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Notes -
Collectivization of Suffering
Disclaimer: This might be better for the Fun Thread, as there's no deep point here, just an observation.
I've become aware of a vibe among my circle of professional peers: collectivization of suffering.
Look, for example, at this comment to an article about decreasing worker productivity on hackernews, a news aggregator site that's popular among techies, especially US ones: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33468735
When did it become popular to upload your emotions to a shared cloud? How does that even work? Like, when I eat a donut or stub my toe, does the collective feel a pang of pleasure or pain? This commenter and others in that thread bring up war, the pandemic, social upheavals, etc. It's like they're trying to say that these things affect them deeply... despite 99.99% of them being completely uninvolved. It sounds... preposterous: that most likely a tech worker that's most likely situated in the US of A is somehow suffering as much as a Ukrainian soldier in the Donbas or a woman protester in Iran.
This reminds me of a great collectivist, Hegel, who picked up Rousseau's idea of the national spirit, and molded it around the idea of the state. People who declaim being part of a great collectivized suffering sound to me like folks that are yearning to become ants in a great colony, extensions of a single organism, like what fingers are to a person.
I worry that people like this are ripe for exploitation. They just need an ideology to forge them into something violent--the poster writes as much: "I believe we are on the edge of a massive social upheaval".
I think these people truly are suffering but do not have the vocabulary or introspection to determine the cause. My relative would have you believe that every bad emotion they felt from 2016 to 2021 was caused by Donald Trump, and since 2022 the cause is Vladimir Putin. Most of his complaining is about these two. But I know him and I know that he’s actually upset about aging, a feeling of lack of control, and a decayed sense of community. These external events become symbols of internal disruptions.
But they could be feeling bad because of Trump/Putin! If you think about something you've decided is bad and should make you feel bad constantly, you're gonna feel bad! Even subconsciously, you'll start depressing yourself or teaching yourself to obsess over the "bad" thing until you've turned your own psyche away from your immediate experiences and towards this external thing (or, worse, your internal interpretation of the external thing, which you've already taught to catastrophize).
Is there a name for this?
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