Who Asked For This?

how we got here, America

Another America (Great Sand Dunes Nat’l Park)

His friend asked for some life advice. And a twenty-two-year-old Hunter S. Thompson replied in a letter:

It is not necessary to accept the choices handed down to you by life as you know it. But a man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.

Whenever I need a reminder to own my life’s choices, I revisit this letter—and it’s worth reading the whole thing—though lately I’ve been thinking this sort of examination might well apply beyond myself. For, what applies to one individual often applies to them en masse, to a whole society even, to a whole country. As Socrates said: the unexamined life is not worth living. I guess I’d add, an unexamined culture is not one worth living in.

THE STATE OF AMERICAN CULTURE

When I started in construction, all the guys would take lunch together sitting on buckets, shooting the shit and getting to know each other; now, for the most part, everyone sits on the same buckets and stares at their phones. In my mind, that captures our culture in a couple of ways: one, you might see it as a lack of community, and two, it’s our ever-present state of distraction.

I’m guilty as anyone, but I didn’t ask to kill time scrolling on my phone. The thing just seemed to appear in my hand, as it did in everyone’s, and next thing I know my free time just sheds away. Now, I might not have asked for it, but someone did.

Every cultural moment, for better or worse, is a product of the commitment of a few and the indifference of many. In a society distracted by convenience, it seems all the easier for those few to get their way.

What’s our current culture in America?

Ted Gioia

says our culture has flattened and homogenized in the name of corporate profit. I’d argue so has our humanity.

At one point in the not so distant past, landing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon brought Americans together in triumph. The last time we all came together as Americans might have been 9/11. I was only 15 at the time, so I can’t be sure, but it felt that way.

What’s a recent cultural event in America that brought people together? Setting aside increasingly epic natural disasters, one that comes to mind was the local opening of a Buc-ee’s super gas station, which saw people lining up for miles for the chance to try fifty different flavors of beef jerky, watch choreographed barbecue chopping, buy some Buc-ee’s branded merchandise—which incidentally reminds me of the time In-N-Out Burger opened a few years earlier, for which people waited in a fourteen-hour-long drive-thru.

I think

Ted Gioia

is right to call out the corporatization of our culture. Couple that with the apparent apathy of most people, if not outright enthusiasm for the offerings, and it feels like we’re consuming ourselves.

A SOCIETY OF CANNIBALS

The Ouroboros is an ancient symbol of a snake with its tail in its mouth. A common meaning is that of infinity or wholeness, but these days I see it as the mascot of a society that’s cannibalized itself. Or, more particularly, one part of society intentionally eating another, without realizing the consequences.

This reminds me of the time I worked on a cattle ranch that had been in continuous operation since the 1870s and some school kids came out to learn about it. At one point we stopped at the slaughterhouse, a small shed with some hooks on the ceiling, and one student earnestly asked: “wait, you have to kill the cow to get a steak from it?” This kid has grown up and now manages a private equity firm.

Community cannot be commodified. Trying to squeeze everything in life for maximum profit, justified in the name of convenience and efficiency, kills our communities and our culture. Because community takes time to build, and ironically, a strong community likely leads to the best long-term profit, but apparently that’s not something quantifiable in our instant gratification lifestyle. I’m sure people like

Paul Krugman

can speak to this with plenty of factual backing, but I’m saying we seem to have consumed our way to the bottom, through the bottom even, creating an ulcer through which we as individuals have fallen, alone and lonely.

This is not a coincidence. Consider Facebook’s original motto: move fast and break things. It turns out that’s exactly what’s happening, and the “stuff” being broken is our community, our mental health, our environment.

Some might argue that the era of “move fast and break things” is over, but based on the technocracy manifesting in Washington, I’m not so sure.

Jess Piper

argues these people know exactly what they are doing, intentionally wrecking public services for the benefit of privatization, as she’s seen first-hand in my home state of Missouri.

I can see how all of this sounds pretty pessimistic, and honestly sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be best to hit rock bottom so we can see it all clearly, as

Michael Ian Black

has written about—but I’m not without hope.

I MEAN, WE HAVE A PROBLEM, RIGHT?

Convenience creates complacency. Interestingly, convenience and conventional share the same root word, the Latin convenire, meaning “to agree.” Perhaps we ought to start being more unconventional?

I had a college professor who said literacy today is not the ability to read and write, but the ability to understand the bias behind the messages we receive. (In other words, what people are trying to get us to do.) By that measure, we’re a fairly illiterate society. The technologists have their agenda—it’s posted on every door—but we can’t read, so it comes as a real shocker when we get evicted from a life we understand into their vision of the future (Google’s AI search results, anyone?).

Then again, we’re a society that refuses to use reusable bags at the grocery store, even though we know how bad plastic bags are for the environment, but the convenience is just too great to overcome. At this point, such action is either ignorance or laziness. (Apologies if I sound self-righteous here—but it just bugs the fuck out of me to see a grocery cart full of plastic bags.)

The point is good things are often a matter of inconvenience, but well worth it. The things we take for granted, the things we consider conventional, they’re not neutral or unbiased occurrences. They serve someone’s interests.

When you don’t know how you got someplace, it seems inevitable, unchangeable, and easy to take for granted as the new status quo. Then we move forward as if there’s nothing we can do to change it. But of course we can change it—all we need to do is pay attention.

Paying attention is the difference between driving the car, sitting in the passenger seat, and being blindfolded in the trunk. Many of us are tied up and don’t even know it.

STAY CURIOUS, MY FRIENDS

I’ve probably shared this email from Mark Manson at least a dozen times:

The defining trait of progressing in the 21st century appears to be a driving curiosity about anything and everything.

The 20th century did not reward curiosity. The traditional structures of schools, corporations, and the church didn’t just deter open questioning and experimentation—they often feared it. Instead, they usually rewarded emulation. Any sort of innovation or experimentation was limited to a few people at the very top of the pyramid. Everyone else was expected to be a good worker bee.

What a letdown, to do all the things you were “supposed” to do, check all the boxes, and wake up to realize what you expected never got delivered. That seems to be what’s at stake here.

At the close of that letter I mentioned at the outset of this piece, Hunter S. Thompson says: “No one has to do something he doesn’t want to do for the rest of his life. But then again, if that’s what you wind up doing, by all means convince yourself that you had to do it. You’ll have lots of company.”

That sounds pretty miserable. And I’m pretty sure there’s only one way to avoid it . . . owning our present circumstances, then changing them accordingly.

I try to own my problems. It often sucks. But it’s better than playing the victim. We, America, need to own our problems and stop shirking responsibility. Not blame them on other people: People that don’t look like us or think like us or love like us. Our country’s problems aren’t the fault of the undocumented immigrant down the street or the trans kid at school. It’s not even Mark Zuckerberg’s or Elon Musk’s fault. No, it’s your fault. It’s my fault. It’s our fault.

The Navy SEAL Jocko Willink calls this “extreme ownership.” I willingly choose to mindlessly scroll on my phone. Sure, it’s in the technologists interests that I do so, but they are not compelling me to do it. And the same can be said for so many of our collective problems.

We got here through a lack of vigilance.

So, who asked for this? We did. We asked for every bit of it. And we deserve it all. But, we can decide to be aware of what we’re asking for, change the ask, and then we’ll deserve that too.

-Martin

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