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.
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.
Bust your arse from 20 to 56, then fucking retire enjoy the fruits of your labor, $900k super, zero debts, own a good car, roof over head that keeps you warm & dont leak, $30k per year you live like a king, $50k per year you are living in sloth and gluttony
ReplyDeleteThe boomers sure had it good didn't they?
ReplyDeleteSo the average salary right now in Australia (one of the world's most prosperous countries) is about $78000 p.a. Median house price in Sydney is $1.15million. Assuming that you spend $30 000 of that $78000 income each year on living (as you say you do in retirement with zero debt and a roof over your head), that leaves $48000 to pay off your house each year. Without interest/inflation, it would take you 24 years on average salary to afford an average house. With interest, I suspect you would spend the entire 36 year working life you recommend saving to simply afford the roof over your head, let alone the 900 000 super. Times have changed mate. The resentment of the millenials is not born of laziness, but hopelessness.
More generally, to me it seems like a bad deal to trade your youth for comfort in your old age. There are things you can only do in your youth. I'd hate to miss out on them because I'm too busy balancing accounts in an office all night.