I’m skeptical that much of the suffering and meaninglessness you described is inherent to abundance, and especially that economic labor is a necessary structure for human desire to organize itself around. You might be interested in thecatamites’ short post on consequences, which I like a lot:
i always end up talking to people at work who’ll insist that without a job, without the consequences of NOT having a job and the way those consequences frame and direct our behaviors, that we simply wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves. to which i always think, well, maybe YOU wouldn’t, man…
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to want something, to lack shelter or respite from the blunt animal miseries of exploitation, scarcity and torture—surely part of the cruelty of these is how they overshadow all the other ways that we might be unhappy. and how meagre their countervailing images of happiness turn out to be, money, food, ammo or red potion. compare to the strange and elaborate unhappinesses involved in simply being alive, in the directionless abundance of perception itself, that stuck tap endlessly pouring out into a drain. isn’t that something worth fighting for, something everyone deserves?
He is writing in the context of video games, where all scarcity is artificial, and in which infinite abundance is only a matter of downloading a cheat engine. Somehow, though, the existence of cheat engines (or walkthroughs, etc) mostly doesn’t prevent people from seeking out meaningful challenges and struggles in games anyway. And there are games without friction, walking sims or narrative-focused adventure games, and lots of people like them, too.
I also think it’s surprising that you would see “loss of structure” as a characteristic flaw of utopias, when your example utopia—the boarding school—sounds like a very structured, maybe even over-structured environment. Classes go HERE, study hall from this time to that time. I can’t speak for Aria, but the people I knew in school who did lots of drugs and pushed boundaries weren’t crying out for lack of structure; they were sick of structures, of being told what to do all day, feeling trapped and powerless. Is it possible that what she was feeling had less to do with the weightlessness of endless abundance, and more to do with the awful constriction Scott Alexander describes here? (Scroll down to section III or Ctrl-F “child prison” for the relevant bit).
(My high school also had therapists and meditation programs, and occasionally emotional support animals, and nobody really tried to stop students from getting stoned all day, but it still wouldn’t have passed the ‘burrito test’. Would yours?)
Ultimately I would prefer human adults have the freedom to decide what they want to do in a state of abundance, even if some of them then decide to live in frictionless comfort. And then, if they decide that frictionless comfort is unsatisfying, to be able to change their mind, attempt something more difficult instead, and have the resources to pursue that too. Even if one chooses scarcity and labor in the end, I’d rather that be chosen internally, not inflicted externally. Schools don’t offer that freedom; the students have their goals and purpose decided by an outside authority, and if they don’t like them, tough shit. We think it’s alright (sometimes), because the students are children and so aren’t grown enough to figure things out for themselves. But any future where that becomes universal is nothing like what I’d call utopia.
I’m skeptical that much of the suffering and meaninglessness you described is inherent to abundance, and especially that economic labor is a necessary structure for human desire to organize itself around. You might be interested in thecatamites’ short post on consequences, which I like a lot:
He is writing in the context of video games, where all scarcity is artificial, and in which infinite abundance is only a matter of downloading a cheat engine. Somehow, though, the existence of cheat engines (or walkthroughs, etc) mostly doesn’t prevent people from seeking out meaningful challenges and struggles in games anyway. And there are games without friction, walking sims or narrative-focused adventure games, and lots of people like them, too.
I also think it’s surprising that you would see “loss of structure” as a characteristic flaw of utopias, when your example utopia—the boarding school—sounds like a very structured, maybe even over-structured environment. Classes go HERE, study hall from this time to that time. I can’t speak for Aria, but the people I knew in school who did lots of drugs and pushed boundaries weren’t crying out for lack of structure; they were sick of structures, of being told what to do all day, feeling trapped and powerless. Is it possible that what she was feeling had less to do with the weightlessness of endless abundance, and more to do with the awful constriction Scott Alexander describes here? (Scroll down to section III or Ctrl-F “child prison” for the relevant bit).
(My high school also had therapists and meditation programs, and occasionally emotional support animals, and nobody really tried to stop students from getting stoned all day, but it still wouldn’t have passed the ‘burrito test’. Would yours?)
Ultimately I would prefer human adults have the freedom to decide what they want to do in a state of abundance, even if some of them then decide to live in frictionless comfort. And then, if they decide that frictionless comfort is unsatisfying, to be able to change their mind, attempt something more difficult instead, and have the resources to pursue that too. Even if one chooses scarcity and labor in the end, I’d rather that be chosen internally, not inflicted externally. Schools don’t offer that freedom; the students have their goals and purpose decided by an outside authority, and if they don’t like them, tough shit. We think it’s alright (sometimes), because the students are children and so aren’t grown enough to figure things out for themselves. But any future where that becomes universal is nothing like what I’d call utopia.