There is something deeply, fundamentally wrong with the world we are living in today.
Five days a week, most of us wake up and drag ourselves out of bed to work a job we don’t particularly give a shit about (that’s after spending a half-hour commuting there one way pre-pandemic, of course). After time spent recovering on the weekends, we rinse and repeat… in order to pay the bills and have the wonderful chance to do it all over again. A recent Gallup poll purports that 54% of workers are “not engaged” at work, a.k.a. doing the bare minimum, while 14% are “actively disengaged,” or miserable and spreading their unhappiness because of their experiences.
Now now, you say. Work was never supposed to be “fun,” at least not in the same way video games and vacations are. And of course not. But I’d like to think that there ought to maybe be some sliver of meaning or purpose behind what we spend the better half of our waking hours “engaged” in. That we are making a tangible difference in the world while also contributing to our own personal fulfillment and actualization. But most immediately, that for trading away our precious time and energy, we would be compensated fairly, at least with a “living” wage for those of us who are not self-employed.
The blunt fact of the matter is, what many of us do “for a living,” at least in recent human history, seems to have largely accomplished neither. What it has “accomplished,” most notably, is furthering the already staggering, largely unfathomable, and now unprecedented wealth gap, skyrocketing inequality of nearly all kinds to stratospheric levels. What it has accomplished is destroying the earth’s ecosystems, swelling the earth’s temperatures, and polluting the earth’s lungs (and soul?), all in the name of prosperity and advancement, inching us closer to a global climatic disaster and point of no return. These two great existential threats, inequality and climate change, have the power to completely collapse civilization as we know it, yet they seem to chug on happily forward.
But we now have supercomputers in our pockets, self-driving cars, all the on-demand entertainment we could ever ask for, and countless other signs of “progress” and technological wonders that no human has ever had access to before in all of history. We should undoubtedly all be happy and grateful, right?
Christopher McCandless, who died at 24 in the Alaskan wilderness after setting off on a solo journey of self-discovery, turning his back on the meaningless and excess of modern society, said that “happiness is only real when shared.” And if someone with so profound and dire and urgent of a perspective as him can say that, it makes me wonder how comically far out of touch we have become from our very human condition. In America, we have a “civilized” society in which millions of our fellow humans are working multiple minimum-wage jobs just to survive and put food on the table, one paycheck or medical emergency away from complete financial ruin, while the wealthiest 85 people in the world control as much wealth as the poorest half of the entire global population. We have over half a million people in this country alone experiencing homelessness at any given moment, living on the streets, abandoned like feral animals, or shoved altogether out of polite sight.
And for those of us who are more materially fortunate and privileged, while our everyday struggles pale in comparison to those living in destitution, we remain susceptible to experiencing the same emotional and existential despairs as any. It seems the bulk of our lives is dedicated to some of the most mundane, menial, and meaningless tasks humanely possible. For the office workers, we are relegated to sitting behind a desk and staring at a computer screen for upwards of eight hours day, slowly killing our eyes, backs, souls. And for what? To really just sadly avoid the lives of those who have it worse, who toil back-breaking jobs on their feet, from retail to construction to restaurants, for an insultingly pathetic minimum wage that has not increased in over a decade. Don’t forget the privilege of getting yelled at by Karen.
This is no way to live. Some of us believe we are dedicating these precious waking minutes to “making the world a better place,” as all corporations believe they unquestionably are, when in reality, most are stuck doing little more than lining the pockets of the .1% in the grand scheme of things, making rich people even richer while the rest of the world continues to suffer behind in the dust. The status quo hums merrily along, with inequality, wealth or otherwise, more problematic than it’s ever been. Large organizations seem to wield more influence over our lives than ever before, spending billions to tell us what’s “missing” from our pitiful existences, which wouldn’t be so pitiful if only we bought this or that. If only we looked like her or had this many followers.
Everywhere I turn, I hear about companies “breaking the mold” or “revolutionizing xyz” or “disrupting” the status quo, yet I see largely only the most trivial of problems being “solved,” concealing the same old selfish desire for wealth and fame and status as the “next big thing.” This incessant culture of “productivity” has created the very environment that is actively undermining us. We are at a point where we have become so attached to technological progress, yet so unaware that this is not the same thing as bettering society (in fact, they’re often at direct odds with each other).
The reality is, we don’t need 90%+ of the things society has sold us on today to be happy. They are superfluous, yet we invest so much time and energy into chasing these things, these largely material wishes, forever imprisoned in a race of rats to accumulate more and more and more. How can we truly reform our working lives if we believe such conditions and sacrifices are necessary for happiness and fulfillment and success? I find it quite discouraging that, for instance, some of our best and brightest from places like Stanford are devoting their lives to figuring out how to generate 5% more clicks in the name of Google’s ad revenue. That our Ivy League grads continue to seek out the most “prestigious” and highest-paying employers, i.e. Facebook, Goldman Sachs, Amazon, McKinsey, etc., the same ones that largely solve no real, pressing problems in society, or even actively make the world worse (thank you, McKinsey, for the recent news of your helping feed the opioid epidemic— just what we were missing).
We are living in an age of unprecedented alienation from the very things that make us human.
We as a society have allowed unbridled greed, hubris, and desire consume us and destroy us. We are statistically the wealthiest and most materially comfortable we’ve ever been as humans. Yet we are more depressed than ever. More unfulfilled than ever. More embroiled in superficiality than ever. I look around and see people consumed by their artificial alter egos. Their virtual lives. Chasing wealth and fame and all the usual suspects. No wonder mental illness, suicide, substance abuse, and just about every other statistic of despair has skyrocketed to alarming levels in modern society. How ironic is it that we live in a time where vast segments of the human population are experiencing chronic malnourishment and starvation, yet we are also more obese than ever?
We were simply never meant to live like this. And the truth is, for 95% of our existence as a species, we didn’t. Our ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers deeply connected to and in sync with the natural world, “working” only 15–20 hours a week, doing the kinds of activities communally we do for play — hunt, fish, pick berries — with the rest of their time spent in the company of loved ones, enjoying activities of leisure. Many of us are so tired from work that we have no energy to do anything after. We live for the weekend. Our ancestors had real communities with lives oriented around cooperation and personal autonomy, with a real purpose behind everything they did. Hunting for this or building that was directly tied to the improvement and wellbeing of those around them and didn’t necessarily feel like “work,” while today, many of us are stuck in cubicles, clicking on screens to satisfy some virtual persona halfway across the globe, not even sure of the reality of any impact we are supposedly making.
No, I am not advocating we return to living in a more “primitive” state, nor would it even be feasible at this point in human time. Nor am I trying to convey that those before us always had “easier” lives. What I will say is that perhaps now more than ever, we are finding ourselves living extremely unnatural lives, and trying our best to cope with how debilitating the monotonous drudgery of our day-to-day existences is with the unsatisfiable consumption of mind-numbing substances and mindless entertainment. We have sacrificed the very essence of our human condition in the name and pursuit of progress, failing to realize that we are actually regressing.
We are alienated from our work, all in the name of cutting costs, improving the bottom line, and making sure the ruling class have four yachts, not a miserly two. Technological advancement was supposed to make our lives better, yet workers in modern times are working longer and longer hours while their real wages have stagnated and housing prices have skyrocketed. Productivity has increased, yet the fruits of that labor have not, at least not to the rank and file. Instead, CEO pay in the past few decades has ballooned from 20 times the average worker’s to over 200 times. The Millennial generation is the first in history to be financially worse off than their parents, despite being better educated.
Automation, which will wipe out nearly half of jobs by 2030, will only exacerbate inequality and its effects if we don’t seriously address the fact that policies such as universal basic income are a matter of when, not if. Wasn’t the whole point of this technological advancement to create a better tomorrow anyways, one with less suffering and more time to enjoy what truly matters in life? And last but not least, the overarching COVID-19 pandemic of the times, which has resulted in widespread job decimation, has shown us particularly how comical it is that recipients are making more from unemployment than actually working. That is not to be an indictment of the welfare system, but rather an indictment of corporations exploiting their most vulnerable workers with starvation wages and forcing taxpayers to pick up the slack. Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, Amazon, and all the companies that have profited during the pandemic: how hard is it to pay your workers a goddamn living wage, now of all times? Have you zero empathy or humanity for the workers you deem so “essential”?
Reforming work and the conditions of our labor is a foremost endeavor. Yet it is ultimately contained within the larger, perpetual struggle of the divide between the haves and the have-nots, a reality in which so unequal and unnatural of a world has already resulted in catastrophic consequences to our livelihoods and fundamental institutions such as democracy itself. Until we demand the entire system is overhauled, such attacks will only intensify.
We are at a point in human history where we would probably benefit from less labor, not more. There is no reason why humans should have to be working like they do for how long they do just to barely survive, all the while destroying their health, sanity, and the environment. We have stupendously more than enough to go around, but how we currently distribute our resources ought to enrage the 99.9999% of us. We are living in a time where we have individual people, MULTITUDES of them, on this planet holding enough wealth to singlehandedly tackle world hunger, yet spaceships are being built instead. Because, in the name of “advancing” the human species, we ought to direct our attention to making Mars habitable, breathable… but not trying to accomplish that on earth.
None of what I have said is anything others have not said before. And none of this is intended to brush aside all the good that has and is being done in the world by our most kindred of souls. From efforts in renewable energy to decentralized finance to everyday humanitarian efforts, there is so much to be inspired by and continue pushing for. But I feel compelled to write and hopefully encourage even just one person to see, still, how broken of a world we are living in. Because it feels as if we are caught in a perpetual tug of war between two sides — one whose goal is to legitimately better humanity and one whose goal is to selfishly enrich itself and control everyone else.
It’s up to us to do something about it after we first acknowledge and recognize the insanity, and that we are all actively making choices every day that alter the course of this world. For some of us, we have nothing to lose. For just about all of us, we have a duty. We owe it to the people of times past who have fought for increasingly better lives and work conditions. We owe it to our posterior that the human existence will perhaps be just a bit more ideal moving forward. We owe it to the people alive today, all around us, who lead quiet lives of desperation, slowly suffering. But most of all, we owe it to the people who are no longer with us, like Maria Fernandes, a 32 year-old who worked at three, yes THREE, Dunkin’ Donuts before dying in a parking lot from exhaust fumes while sleeping in her car between shifts. We owe it to her and everyone else.
