Generally, people who generalize are actually talking about themselves. I wouldn’t normally introduce myself as “a privileged fuckup”; however, I am more privileged than the average person in this world, and there are definitely things I have fucked up, so to some degree I must indict myself as well. Here, by “fuckup” I mean “person who has achieved substantially, and embarrassingly, less than what is possible with his or her talent and resources”. Guilty.
I had to qualify the title with the word privileged. In this case, I’m not applying it only to the rich, but to the middle classes. I feel like it’s not right to call the genuinely impoverished, who never had a chance, “fuckups”. I’d rather focus on the process that turns people who’ve had plenty of chances into (relative to what they could achieve) mediocrities, and possibly even figure out what to do about it.
There’s good news, however: I think there’s a causative agent of fuckuppery that is so pervasive as to explain almost all of it, singular enough to admit solution, toxic enough to suffice, and subtle enough to answer the question, “Why isn’t this discussed more?”
Let me first address four explanations that sound like they could be singularly causative of widespread fuckuppery, and are frequently cited as causes, but aren’t even minor players.
- Work is hard, yo. People are inherently lazy, one theory goes.
- Too much competition! There’s the argument that not everyone can achieve great things; some people must be fuckups.
- Lack of resources. Also known as, “I’d be published by now but for my fucking day job.”
- Personal weakness. I will establish this as a religious argument of minimal value.
None of these suffice to explain the epidemic of fuckuppery that we see in modern, corporatized, sanitized employment. I’ll blow each of these explanations (at best, partial causes) to pieces before I lay out the right answer.
Failed explanation #1: Work is hard
It’s true that almost everything worth doing is difficult, but that doesn’t mean it’s unpleasant. Things that are unpleasant are, in general, quite unsustainable no matter how much “will power” a person has. The mind is built to learn from (and thus, avoid) negative states. On the other hand, people can do things that are difficult or even physically painful for quite a long time if there is a superior, psychological reward involved.
I don’t think people are very different from one another in their tolerance for unpleasant mental states (and I’ll get back to this, later). So what is it (aside from extraordinary natural talent) that makes someone like Usain Bolt or Michael Jordan become a great athlete, even in spite of physical pain and exhaustion along the way? They figure out a way to separate difficulty from unpleasantness. Most people will never be professional athletes, but the skill of preventing difficulty from becoming emotional negativity is one that anyone can develop. As Buddhism teaches us, one can feel pain and not suffer. When the great athletes are exhausted from training, they don’t stew about it in negative mental states; they accept it as part of the process and, in a way, an aspect of the reward.
Some people think failure (at an ambitious project) is naturally unpleasant. It’s not. In fact, weightlifters literally train to failure, which means they lift until their muscles (momentarily) cease functioning. It’s the social stigma, especially at work, that gets people. We need to kill that. The problem is that humans have a tendency to recognize patterns when they aren’t there, and failing at one workplace project creates a sense of decline, replacing what is actually a noisy process (Brownian motion with drift) with a parabolic arc (vaulting ambition) straight out of a five-act Shakespearean tragedy.
One note I’ll make is that the education system unintentionally(?) encourages risk aversion. Instead of being encouraged to tackle very hard problems and setting the pass mark at, say, 20%; students are asked to tackle very easy problems with the pass mark set at 60 to 75% and average performance calibrated to be between 70 and 90%. This means that one total failure cancels out several excellent results; if you get one zero and three 100%’s, you’re still only average at 75%. I’d rather see the reverse: courses and work so demanding that 100% is extremely rare, but with 25 to 50 percent being a respectable score. In the real world, on projects worth doing, 50% is a hell of a good success rate compared to the maximum possible.
Is work hard? Of course. Yet as humans, we love to do hard things. We do a lot of things with zero or negative economic value (such as climbing mountains) because they are difficult and painful. We like the mental state of flow, we need to be challenged. We also enjoy physical exertion and discomfort if there is a reward involved. Hell, most of what we do on vacation is more work-like, in a primal sense, than office work. Biking 30 miles in 95-degree heat is a lot harder than sitting in a chair for eight hours, but most people would envy the first experience and not the second.
Failed explanation #2: Too much competition
Um, no. Have you seen the people out in this world? Like, really measured how diligent, engaged, and effective most of them are? If you have, you’re not worried about competition.
At least, I should say, one shouldn’t worry about competition in the grand sense. There are local competitions for specific resources and it’s not fun to see a superior competitor enter the field, but in the broader scope of things, competition is not what will hold a person back. I, for one, would love to live in a world where a person like me were average in intellect, creativity, and work ethic.
Sure, there is a lot of competition, in a less grand sense, for things that are known to have value: money, property, jobs, relationships, social status. It’s pretty easy to lose one’s creative and spiritual way and start chasing after the things everyone else wants and, when that happens, competition is the only thing one thinks about. If you live that way, you will wreck your life in battle with some of humanity’s most vicious, cutthroat people. That’s not an issue of “too much competition”, though. That’s on you. Part of the game is figuring out which subgames are worth playing and which will just waste time.
I want to make one thing clear, which is that there are genuine competitive issues in this world and many people face them. If you’re in a poor country where access to water is limited, then there are competitive forces making your life hell. That’s why I’m focusing on privileged people, who still get themselves intimidated by “all the competition”, and that obsessive focus (not the competitors themselves) does prevent them from excelling.
Guess what? There’s no threat of competition when people excel. Let’s say that you become the best Calvinball player in the world, advancing the game in ways the world hasn’t seen for centuries. There’s a sudden uptick of interest in the sport. Good for you; you make a bit more money, being strongly responsible for external world’s increased interest in the game. Now, let’s say that someone else comes along who’s slightly better than you are; you beat him sometimes, but he’s clearly the superior player. His effect (as a superior player) on you is… that you make more money. Sure, he’ll probably make even more than you do, but the degree to which he advances the game (and increases interest) benefits you. There are now two great players, which means the overall quality of the games (as no one would care to watch if you just won all the time) goes up. When you and he play, people who’ve never watched a Calvinball match in their lives come out. The match will have a winner and a loser but, economically, both sides win.
All animals and most people (the not privileged) have to worry about competition as an existential threat. In the wild, it’s deadly. For privileged people (here defined using a fairly low bar, so middle-class Americans qualify) the threat from competition is just not that great, not in the long run. If you excel and someone else is better, that just advances the field. If you suck, it’s not the fault of the competition; it’s all on you.
Besides, even in the relatively broken world of white-collar work, one never really has to worry, when doing something genuinely worth doing, about others who are better at the work. One has to worry about nasty people and political adepts, not superior craftspeople. In fact, people who are genuinely superior are usually quite nice about it, at least in my experience. It’s those who are inferior but politically powerful that are most dangerous.
Failed explanation #3: Lack of resources
This one falls down pretty quickly, because the people with tons of resources are often the biggest fuckups of all.
This is a pretty lame excuse that fails to address the real problem. Sure, a day job can slow the progress of that novel, but writers write. If you can’t get a few pages written per week while working a typical day job, you’re not a writer.
There’s something going on that prevents people from using the resources they have. They spend 3 hours per day watching TV and complain about a lack of “time”. No, that’s a lack of energy. It’s different. In fact, it’s not really a lack of energy (in the physical sense) so much as a motivational problem. I’ll get back to that, after I kill a fourth failed explanation for the epidemic of fuckuppery. The issue isn’t a lack of resources but a lack of the emotional and cognitive energy to manage what they have, which presents the (compelling) appearance of resource enervation, but it’s not actually that.
Since I’m focusing on a class of people who have 2 to 6 hours (or more) per day of free time, plus enough disposable income and technological access to learn almost any topic in the world, I don’t think we can give “lack of resources” credit for the overwhelming likelihood that a person does not excel. Sorry, but the resources are there, so I have to kill that excuse.
Failed explanation #4: Personal weakness
The knee-jerk conservative reaction to any social or psychological problem is to ascribe it to “personal weakness” or a lack of “individual responsibility”. It really is the “God of the Gaps” for those people, and it’s pretty absurd.
Why would I take time to address some macho nonsense explanation? Because I think all of us (not just mouth-breathing right-wingers) have a tendency toward self-shame when we compare what we actually accomplish to what we could achieve if we got our shit together. We tend to take our shortfalls personally, without full recognition of the forces resulting in the outcome. We either fall into an external (competition, lack of resources) or internal (personal weakness) locus-of-control explanation, without recognizing the complex mix of the two that we actually face.
By all means, if taking an extreme internal-locus-of-control mentality helps you, then let it motivate you. However, I don’t think the personal weakness argument applies, and if the shame is getting you down, then throw it aside; I’ll explain your (probable) problem just below. Some people have more favorable biology and material resources than others, but there isn’t much evidence to convince me that any of what I wish to analyze is driven by moral strength/weakness variable independent of those causes. I just don’t see it being there. Most people want to achieve things, work hard (as they understand the concept) and want to do the right thing. Yet, almost everyone deals with emotional fatigue, fluctuating motivation, and less resilience than most people would wish to have. It’s not “weakness”; it’s psychology, and a lot of this stuff is rooted more closely to the physical brain than the part of ourselves we view as nonphysical, moral, or spiritual– and possessing some kind of “character” that deserves to be rewarded or punished.
Those four dragons slain, we can get to an accurate explanation of why most people are so ineffective. It’s actually quite simple. Let’s drop into it.
Organizational “work” conditions people to associate work with subordination, making them lazy, unfocused, irresponsible, and emotionally enervated.
That work worth doing is hard and fails sometimes is not the problem. People can deal with failure. (One of the most engaging reinforcement systems, as seen darkly in slot machines, is variable-schedule reinforcement.) The issue certainly isn’t “too much competition”, with most people achieving a small percentage of what they’re capable of and therefore not much competitive threat in the world. Moreover, the problem isn’t scarce resources (although those resources are finite, and therefore squander will likely lead to non-achievement). Since the evidence is extremely strong for conditioning (learned helplessness) I think the “personal weakness” argument can be thrown out as a claim rooted in almost a religious bias. Instead, the problem is that society is structured in such a way that it trains people to dislike work.
Most people do most of the work in their life under a subordinate context. If people can only conceive of doing difficult or taxing things when in a state of subordination, they will lose their drive to work. Over time, this will strip them of their creativity and ambition in general. If the conditioning is complete, they’ll become permanent subordinates, unsuited to anything else.
It’s not the objective difficulty, but the erratic and corrupt evaluation, that gets to most people. When the reward is divorced from the quality of the work, people lose interest in the latter. Most people, after all, associate work not with physical or mental difficulty (which people enjoy) but with economic humiliation. In a work world driven by non-meritocratic political forces and therefore subject to constant shifts in priority, they also lose a sense of coherence, and the ability to focus atrophies, since responding quickly to political injections is more valued than deliberate performance. Eventually, full-on disengagement sets in, and people lose a sense of ownership or responsibility. Over time, this creates a class of people conditioned into permanent subordination.
That’s almost all of us, sadly, to some degree. Few of us (even the wealthy, who have no need to work) are free of all traces of the subordination meme-virus. Even many self-employed consultants are had by the balls by a single client or a tight-knit network of clients who value each others’ opinions, and venture-funded entrepreneurs answer literally to their investors. Now, one might argue that “everyone has a boss”. I disagree. Everyone serves (to quote from Game of Thrones, “valar dohaeris“) but it is not strictly necessary for people to serve others on humiliating terms. That part is artificial. It doesn’t need to be there, and in the long term, it does a lot of harm.
Age discrimination is one symptom of the underlying sickness of corporate discrimination. Why is there so much ageism in the corporate world? In terms of skill and competence, older people tend to fall under a bimodal distribution, with some being very good and others being quite weak. There are some who are extremely capable, and that’s because they maintained their creativity, originality, and energy in defiance of a system that spend decades trying to squash them. They’re exceptional as advisors and independent contributors, but they sure as hell aren’t desirable by managers who demand personal subordination; that won’t happen. On the other end are those who’ve subordinated quite well, let creative atrophy set in, and now stand at a disadvantage to younger people who haven’t been burned out yet. Subordination has a long-term cost– the destruction of human capital– and ageism establishes that the penalties are borne by those whose human capital has been destroyed.
More generally, this epidemic of privileged fuckuppery exists because, even at very high levels in our society, we’ve forged generations of people who have a deep-seated association of work with subordination– one that often begins in education, where it befalls the wealthy as much as the poor. They can’t even begin projects without thinking obsessively about how they will be evaluated (which is different from the valid question of how the work will serve others) and that whittles their minds down into second-hand crappy models of other peoples’ minds. It’s no good. We have to fight it. We have to kill it. This may not be an existential threat to the biological species (that being quite resilient, and more of a threat to nature than threatened by it) but it does pose a danger to the continuance of civilization. At this point, civilization cannot continue without ongoing technical progress, especially as pertains to solving ecological problems, which means we are reliant on human creativity, which organizational subordination kills not only in the bottom, but also at the top (because it requires elevated position-holders to focus more on maintaining rank than anything else).
Workplace subordination, in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, had major operational efficiencies. Additionally, the destruction it inflicted on human capital was there for poets and philosophers to observe and mourn, but it never threatened to cripple the economy, because its standardization effects outweighed its costs. Assembly-line workers, in truth, didn’t need to be creative to do their jobs. What has changed is that machines are taking over the subordinate work, and will soon enough capture all of it. If the job can be done by a person in subordination, that means that perfect completion can be specified (as opposed to creative work where perfect completion is not even well-defined) and if it can specified, it can be programmed, and the work can be given over to robots. Soon enough, that will happen.
The result of this is that the market value of subordinate work, on the market, is falling inexorably to zero. People who are afflicted by the long-term conditioning of subordination will have no leverage in the modern economy, and (as much as I am cautious about such things, being more strongly libertarian than I am leftist) I suspect that central intervention (socialism! gasp!) will be necessary if a nation is to survive the transition. All that will be left for us is work requiring individual creativity and personal expression, and the people who have lost these capabilities to decades of horrible conditioning will need to be given the help to recover (or, at least, enough sustenance while they can bring themselves to recover). The real discussion we need to have– involving economists, business leaders, educators, and technologists– is how to prepare ourselves for a post-subordinate world.
