Finding Meaning

What it means to have purpose and how we become dysfunctional without it.

Farnam Street newsletter:

What every human being wants and needs:

1. To be part of something larger than themselves
2. To be paid attention to
3. To be listened to
4. To be respected
5. To be loved
6. To matter

Callback to Social 

• Because of our dependency on each other we are biologically conditioned to fear going against the status quo lest we be ostracized. Not being liked is akin to the threat of death (being thrown out into the cold wilderness by yourself).
• The flipside is that we have people who still desire acceptance but they go against the status quo because leaders appear to be “revolutionary” and different. All or nothing. Maximum payoff rather than being just another cog. Too much emphasis on trying to be a rebel and not thinking they need acceptance.
• Depending on our life experience, we all find different ways of getting attention/acceptance within different niches, so the outlets are not as important as the driver.
• The idea of having a life’s purpose (ordained to you by a god or genetics) is not really valid. Purpose is self-appointed and derived from fully committing to a task without reservation, enjoyment and/or fulfillment gained from undergoing that purpose, a high enough competence level that you can attain a flow state, and achieving needs from the previous categories. Usually feeding the “social” need as the skills typically mentioned are contributing towards improving society and establishing your value within your group. Reducing the fear of being ostracized and unpredictability. 

How to Find Your Passion/Purpose

• How to find purpose/passion (ikigai) and the importance of finding a way to provide value for others. If we enjoy doing something it’s likely other people will too. Teaching others how to reach what you’ve attained will speed up our informational homogeneity, making us feel rewarded for providing value to the group, building healthy relationships (lessening chances of being ostracized), and decreasing the learning curve for the student (collective intelligence).

Status Anxiety Notes

Against Employment and Dysfunctional Economics

Dependence on an Employer

Three Acres and Liberty: in order to lead a happy life, one must attempt to escape reliance on employers and instead work directly for oneself, at one’s own pace, for one’s own rewards.

In England, the transition from a nation of small agricultural producers to one of wage earners was accelerated by the loss of access to land, a resource which had enabled the rural poor to survive by growing food for themselves and letting their live-stock to roam, graze, or forage. From the eighteenth century onwards, the majority of “open” English fields were enclosed behind walls and hedges by powerful landowners.

The travails of being an employee include worry over the duration of one’s employment and also the everyday humiliation of many working practices and dynamics. The question of who will be promoted, and who left behind, typically becomes one of the most oppressive anxieties of the workplace— and one that, like all anxieties, feeds off uncertainty. Compounding the misery is the fact that because achievement in most fields is difficult to monitor reliably, the path to promotion or its opposite may have an apparently haphazard relationship to performance.

Dependence on an Employer’s Profitability

The most effective and swiftest way for management to improve profitability is almost always to decimate staffing levels.

Mergers, technology replacing employees, and market changes can also lead to instability of job security.

Dependence on the Global Economy

Typically, four or five years of expansion have been followed by one or two of retraction, with occasional massive retrenchments lasting five or six years. The best efforts of governments and central banks have demonstrated that there is little to be done about such turbulence.

Every cycle follows a similar pattern:

Growth picks up and companies invest in new capacity to meet perceived future needs. Production costs tend to escalate at this stage, as do asset prices, especially for equities and property, driven up in part by speculators. Inexpensive credit encourages businesses to commit to large, capital-intensive factories and offices. At this critical point, demand and current output both begin to slow, even as consumption continues to accelerate. A lack of savings spurs an increase in personal and commercial borrowing. To satisfy domestic demand, companies start to import more and export less, a trend that soon results in a balance-of payments deficit. The economy is now officially out of kilter, freighted by overinvesting, overconsumption, overborrowing and overlending. Here begins the slide into recession.

Prices are pushed higher by the use of less efficient means of production, by the growth in the money supply and by speculation. Tighter and much more expensive credit raises the cost of outstanding debt. Asset values, inflated in the upswing, are punctured. Borrowers can no longer make their payments, and the collateral available for new loans is restricted. Incomes, investment and consumption all fall off. Companies and entrepreneurs flounder or go bankrupt; unemployment rates rise. As confidence evaporates, borrowing and spending dry up. Long-term capital investments made in better days now come on line, increasing supply and depressing prices just as demand is slackening. Companies and individuals are forced to sell off assets at a loss, deepening the crisis, but many potential buyers wait for the market to hit bottom before purchasing, further delaying recovery.

Rather than a sign of hysteria, a state of steady anxiety may be a reasonable response to the very real threats of the economic environment.

If we are anguished by the thought of failure, it may be because success seems the only dependable incentive for the world to grant us its goodwill. A family bond, a friendship or a sexual attraction may render material incentives unnecessary, but only a reckless optimist would rely on emotional currencies for the regular fulfilment of his or her needs.

In his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785), Immanuel Kant had argued that behaving morally towards others required one to respect them “for themselves” and not use them as a “means” to one’s own enrichment or glory. With reference to Kant, Marx now accused the bourgeoisie, and its new science of economics, of practising “immorality” on a grand scale:

“[Economics] knows the worker only as a working animal—as a beast reduced to strictest bodily needs,” he charged in the Manifesto. The wages paid to workers were, he believed, just “like the oil which is applied to wheels to keep them turning … The true purpose of work is no longer man, but money.”

Raw Materials + Labour + Machinery = Product + Profit

Whatever goodwill the employer may display towards the employee, and however many years they may have devoted to a job or task, workers must live with the anxiety of knowing that their status will never be guaranteed but will be forever dependent on both their own performance and the economic well-being of their organizations.

Although the fear of being left penniless is a primary reason for our worry over the instability of our employment, it is not the only reason. We also worry because of love, for our work is the chief determinant of the amount of respect and care we will be granted. It is according to how we are able to answer the question of what we do that the quality of our reception is likely to be decided. 

Meanwhile, our need for love remains unwavering, no less steady or insistent than it may have been when we were infants, an imbalance between our requirements and the uncertain conditions of the world that constitutes a stubborn fifth pillar on which our status anxieties rest.

The Need for Art

Life is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behavior of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error. Surreptitiously and beguilingly, then, with humor or gravity, works of art—novels, poems, plays, paintings or films—can function as vehicles to explain our condition to us. They may act as guides to a truer, more judicious, more intelligent understanding of the world.

Art and Snobbery

Novels may act as conceptual counterweights to dominant hierarchical realities. They can reveal that the maid now busying herself with lunch is a creature of rare sensitivity and moral greatness, while the baron who laughs raucously and owns a silver mine has a heart both withered and acrid.

Lines that may be stretched to define a whole conception of the novel: an artistic medium to help us understand and appreciate the value of every hidden life that rests in an unvisited tomb.

“If art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally,” knew George Eliot.

Painting is another medium that is great at telling the stories of those who would otherwise not be investigated. The lives of the seemingly mundane command attention, especially when the artist is expected to paint portraitures of royalty and landscapes, but chooses not to. This makes the viewer question the value of the commoner instead of overinflating the importance of some bulbous and insecure queen.

Tragedy

Our fear of failing at various tasks would likely be much less were it not for our awareness of how harshly failure tends to be viewed and interpreted by others. Fear of the material consequences of failure is thus compounded by fear of the unsympathetic attitude of the world towards those who have failed, exemplified by its haunting proclivity to refer to them as “losers”—a word callously signifying both that they have lost and that they have, at the same time, forfeited any right to sympathy for losing.

Tragic drama followed a hero from prosperity to ruin and shame. Leaving the audience hesitant to condemn the character, humbled by the ease at which tragedy has befallen somebody of their status, and questioning whether they would fare any better in a similar situation. These stories are considered sophisticated or complex. Hopefully inspiring sympathy in the viewer, demonstrating to them that we all have the capacity for folly and the corresponding repercussions.

Comedy

Humorists and their targets have long recognized, jokes are an enormously effective means of anchoring a criticism. At base, they are another way of complaining: about arrogance, cruelty or pomposity, about departures from virtue or good sense.

Freud wrote, “A joke will allow us to exploit something ridiculous in our enemy which we could not, on account of obstacles in the way, bring forward openly or consciously.” Through jokes, Freud suggested, critical messages “can gain a reception with the hearer which they would never have found in a non-joking form … [which is why] jokes are especially favored in order to make criticism possible against persons in exalted positions.”

At the hands of the best comics, laughter acquires a moral purpose, jokes become attempts to cajole others into reforming their character and habits. Jokes are a way of sketching a political ideal, of creating a more equitable and saner world. Wherever there is inequity or delusion, space opens up for humor-clad criticisms. As Samuel Johnson saw it, satire is only another method, and a particularly effectual one, of “censuring wickedness or folly.” 

“The true end of satire is the amendment of vices.” – John Dryden

A great deal of what we find funny has to do with situations or feelings that, were we to experience them in our own, ordinary lives, would likely cause us either embarrassment or shame. The greatest comics shine a spotlight on vulnerabilities that the rest of us are all too eager to leave in the shadow; they pull us out of our lonely relationship with our most awkward sides. The more private the flaw and the more intense the worry about it, the greater the possibility of laughter.

Comedy reassures us that there are others in the world no less envious or socially fragile than ourselves; those other fellow spirits wake up in the early hours feeling every bit as tormented by their financial performance as we do by our own; and that beneath the sober appearance society demands of us, most of us slowly going mad, which in itself should give us cause to hold out a hand to our comparably tortured neighbors.

Comics and artists alike use their artform as a way of critiquing life and the absurdity of our condition and the seriousness we place upon it. Easing us into accepting that we are all in this together, but simultaneously still have plenty to work on.