We are living through a period of mass disenchantment. With the economy, with political systems, with corporate fuckery, with technology, and, most consequentially, with each other.
Amid rising political corruption, the decreasing efficacy of institutions, declining economic prospects, and the increasingly outrageous ways that our economy finds to exploit people, it should be no surprise that people are so disenchanted with “the system.”
What is perhaps more surprising is how much disenchantment there is between people. It is a commonly-held belief that people pull together in crisis; that when “the system” fails us, we fall back on each other.
But people are unbelievably disenchanted with each other today. It turns out that in advanced societies, other people are as much a part of “the system” that fails us as any other environmental factor (like rising prices or lying politicians).
So much of the pain of having your society fall apart is losing access to the scripts and roles that permit you to enter other people’s lives, and watching them fail to fulfill the scripts and roles that would motivate you to let them enter yours.
Today we see different groups polarizing over social, cultural and political issues—often for very understandable reasons, but also, in other cases, for reasons that make little sense. People who share many common interests seem incapable or unwilling to recognize their similarities, and to fixate on their differences.
Much of this is driven by political demagogues and bad-faith media organizations who profit off of maintaining the economic and political status quo, and who deftly stoke the flames of a culture war to prevent the emergence of a (bottom-up) class war.
But there is also clearly a lot of profit to be made by social media platforms and online grifters who benefit from rage-baiting people and stoking tensions in order to capture attention and sell ostensible solutions.
An important feature of this is the way that social media platforms drive “availability heuristics”: creating ready-at-hand examples to reinforce stereotypes and biases, and reinforcing fallacious beliefs that outgroups are more homogeneous (especially in offensive or harmful ways) than they are.
Part of this dynamic is an algorithmically-fueled widening chasm of gendered expectations between men and women that causes them to become increasingly rigid and entrenched in desires and aspirations that are no longer realistic in our times.
Precisely in a moment when gender roles and norms make less sense than they have in hundreds of years (if ever), people are consuming more media content than they ever have before, much of which reinforces unrealistic expectations about relationships and other people more generally.
In a time when people are rapidly losing the capability of fulfilling our expectations, pxrn, romantic fiction, social media validation, and sycophantic AI chat bots are raising our expectations, and making us less tolerant of friction, inconvenience, or discomfort.
Just before they died, Lauren Berlant wrote a short, prescient book entitled “On the Inconvenience of Other People,” which explores how consumer capitalism sells us the pure fantasy of personal sovereignty and frictionless lives.
Berlant argues that this is an irresponsible aspiration that causes us to turn away from the inherent inconvenience of other people—the consequence of which is that we miss the fact that other people, for all their frustrating, untamable, unpredictable, grating presence, are really the purpose of it all; the spice of life.
In a time in which so much of our world is collapsing—when institutions, jobs, politicians, and relationships betray us—it might be tempting to close ourselves off from others; especially when we have access to a tremendous fountain of validating media.
We should be skeptical of the temptation to avoid the inconvenience of other people--to retreat from relationships because we do not see value in them, or because we believe we are too good for other people.
Now is a time to fundamentally change our standards; not to raise them in ways that are impossible for others to meet. Of course we should not tolerate abusive or destructive presence in our lives; the objective, instead, should be to find the ways that our broader aversion to inconvenience and everyday discomfort are robbing us of connection.