This is a collection of very short philosophical thoughts (mostly existential in nature) that I have sometimes. Whenever I have a new one I repost this collection with the newest fragment at the top. Most of these assume a fair bit of knowledge with philosophy or at least my thoughts in general to make any sense.
Centrists who don't understand centrism
In the aftermath of Brexit and Trump there are claims across the political spectrum that liberal-centrism is in crisis and fresh new ideas are needed (I'm working on something longer about this). Inevitably, the "new ideas" in question are anything but. Tariff barriers were at their Zenith in the Hellnic period. Then there is the inevitable reply from liberal centrists - Trudeau is in power, Macron is in power, chill out. What frustrates me the most about this dialogue is that any crisis that we have is the result of a drift away from the liberal-centre and a failure on the part of politicians to educated themselves on updates to the liberal-centre. Left-wing and right-wing politicians will inevitably revert to glib, ideological stupidities at the first sign of chaos, like small government-as-a-portion-of-GDP as a response to low growth, or nationalising industries as a response to unemployment. Causal chains are not something the wings care about. But the centre should be in there looking for an evidence-based policy response drawing on ideas from across the political spectrum. Instead, centrist politicians seem to be unable to advocate for centrism on any grounds other than it being a good triangulation strategy.
Some examples. Bowen has been a staunch advocate for remaining open to trade and investment, but he's also advocating for bilateral deals and the TPP, which betrays a lack of understanding regarding how comparative advantage changes, the role of trade in fostering competition, and the importance of trade dynamism for ensuring Asia's ongoing development. Shorten is out there talking some sense on housing, but I fear that it's mostly just because he thinks it will get him the youth and migrant vote and not because he sees housing as fundamentally broken in Australia. Meanwhile, he's also targetting completely brain-dead advertisements about migrants taking jobs in marginal seats in Queensland. There is no evidence for migration undermining employment or wages in Australia, especially for low-skill workers because we only take high-skill migrants. I've got mates presenting themselves as centrists one minute, and nekminnit they're talking about protecting jobs in forestry and developing an indigenous light rail manufacturing industry from scratch. These two things do not jibe.
Over on the Liberal side, Malcolm has tied himself into knots to avoid stating the obvious: carbon pricing is the best way to reduce emissions. Even Greg Mankiw and Martin Feldstein, the heads of the President's Economic Advisory Council's for Bush and Reagan respectively, have said so. The government is advocating for the deregulation of university for completely confused reasons. They think it will take more of education off the government's books by reducing the need for a subsidy, but actually it will blow up the tertiary sector's presence on their books because HECS debts will quadruple. They think it will lead to a more educated workforce, when actually it will just result is an enormous inflation of cross-subsidised research that is largely useless to the public, and even more resentment on the part of students for having to pay hundreds of thousands for a shithouse education. And then there's this whole Adani frackas, as though a billion dollars and stupendous carbon emissions from an obsolete industry was a reasonable price tag for 1500 jobs.
What this suggests to me is that the right of the Labor party and the left of the Liberal party have no idea what centrism is other than a triangulation strategy spruiked by pollsters.
Centrism is about a couple of things:
- Open competition in the economic and political realms
- Equal opportunity in that competition (note: not equality of outcomes)
- (1) and (2) require equity and efficiency to be comingled in public policy
- The best way to achieve (3) is to combined market, government and community policy tools to arrive at sophisticated policies that achieve bipartisan outcomes (i.e. equity and efficiency). I call these hybrid policies. We have a book coming out on them in April next year.
Politicians instead think centrism is about drawing on governments, markets or community as necessary to do what is populist in a particular context. Boomers want to live rich - leave housing to the market; voters in Adelaide threatening to swing - get the state in there; forestry workers about to be out of a job in an obsolete industry - fuck helping them re-skill and relocate to new and better jobs, we're here to protect the community. This isn't far removed from the kind of patronage and interest-group politics that defines middle-income countries. We can do better. The first place to start would be for centrists politicians to actually learn the ideas that undergird their politics.
The Grind
Most people don't want much that can't be had with a middle-class income. Once you've got middle-class income, you start to seek intangibles: meaning, good relationships, adventure, that sort of thing. As you spend an ungodly number of hours in your life at work, it makes sense that millennials are trying to find jobs that provide these things. They avoid droll offices and unbearable coworkers and try to find jobs with travel opportunities and international offices.
Unfortunately, there just aren't that many jobs like that. Many of the ones that do exist are also based in places like London i.e. cities where the cost of living is massive. At that point, there suddenly springs into being a harsh trade-off between having a middle-class income in real terms and having all these nice job features. To live in London in a way that is middle class, you need a lot more money than if you live in Wollongong. But there are very few jobs in London that have both the relevant salary and the relevant life-enhancing qualities. Everyone is applying for these jobs, like being an analyst at The Economist. So the only way to get them is work your buttocks off, that is, to grind. And once you've got them, you probably need to keep grinding, in part because of the massive university debts you accrued trying to get the job in the first place.
One of your two other options is to go work in, among other things, the charities sector. But here the wages are terrible. So bad in fact that if you have debts you are basically precluded from charitable work. An odd side-effect of this is the explosion of millennials who want to work in charities while still earning a middle-class salary. They want to do good and be paid for it. They complain that donors don't tolerate high enough administrative overheads in charities. They say charities need to offer higher salaries to attract top talent (which is them apparently). Haha; nice try dickheads. It's called charity for a reason.
The other of your two other options is to chase the dollars and try to enjoy the really nice things that alot of money can buy, like houses by the beach, 10000 thread count sheets and fine dining. Best example I can think of here is finance. Gross. Among a thousand problems, a major one here is that industries that pay the cash-monies invariably involve working colossal hours, so you don't end up with much time to actually spend that money. The other one that kills me is being asked to demonstrate that I have a "passion" for consulting. Hahahahahahahahaahaha...this is like a meme for cheerful nihilism.
Fundamentally, there just aren't that many good jobs available. There are however, lots of important jobs. They just don't seem very sexy. Like nobody think being an accountant for Cadbury is transcendental work, but actually judging by Cadbury's market capitalisation, people really want their chocolate. Societal wellbeing is greatly enhanced by the smooth functioning of Cadbury's operation. People often forget, especially in the corporate social responsibility space, that the main way any business serves the general interest is by serving its market and serving it well. If its CSR activities compromise its ability to do its business that is quite probably inefficient from a societal welfare point of view. I don't want Cadbury making massive charitable contributions; I want them invest profits into more capital so I can get cheaper chocolate.
I hate the notion of "bullshit jobs". The notion is frankly bullshit. If a job exists it is, in the overwhelming majority of cases, responding to demand. For example, people often reflect on how being a corporate lawyer working on international investment is so unimportant compared to say, nurses, and thus it is grotesque that nurses are paid less than international investment lawyers. This is retarded. The world certainly needs nurses. But it also needs people to manage the complexities of investing several billion dollars into an iron mine in rural Mongolia and getting the mined ore across dozens of borders as it is turned into steel and then into buildings, trucks and all kinds of other things that people need. The lawyer need to paid more than the nurses not because they are necessarily more skilled, but because being a lawyer is shithouse. You have to work all day e'ryday with sociopaths to resolve what are essentially mindnumbing administrative complexities, all while various people making million dollar bets throw tantrums at you because they are risking their livelihood on your competence. I'd bloody well want to be compensated. An even more retarded point is the kind made by Graeber and other unreconstructed Marxists that people like garbage collectors and train drivers should be paid more because they are "actually important". These commentators fail to notice the obvious fact that train drivers and garbage collectors have no skills and there are 6 billion people on the planet just like them who would happily do the job. Demand and supply bitches. Just because the labor theory of value seems ethically attractive doesn't mean it is true.
I digress. The point I actually wanted to make herein is that there isn't much you can do if you want a middle class life with even vaguely meaningful work and not work more than 55 hours a week. The one option that pops up is government, and even there you're looking at the most competitive agencies where tournament labour market dynamics are a thing. Outside of those departments you're mostly looking at classic bureaucratic skulduggery. So it seems we are confined to the grind.
Life after Nihilism
I've spent a bit over a decade trying to transcend nihilism using the Nietzschean method. This is the antithesis of the Buddhist or ascetic method. Humans desire being: they want a stable identity, a sense of transcendental purpose, and serious values. Nihilism undermines this desire because it drives home the reality that the universe is devoid of purpose, has no normative order and that consciousness means we are always becoming and can never have an 'equilibrium' identity. Rather, we make incremental steps towards one. The ascetic ideal suggests either:
In the Christian tradition: the desire for individuation that is inherent in the yearning for being is basically temptation, i.e. Satanic, and the best thing to do is to humble yourself before God and accept your place in his plan, which ironically gets you identity, purpose and serious values.
In the Buddhist tradition: individuation and the self more generally is a trap. It is wrong road and we must walk back to the beginning. Mindfulness and meditation allow you to take control of consciousness and use that control to annihilate the self, leading to nirvana.
The ascetic ideal seems shit to me. Life is great. I don't care that it has some downs. I don't even care that it is ultimately meaningless and largely absurd. The main thing that bothers me about it is just how short it is. A thousand years would be nice. I want more life!
All my philosophising has gotten me to the point where Nihilism doesn't bite me quite like it used to, but I'm still devoid of any sustained motivation. There are things that I care about and can do with enthusiasm most of the time, but I regularly get bored (ennui) with them, and only slightly less regularly reflect on the fact that they're rather meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Certainly my contribution to them is basically pointless.
It's hard to stick with something in contemporary society because the grind is so intense.
My basic approach to life nowadays is just to follow whatever I find intrinsically motivating at the present point in time. This means that I bounce around a lot. Sometimes I'll just want to focus on my hobbies for a month. Other times I'll get really carried away with teaching (incidentally, teaching is one of the few things that I have a sustained passion for), or exercise, or reading, or writing. Sometimes I just want to bugger off into the mountains for a fortnight.
This is quite a change for me. 5 years ago I was totally obsessed with two things: fulfilling my potential and not having any regrets when I was dying. Nowadays I'm much less confident that my potential is any specific thing, and the main thing I imagine regretting is doing stuff I didn't want to do. Working for deferred rewards is fine if you have some idea of what those rewards are (like working as a lawyer for 30 years because you know you can then be a judge and that's what you really want). I've got NFI where I want to end up, so summoning the motivation to stay on the grind is tough.
I'm getting really anxious about having to go into the "real world" and the join the 50 hour a week workforce because my productivity just doesn't follow those patterns and I'm going to get really depressed having to go against my motivations all the time.
The Grind
Most people don't want much that can't be had with a middle-class income. Once you've got middle-class income, you start to seek intangibles: meaning, good relationships, adventure, that sort of thing. As you spend an ungodly number of hours in your life at work, it makes sense that millennials are trying to find jobs that provide these things. They avoid droll offices and unbearable coworkers and try to find jobs with travel opportunities and international offices.
Unfortunately, there just aren't that many jobs like that. Many of the ones that do exist are also based in places like London i.e. cities where the cost of living is massive. At that point, there suddenly springs into being a harsh trade-off between having a middle-class income in real terms and having all these nice job features. To live in London in a way that is middle class, you need a lot more money than if you live in Wollongong. But there are very few jobs in London that have both the relevant salary and the relevant life-enhancing qualities. Everyone is applying for these jobs, like being an analyst at The Economist. So the only way to get them is work your buttocks off, that is, to grind. And once you've got them, you probably need to keep grinding, in part because of the massive university debts you accrued trying to get the job in the first place.
One of your two other options is to go work in, among other things, the charities sector. But here the wages are terrible. So bad in fact that if you have debts you are basically precluded from charitable work. An odd side-effect of this is the explosion of millennials who want to work in charities while still earning a middle-class salary. They want to do good and be paid for it. They complain that donors don't tolerate high enough administrative overheads in charities. They say charities need to offer higher salaries to attract top talent (which is them apparently). Haha; nice try dickheads. It's called charity for a reason.
The other of your two other options is to chase the dollars and try to enjoy the really nice things that alot of money can buy, like houses by the beach, 10000 thread count sheets and fine dining. Best example I can think of here is finance. Gross. Among a thousand problems, a major one here is that industries that pay the cash-monies invariably involve working colossal hours, so you don't end up with much time to actually spend that money. The other one that kills me is being asked to demonstrate that I have a "passion" for consulting. Hahahahahahahahaahaha...this is like a meme for cheerful nihilism.
Fundamentally, there just aren't that many good jobs available. There are however, lots of important jobs. They just don't seem very sexy. Like nobody think being an accountant for Cadbury is transcendental work, but actually judging by Cadbury's market capitalisation, people really want their chocolate. Societal wellbeing is greatly enhanced by the smooth functioning of Cadbury's operation. People often forget, especially in the corporate social responsibility space, that the main way any business serves the general interest is by serving its market and serving it well. If its CSR activities compromise its ability to do its business that is quite probably inefficient from a societal welfare point of view. I don't want Cadbury making massive charitable contributions; I want them invest profits into more capital so I can get cheaper chocolate.
I hate the notion of "bullshit jobs". The notion is frankly bullshit. If a job exists it is, in the overwhelming majority of cases, responding to demand. For example, people often reflect on how being a corporate lawyer working on international investment is so unimportant compared to say, nurses, and thus it is grotesque that nurses are paid less than international investment lawyers. This is retarded. The world certainly needs nurses. But it also needs people to manage the complexities of investing several billion dollars into an iron mine in rural Mongolia and getting the mined ore across dozens of borders as it is turned into steel and then into buildings, trucks and all kinds of other things that people need. The lawyer need to paid more than the nurses not because they are necessarily more skilled, but because being a lawyer is shithouse. You have to work all day e'ryday with sociopaths to resolve what are essentially mindnumbing administrative complexities, all while various people making million dollar bets throw tantrums at you because they are risking their livelihood on your competence. I'd bloody well want to be compensated. An even more retarded point is the kind made by Graeber and other unreconstructed Marxists that people like garbage collectors and train drivers should be paid more because they are "actually important". These commentators fail to notice the obvious fact that train drivers and garbage collectors have no skills and there are 6 billion people on the planet just like them who would happily do the job. Demand and supply bitches. Just because the labor theory of value seems ethically attractive doesn't mean it is true.
I digress. The point I actually wanted to make herein is that there isn't much you can do if you want a middle class life with even vaguely meaningful work and not work more than 55 hours a week. The one option that pops up is government, and even there you're looking at the most competitive agencies where tournament labour market dynamics are a thing. Outside of those departments you're mostly looking at classic bureaucratic skulduggery. So it seems we are confined to the grind.
Life after Nihilism
I've spent a bit over a decade trying to transcend nihilism using the Nietzschean method. This is the antithesis of the Buddhist or ascetic method. Humans desire being: they want a stable identity, a sense of transcendental purpose, and serious values. Nihilism undermines this desire because it drives home the reality that the universe is devoid of purpose, has no normative order and that consciousness means we are always becoming and can never have an 'equilibrium' identity. Rather, we make incremental steps towards one. The ascetic ideal suggests either:
In the Christian tradition: the desire for individuation that is inherent in the yearning for being is basically temptation, i.e. Satanic, and the best thing to do is to humble yourself before God and accept your place in his plan, which ironically gets you identity, purpose and serious values.
In the Buddhist tradition: individuation and the self more generally is a trap. It is wrong road and we must walk back to the beginning. Mindfulness and meditation allow you to take control of consciousness and use that control to annihilate the self, leading to nirvana.
The ascetic ideal seems shit to me. Life is great. I don't care that it has some downs. I don't even care that it is ultimately meaningless and largely absurd. The main thing that bothers me about it is just how short it is. A thousand years would be nice. I want more life!
All my philosophising has gotten me to the point where Nihilism doesn't bite me quite like it used to, but I'm still devoid of any sustained motivation. There are things that I care about and can do with enthusiasm most of the time, but I regularly get bored (ennui) with them, and only slightly less regularly reflect on the fact that they're rather meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Certainly my contribution to them is basically pointless.
It's hard to stick with something in contemporary society because the grind is so intense.
My basic approach to life nowadays is just to follow whatever I find intrinsically motivating at the present point in time. This means that I bounce around a lot. Sometimes I'll just want to focus on my hobbies for a month. Other times I'll get really carried away with teaching (incidentally, teaching is one of the few things that I have a sustained passion for), or exercise, or reading, or writing. Sometimes I just want to bugger off into the mountains for a fortnight.
This is quite a change for me. 5 years ago I was totally obsessed with two things: fulfilling my potential and not having any regrets when I was dying. Nowadays I'm much less confident that my potential is any specific thing, and the main thing I imagine regretting is doing stuff I didn't want to do. Working for deferred rewards is fine if you have some idea of what those rewards are (like working as a lawyer for 30 years because you know you can then be a judge and that's what you really want). I've got NFI where I want to end up, so summoning the motivation to stay on the grind is tough.
I'm getting really anxious about having to go into the "real world" and the join the 50 hour a week workforce because my productivity just doesn't follow those patterns and I'm going to get really depressed having to go against my motivations all the time.
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