe it, what’s the harm? Best case: it’s true and your child is Lisan al-Gaib. Worst case: it’s a fun exercise with your baby.” Maybe the author read too much Dune. My point is: even bullshit like this sells. Why wouldn’t a book about agency sell?
Mormons seem to have adapted to modernity quite well. Maybe the Mormons should win the culture war? How do we help them? Maybe we should borrow some of their tenets and start a cult?
Maybe if we think phones and the internet are a big problem, we can incorporate that into our cult too.
Those ideas are a drop in the ocean, and they’re probably stupid, and I’m also being flippant to an extent. But in the whole diagnosis-sphere we don’t even have this. We have the diagnosis, and then what? Let Moloch win? Put all our hopes into AI? I mean, we could do that and in reality a lot of people have decided to do that. But maybe we should also take the problem seriously and at least try to imagine some solutions because I don't think that even benevolent AI would save us. Like the other response to your comment is civil service - we haven't talked about that before. That's better than dooming, no?
It's a lost cause when people's jobs depend on them not realizing it.
You can trust people to do the right thing, but only after exhausting every last possible option, and modern society provides a lot of options. What you're fundamentally asking people to do is burn their idols in the shape of themselves; experience the painful process of narcissistic injury, and as long as there's money to be made in selling people the opposite of something they didn't want to do anyway it's a non-starter.
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What about compulsory civil service? For improving public spaces and services that people would vote for, like cleaning cities, fixing/extending public infrastructure (especially housing), hosting public events, and elder care (for older demographics’ vote).
It would be “half-communism”: younger people are assigned jobs (with some freedom to select based on performance in standardized exams regularly administered during school), but the underlying economy is still capitalist and the jobs are temporary (though may begin lifelong careers).
Every reasonable career today should have a corresponding civil service entry-level job. Especially leadership: future politicians and CEOs should almost all be former civil service members (because the vast majority, including me, believes that civil service makes good leaders).
Maybe the civil service isn’t legally mandatory, but by far the easiest path to financial stability (like military, but more diverse specializations, and pays better or the private sector pays worse). Or maybe it starts during school, is mandatory until 18 (or a few years later), but encouraged for longer. Regardless, the rich (at least some) will avoid it, but I think that’s fine, because the civil service should benefit its members not just the outside public (especially future leaders, both in obtaining and effectively doing their role, as mentioned above).
I think this is possible in certain parts of Europe, but Europe is pretty broke, so it likely wouldn't survive annual government budget review. America on the other hand, I'm not so optimistic. People won't even spend the money to maintain roads that everyone depends on.
I think in America, the civil service should be implemented per state. Otherwise, it would be hamstrung by culture war and the practically inevitable bureaucracy and corruption that arises from being too large and centralized.
Then, I think it’s very possible in states like California and New York City, which seem to be constantly raising taxes to implement other programs. If it succeeds, more tax-averse states may be convinced; or maybe not, but existing in some of the US may be enough (especially because anyone who wants the program can move, much easier than moving to another country).
Or per town, but towns probably need some money or law power from their state.
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I'll defend the old you. First, you have to wonder, how do you really get that way? You mention a bunch of former-Marxist sounding causes having to do with early childhood and the wheel of historical materialism turning and therefore the collapse of obligation based social relations, but the reality is most people are just born that way. The heritability of narcissism has been estimated to be as high as 77%, similar to other DSM diagnoses like ADHD and schizophrenia. Where do those genes come from? In reality traits exist on a continuum, and psychiatrists label people at the tails. The people at the tails are produced by meiotic recombination. The mean and variance that controls how frequently such people occurred is controlled by evolution. Schizophrenia correlates with creativity, and ADHD with adventurousness and energy, so eradicating the genes for those means getting rid of creative, energetic, and adventurous people. Obviously that's bad. What about narcissism? Well, it correlates with Big 5 disagreeableness. That measures how much truth-to-power someone speaks. Are you willing to offend someone for a greater good or do you cower to their demands? It correlates with leadership. Honestly, every leader must be above average narcissism, I mean how else would they get the idea they should be in that position?
The tail-end concept also leads to the question, what is the opposite of these disorders? What's at the other tail? The answer is apparently some type of autism for schizophrenia, something called sluggish tempo for ADHD, and I think the opposite of narcissism is masochistic personality.
I'm guessing that you don't have diagnosed NPD, so it would be unfair to say you even have pathological, tail-end levels of narcissism. So was your reaction really bad, or was it actually closer to the ideal than some people would like to admit? There's this thing in history called slavery, and many people ended up in it. Most people today think slavery is bad. But what are you if you must work for a man, and you never get to criticize that man, or opt out of working for that man? A slave. And that's bad. Now what are you if you must work for the so-called free market, and you never get to criticize the free market (that's narcissism of course), or opt out of working for that free market (the only way is revolution, which is narcissism)? You are merely a slave to the free market.
So you see, to have liberty, you must have some level of narcissism. People who are too low in narcissism are natural slaves. A natural slave of the free market never criticizes capitalism and never tries to leave it or break free from it. If they get any leisure it's because master said they get a good job.
I think liberty is beautiful and good, and therefore it is true. So it's no coincidence that you call it your true life. A life of slavery is indeed a false life, a life lived for another person, who hates you and sees you only as a source of consumption. They see you like a hamburger. A cow waiting for the slaughter. A farm animal. Not even a beloved pet! Why should you hold back your fury from such a person? But that person is the one who pays you in the free market, not allowing you to live your true life.
The one complication here is that we allegedly still have economic scarcity, and you aren't guaranteed to come out on top if you rip up the Hobbesian peace treaty of mass society and declare yourself free. That's a Spartican war declaration, and your neighbor might crucify you in response. Who can blame them, I mean, what would you do to a fellow narcissist who declared you the system and tried to take your stuff?
The only way out is through. That doesn't mean your old ideas were wrong in spirit, just in detail. Your economics were off. Intellectually, there's some promising ideas like shortening the work week. Is scarcity really still so much that people need to work 40 hours a week for the system, the same as a century ago? Probably not. You're probably getting ripped off. As a narcissist, it's your genetic job to be sensitive to that and to root it out. The natural slaves don't even feel it. What you don't want to do is bury your head in the sand. Eventually somebody will come and pick-pocket you.
TLP's definition of narcissism overlaps like 90% with "masochistic personality".
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You can probably get a 1920s level of existence by going on the dole and working zero hours a week. I mean, better, because you can still post on the motte when you're on the dole. Not a lot of takers though, relatively speaking.
While I agree with the premise that you hardly need to work 40 hours a week for 40 years to maintain at least equal and in most respects significantly superior material conditions than someone from the 1920s, it's impossible to get a 1920's level of existence via welfare or FIRE - living a 1920's life alongside friends, family and potential romantic partners in 1920 is significantly different to voluntarily choosing such a life while all your peers are living in 2026.
In that respect it's hardly the fault of the system, capitalism, or wealth inequality though, but simply the natural consequences of choosing to live like an oddball; at the end of the day most people complain, but their revealed preference is that they'd rather work more to consume more and fit in.
Indeed. The kinds of people complacent enough to be okay living a 1920s existence today are probably pretty contemptible.
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You can’t do that, at least in the UK.
You need to provide evidence that you are working full time to apply for jobs, or they’ll cut you off. And you need to be genuinely poor or they’ll tell you to live off your savings.
You can't do it in the US as a single non-elderly man either... unless you commit disability fraud. Which turns out to be ridiculously common.
That's how you do it in the UK too. But I don't think it's trivial, especially if your life history is incompatible. Degree + good job for ten years suggests an ability to live in society, unless you can cite being assaulted or raped or some other trauma. Someone from the underclass who's perfectly able to work if they want to but is belligerent/anxious and has a history of getting sacked because he/she doesn't play well with employers is much more plausible.
People are getting generous PIP for ‘severe anxiety’, something that a single generous psychiatrist (is it time for @self_made_human to do the British would-be-NEETs of TheMotte a favor?) can diagnose you with.
Hey I'm pretty sure I bought @Corvos a drink at some point. That's technically an anxiolytic and possibly a favor. And I don't think I'm the right person for disability adjustments, though they do take psychiatric inputs.
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I am sure that many unscrupulous individuals find a way to spend less than forty hours a week looking for a job.
Naturally.
What I'm saying is that it's not a matter of people like you and me looking at zero hours of work but low living standards and opting for the alternative as revealed preference.
I'm saying that option genuinely isn't available unless you're also poor and up for committing fraud, so the lack of middle/upper class takers doesn't tell you much about its desirability.
Well, of course you don't get to take your 2020s level of wealth into the 1920s time machine. That was never part of the deal.
IME a significant portion of the UMC/UC is comfortable with, shall we say, questionable tax practices (dubious business write-offs, under the table nannies, etc). I don't think it's their acute sense of honor that keeps them from doing this.
Since you mentioned the upper class, let's look at this the other way. You can withdraw 40k a year from a 1M principal indefinitely. Certainly you can live better on 40k a year than the median 1920s person, and it won't take decades to save up 1M on a high income especially if you are already practicing for your 1920s lifestyle. Yet basically no high earners do this outside of FIRE weirdos. There's just not that much demand to live like you're in the 1920s. People would rather live in the 2020s and work 40 hours a week.
Who was talking about time machines? You were saying ‘if you’d a low income and lots of free time to make art then go on the dole’ and I was saying that the system doesn’t work like that.
Re: FIRE, you life and mine are different. Even if I paid no tax and had no expenses, it would take considerably more than a decade to get that kind of money.
But that’s not the problem. The problem is that it renders you completely vulnerable, especially now that you’ve also driven yourself to zero net worth to be eligible. Even the people who don’t like their jobs know that going on the dole or claiming disability benefits as a middle class professional will be a door you can never reopen and that obviously affects their decision making.
Again, you seem to be gesturing towards ‘people say they want A but when pressed they don’t take A~ (which is a really shit version of A) so they can’t really mean what they’re saying’.
The whole discussion is why we are still working as much as in 1920.
It does, though. You just can't do it with significant wealth. The point is what it takes to get a 1920s level of existence today. It doesn't take 40 hours of work a week.
It's not about your life or mine. You are the one who brought up the upper class. My point is that people who can amass 1M in savings in a reasonable timeframe almost never quit the rat race and live on 40k a year in perpetuity. That tells you something about the demand for such a lifestyle.
Vulnerable to what, exactly?
Sure. The best version of A is I get paid $1M a year to make art at a leisurely pace. Everything else is a "shitty version" of that. if you want 2020s living standards, you gotta work like the average 2020s citizen. Can we not conclude anything from the fact that nobody takes the 1920s material conditions gambit in return for limitless free time? I think we can.
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You don't have to go into Marxism to protect your True Self. You can also go into crackpot science.
I know a certain person. Reasonably smart, has a PhD. He's always had a bit of a chip on his shoulder, but the years have not been kind. He sees people much smarter meet with professional success and status while not seeing a path to it himself. But he knows that while he may not be "quantitatively" as smart as the people at the top, he's much better at "making connections" (aka schizo daydreaming). He knows that all of academia is fake, a charade where people blindly parrot whatever the boss believes which is why a free thinker such as himself could never get ahead. But he knows that he deserves to get ahead, that he deserves to be on top and to have everyone (including, of course, Father) admit that they were wrong and he was right.
His current project is a new model for fundamental physics. You see, the reason he can't conceptualize quantum mechanics or whatever isn't because he doesn't have the chops but because it's bullshit and the lemmings in academia just eat it up. He's getting close. He's got a small following, mostly senile boomers and lumpenproles, but it's growing. His true self is coming into being. Someday, a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the academy.
Marxism, wokeness are just a couple of examples of the ways to protect your identity. They are by no means the only ones, of course, it's whatever belief allows for the easiest and the most convenient existence.
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You could just have said that you know Eric Weinstein personally :)
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Good post, and thanks for the shout out.
I'm reminded of Churchill's famous quip. Yes, liberal capitalist democracy is the worst system for enabling people to self-actualise and achieve their full potential – except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.
I'm also reminded of one of my favourite bon mots from Christopher Hitchens: "it's true that everyone has a book inside him, but in most cases, that's where it should stay." I'll occasionally encounter communists, socialists etc. bemoaning the fact that they don't have time/energy to create art under a capitalist system, and I can't help but think – maybe if you devoted the time you spend bemoaning this state of affairs to actually, you know, MAKING something, you'd have something to show for it. I can't imagine you'd spend a lot of time creating beautiful music or poetry even in the hypothetical post-revolutionary utopia you believe awaits you.
I saw a post on Instagram recently saying something to the effect of "it's so sad to think of all the great art we're missing out on because people have to work for a living". And my honest reaction was – probably not very much? For the best writers, musicians, artists etc. of the twentieth century, creating art was a compulsion, something they couldn't stop themselves from doing even if they wanted to, and yes, many of them worked full-time jobs and wrote/composed/painted in their spare time until they got something going. If that doesn't describe you, I'd hazard a guess that any art you would hypothetically create probably just isn't very good.
And of course there were people in the comments complaining about being told to paint/write/compose in their spare time, insisting that there's no way they can be expected to produce anything of value when they're exhausted after a long day in work. Again, I can't help but think – skill issue? If, after an eight-hour shift, you can't summon the willpower to pursue your creative ambition, it's hard for me to imagine that the fruits of this creative ambition would be of interest to anyone besides yourself. It rather sounds like your creative ambition isn't something you need to do (an all-consuming passion) but something you want to do (a hobby). Not saying that the best artists are necessarily those for whom creating art is an all-consuming passion, but the correlation is greater than zero.
I'm also find the entitlement on display kind of contemptible. The Medicis didn't hand out patronages to just anyone, but rather to artists who had already demonstrated technical skill and artistic achievement. The implicit demand that the public purse should subsidise the livelihoods of "artists" who by their own admission have never created anything of value (and may never do so) really rankles.
And on top of that, the people making these demands are privileged to live in an era in which it's never been cheaper, faster or more accessible for people to pursue their artistic passions. I'd be willing to concede that, say, sixty years ago, we were denied a non-negligible amount of legitimately interesting artwork owing to the fact that it was prohibitively expensive to make a movie or record an album. Nowadays, you can write a novel on your phone on the way to work. You can record an album on your laptop in your bedroom. Critically acclaimed award-winning films have been filmed on smartphones and edited on consumer laptops. Two of the top-grossing films of this week were directed by Zoomers who made names for themselves uploading content they produced themselves to YouTube. The barriers to entry have never been lower. Stop making excuses for why you can't make something, and MAKE SOMETHING.
I feel like COVID should have put the lie to this delusion, but as always, apparently no one learned anything from COVID. We had a natural experiment where most of us were locked inside with pay and absolutely nothing but time to self-actualize, create, organize our lives for weeks/months. And what did we do? We watched Tiger King and played Among Us and learned how to commit various types of fraud at an industrial scale. Some of us engaged in some casual rioting and arson. Some of us planted half a garden we immediately abandoned once the bars opened back up. Nobody made any good art. To the extent people made anything at all, it was insufferable naval-gazing drivel. Not one of my "artist" friends took the opportunity to actually write that novel or record that album they all swear is in them somewhere.
Art is subjective but I will note a decent number of people created really amazing content in a niche community I'm a part of during the COVID days, and now that those days are over a lot of these people no longer produce content. Nothing too crazy big but the bigger works probably had 100s of hours of work put into it over the course of months. The creatives had more time and also had a bigger audience to get their work out to. With things returning to normal the audience size diminished and people had to return to their day to day jobs so activity simply isn't what it was back then.
I don't disagree with your point about people that say they want to do X but never do X. People like the idea of being a writer or artist or creative type more than actually doing the work. Making anything takes work. There are the artists that don't have a career but do spend like 10 hours a day drawing, and then there are "artists" that draw once a month and spend 95% of their free time scrolling reddit and watching TV shows. I don't think there is much you can say that is going to flip the second type of person to the first type.
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I intellectually agree with you on the broad strokes and the impossibility of restructuring society around the whims of "creatives" - yet emotionally sympathise with @Corvos, since I find myself in a similar boat and used to create a lot of music in university (as well as when I was laid out flat by chronic illness). Given the musical taste you've demonstrated here I doubt you would like any of what I made, but I honed my skill at it until I would say I was at a professional level, or at least close to it. I have some receipts to prove it, too; I minimally marketed my music and ended up selling over $1,000 worth of it with pretty much close to zero financial investment on my part (this is not much in context, but considering how little I was trying to get eyes on it, I'm surprised it actually gained so much traction). At one point I had a friend show a track of mine to someone who had studied audio engineering in university, and they asked to speak to me so they could understand how I was making what I was making. Not to toot my own horn too much, but I was good at it.
At this point, though, I've been so radically run down by the endless demands of my work, which I have complained about here and here, and I barely find myself making anything at all. I used to be so much more of an interesting person; I used to make more, I used to read more, I used to care more about things, and now I find myself largely blanking out in front of the screen during much of my free time because my work and personal commitments swallows all of my energy. I would be lying if I said it didn't bother me.
To be fair, I constantly see artists who are just bad and whose creative endeavours amount to just dabbling make this claim as well (way too many people in the electronic music sphere are capable of only making drone music), and a lot of times it does in fact boil down to a skill issue and placing a lot of blame on "capitalism" to mask their own lack of motivation and talent. But not every eight-hour shift was made equal, and the amount of time I spend at work almost certainly heavily exceeds eight hours per day when you count the unpaid overtime, I'm not really capable of sparing the time to have lunch many (most?) days. The fact that people use the justification to bolster their own failure to accomplish things is not incompatible with the existence of people who are actually burned out as hell on their jobs, barely keeping their head above water on that front, and who would genuinely make things that are worthwhile if their motivation wasn't constantly being sledgehammered.
I would genuinely love to hear some of the music you've created, if you'd be interested in sharing via DM.
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First things first: I broadly agree with what you say about people who complain about a lack of time to create art, claiming that their jobs weigh them down. That doesn't apply to everyone, but it fits well with my understanding of narcissism. Hear me out, though: if you liked the first part of my post, hear me out.
I read your articles, and I regularly read your comments here. You have said that trans issues are your hobby horse, and you are generally fond of cultural commentary. Yours is incisive, and I think it is directionally right. You have a sharp blade, finely honed, but to be quite frank, I think your target is utterly defeated. The commentary you do is most likely worth it for you - and please correct me if I'm wrong - because it is simply satisfying to speak the truth about those issues, be they trans issues or Henry Nowak's senseless murder. But it's also probably very easy to slice through those issues, because we've seen so many of them that we - or at least I - know how every story goes, beat by beat. I'm not telling you to stop writing your observations, but why not pick a harder target?
Because as it stands, you are contributing to the catalogue of our grievances with the left and its absurdities. You are participating in compiling this big book of grudges, but why stop at that if we know that merely cataloguing grievances won't do anything? If you agree with TLP's or Lasch's thesis that narcissism is what happens to a rotting culture, why not take a crack at the root of the problem? At its solution maybe? If that wouldn't be as fun as commentary, I think it might be more satisfying. I think you have the chops for that, and I know you are familiar with TLP, so maybe my challenge is to go deeper. I'd like to see your piece on where the culture went wrong, for example. Go deeper into the root causes of the malaise, and go after the solutions to it.
I've written multiple articles referring to TLP's ideas at length.
I'm not saying you don't and I'm not asking you to refer to him more. I'm saying that I know you refer to his ideas at length, but what are we going to do about the narcissism except pointing out all of the things that it causes?
Well, I'm not sure if I accept the premise on two fronts. I'm not necessarily persuaded that narcissism is the primary root of all the problems in the West. However, I think the excesses of trans activism are a perfect example of a problem which is ultimately downstream of narcissism.
Have you read this piece by Lou Keep? Or After Virtue by MacIntyre? If not I highly recommend both, especially if you like TLP.
If you'd have to pick the primary root of all problems in the West, what would your guess be?
Broadly: I think in the twentieth century we tore down a huge proportion of our most long-standing institutions, or dramatically scaled back the extent of their power and influence, or they collapsed under the weight of their own contradictions. Whatever the many and varied deficiencies of these institutions, they were load-bearing in the sense of providing a unified Western telos. Many people, I think, did not recognise that a proper society needs an orienting telos to function properly; or were naïve enough to think that, once we abolished all the old decrepit institutions which had systematically kept the truth from us, a new telos would manifest itself of its own accord. But a telos doesn't just happen, any more than a ship or a factory does: it has to be patiently grown, constructed and tended to. It's a fragile, delicate thing. I have a lot of criticisms of the Catholic Church, and in its modern diminished capacity it's a shadow of its former self, but I can't dispute that, at the peak of its power and influence in Ireland, it did provide a telos, an orienting principle, something to work towards. When people talk about the crisis of meaning in Western society, this is what they're getting at. Nothing the progressive coalition has offered as an alternative telos fits the bill ("diversity" is an instrumental goal, not a terminal one; "equality" is a relative and hence meaningless goal, likewise "inclusion"). I don't think modern Anglophone conservatism has much to offer in terms of a telos either. We have technological and economic wonders at our disposal, but are beset with indecision as to what to use them for. We built a spaceship without deciding where we wanted to go with it.
Either that, or the phones.
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I think this is far too triumphalist. Many great artists did it at least in part for the money, and as any amateur dramatics society could tell you, motivation to produce art has very little correlation to the quality of that art. Look at Anthony Trollope, Dickens, Shakespeare! They wrote by the word, or for commission, as did many many others.
Look, I can only speak for myself. When the working day is over, I'm zonked. My work is research and development, and it genuinely uses up all my brainpower. Boo hoo, I'm so special, yadda yadda, but it's true. I wrote several novels back when I had the time and now when the work day ends I just want to crawl home and watch something unchallenging. I know you wrote a novel lately and that's lovely, but others aren't the same.
All of which has to sit alongside the fact that writing is something that one does, hopefully, learn. The extent to which it's teachable is over-rated because people like to dream, but lots of good authors needed some mentoring and some experience to write their really good stuff. And that takes time, and energy, and space.
TL;DR: "If you'd like to try and make beautiful things like you did at university, but you're too tired because your job sucks out all your energy and creativity, then I guess it must suck to suck, loser" seems neither necessary nor fair.
EDIT: Lower heat, what you are observing is a filter that basically removes anyone who doesn't have sufficient time and energy left over to run a side hustle along their main job. Deciding that almost all the stuff that gets filtered out would have been crap seems very much to be a just-world bias. It's equally possible that lots of people who would have made great things or even just pleasant things are getting filtered out, and that it's not economically possible to do much about that now, and that this is sad.
I think part of the definition of art is that it's not done for money or status, but rather it's genuine self-expression. Art is often media, though not always, but most media is not art, it's entertainment, which is media made for money or clout. You speak of many great entertainers. Some of them were also artists, some of them were not. For example, did Shakespeare write his poetry for pay? I don't think so, so maybe it's art. But his plays are not. But they remain popular because he was a skilled entertainer. Speaking of narcissism, it's a symptom to morph entertainment consumption into art appreciation. Most people might not be able to enjoy art, because all they can enjoy is entertainment. But that's okay.
There have been so many atrocious offenses against good taste widely considered to be "art" that I can't take any attempts to define what is or isn't art as anything more than fart-sniffing snobbery. Or at least any definitions more exclusive than something like "human creative expression" or something along those lines (inb4 some pedant asks nonsense like "well then can animal creative expression be art?" or whatever).
What does it even matter if something is (or isn't) art? Outside of potential financial interests like government grants for your art that might be affected if the government suddenly decided that your art isn't actually art, what single effect does something technically being defined as "art" or "not art" have on anything? I suppose it affects how nice your fellow snobs think your farts smell if your definitions of art are in disagreement.
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Some art is improved by money or outside interaction, some is made worse. Art for Art’s sake isn’t a popular take with the postmodernists. To say Art must not be done for any concern of money or status rules out stuff like the Sistine Chapel, The Last Supper, and Guernica. Where does that leave stuff like Andy Warhol or literally every architect for all time. We can go on for a while. You can certainly define Art that way, but we are squarely in a Wittgensteinian argument concerning a non-central usage of Art.
It's a subtle definition in that it's not that it can't be funded or become popular, but that whatever component of a work is done for money or status is not art, it's just labor. Many works are a combination of labor and art. The ones you mention might be half art, half labor, a Marvel movie might be all labor, but the purist art is done with complete disregard for money or status. Sometimes it still becomes popular, but that's improbable and it's suspicious when it happens.
This definition isn't non-central, if you don't use it, I don't get how b2b saas isn't art.
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As good a definition as any, but it’s not mine and I don’t make that distinction. Indeed, I think the increasing tendency to force a distinction between ‘art’ and ‘entertainment / media’, rather than between ‘high-status/cultured art’ and ‘popular art’ has been leading people astray. My sympathies have always been with the jobbing writer and I’ve never had much use for self-expression except as a tool. I just want to make nice things that people like.
Self expression seems core to art, but if you just want to make nice things for high status people which makes you famous, you just want a corporate job with some vanity attached, honestly. Where's the self expression, the truth, the beauty, etc? It's just a commodity no different from a b2b saas.
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Well, that's the thing under discussion, isn't it? It's one thing for an artist who once exhibited genuine talent and made things of value to complain that they don't have the energy to create after a full shift. I can understand that, and even sympathise.
What gets my back up is people who by their own admission have never created anything of value and have never displayed any evidence of artistic talent of any kind demanding that the state subsidise their livelihoods in spite of this.
They were beautiful to me. I got shortlisted for a reasonably prestigious prize once, but most of the rest weren’t objectively great. I would really, really like the chance to try and do better someday, but even beyond that, I think that making things is good for its own sake. Maybe my stuff would have improved if I'd had more time to spend on it, maybe it would improve if I could go back to it after a decade in industry.
I don't suggest that we should fund just anyone who asks off the taxes of those who do tiresome, creativity-sucking work. But I do kind of think it's a shame we can't. Lots of the creativity of the 70s came out of super-cheap housing in cities and a dole system that didn't ask too many questions, and I think that the end of that was inevitable and morally just but also killed much of British art, comedy and entrepreneurship (the kind of entrepreneurship that makes genuinely interesting, far-out things rather than just chasing VC funding by jumping on the nearest bandwagon). The system that replaced it, where you only get Arts funding if you're young, black, gay and Marxist doesn't seem like an improvement. The idea that you can tell the Great Artists because they'll crawl over broken glass or because they show amazing talent right out of the box seems similarly suspect.
Some people genuinely never try at all, and maintain the dream that they could have been great by carefully never actually producing anything. Maybe that’s who you’re talking about. But I don't think many/most of the lamenters are like that. Many more like making things but find it hard, and need a bit of space/mentorship - how many people voluntarily pay their hard-earned money for writing courses? Ideally I'd like for them/us to be able to try, and it saddens me that isn't possible.
Maybe you're talking past each other. The other commenter is talking about singularly spectacular artists, whereas what you mention here cultivates "scenes" and creative group endeavors.
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I apologise, when I was talking about people who've never made anything beautiful or significant, I wasn't including you in that category. By virtue of actually finishing multiple novels you wrote I'd put you head and shoulders above the coulda-woulda-shouldas announcing that they would write something amazing if it wasn't for capitalism, maaaaan.
I admit there's a shade of stolen valour resentment to my line of thinking. I've been recording music as a hobby since I was fifteen years old, I've invested tens of thousands of hours (and a comparable amount of euros) into it, I've directed and edited music videos, I've played gigs, I've booked gigs, I've been through all the logistical and interpersonal headaches that come with organising bands. I did all this while completing my education and holding down full-time jobs. In spite of this, I don't "identify as" a musician. My Instagram handle is just my name and the year I was born. And it does really grate when I meet someone and their Instagram handle is "[forename][surname]music" and who habitually describes themselves as a musician despite the fact that they've never written (much less recorded) a song, never booked a gig, never been in a band and so on. Not that any such person has ever told me that they'd love to write music ("again"), but they're just too busy – but if they did, that would annoy me even more.
I've been no slouch in the creative writing department either, having written five novels/novellas since I was twelve (needless to say, the most recent one is the only one I will stand over), getting a handful of short stories published, winning a couple of awards. "[forename][surname]writer" isn't as common as "[forename][surname]music", but common enough that it still grates.
Yeah, I see that. FWIW I wouldn't trust a instagram handle of 'writer' or 'musician'. As far as I'm concerned writing and making music is a verb, not a noun, and getting some stories published and playing proper gigs is genuinely impressive.
Realistically, my stuff wasn't that good. I only finished one novel, and that was a fan thing, so unpublishable. It was the most popular one in its niche, at least, but that's not a high bar. I have about half of a bunch of others (rewritten many times) but I have an issue with endings for some reason. I know where I'm starting from, and there's always a moment or a few moments that I really want to get to, but once I get the characters into the state where I want them to be then things kind of fizzle. You know that saying about how drinking a margherita on the beach is an Instagram photo not a retirement plan? It's kind of like that, but for plot. (Any advice appreciated).
I must have written maybe 400,000 words over the decade or so I spent writing seriously, which was late school to university to early postgrad before the pressure really kicked in, and I didn't get so far, but I can't help feeling that was a skill issue and I could have got something good. I wouldn't fund me, but I wish somebody could.
100%. I'm constantly reminded of TLP's admonition to describe oneself without using the word "am". It's a surprisingly difficult habit to break, but I think it's really useful in all spheres of one's self-conception. Instead of saying "I'm a musician" you ought to say "I released an album last year"; by the same token, instead of saying "I think I'm a pretty nice guy" you should enumerate nice things you've done recently.
(This can be taken arbitrarily far. "I think I'm pretty good in bed." "Oh yeah? Name three women you've made come.")
Unless you're Alan Wake.
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