January 23, 2021
Garish austerity, Driver's License and the leakiness of work and leisure
Even before the pandemic, Americans have been embracing a nihilist numbness in reaction to the non-stop assault of news, memes, posts and tik-toks on their senses. In January 2020, the Economist proclaimed, “The shared world is intolerable.” A 2020 Super Bowl ad asked, “When did staying in become the new going out?” Minimalists from the Marie Kondo school advocated the wholescale purge of things, and living in empty spaces surrounded by naked, white walls. Nowhere was this truer than in the tech industry and among tech workers. Sensory deprivation became the mantra, and intermittent fasting the ritual. Companies emptied out buildings and turned them into austere open-floor spaces, with uncovered air ducts, white noise machines, and unfinished ceilings coming to represent the new vulnerable and bare chic. Extraneity in all forms was cancelled, luxury came to be synonymous with less, and nothingness became really expensive. I mean, really expensive. A can of CBD infused sparkling water, which advertises itself as “an antidote to modern times,” costs five dollars. CBD is a molecule derived from cannabis.
I can see why it is an appealing prospect to let reality slide off our backs; to succumb to a cocooned existence protected by essential workers, and enabled by faceless websites and contactless drivers. These days, the world is tough to break into. It is formidable. Crucially, it does not appear to be worth our efforts to break into it. It is easier to believe that the world itself will end before capitalism and racism do. Trump’s second impeachment simply becomes a glaring example of the pointlessness of impeachment itself, an exercise in futility.
Millennials and Gen Z have instinctively picked up on this. They have been preemptively retreating from the world, choosing to merge, instead, into the content streaming on their headphones and screens. The emptiness of public experience has been replaced with a rich, private one. As software eats the world, data surveillance envelops it, and cheap labor fuels it, spontaneity has been replaced with the seamless and smooth algorithms that keep news feeds moving and minds lulled, right in the middle of a global disaster. It’s a garish austerity you can expect when American excess meets Buddhist selflessness. Make America Nothingness Again?
Let’s face it. We are virtual wildebeest, migrating at the change of seasons from Whatsapp to Signal, from Snap to TikTok, and from Netflix to HBO, in a digital Serengeti. All the pandemic did was to accentuate the trend. Like a kid caught smoking being forced to smoke the whole pack as punishment, we were given an overdose of what we always secretly wanted.
Nothing captures this zeitgeist more than 17 year old Olivia Rodrigo’s “Drivers License,” a song about teenage heartbreak. It debuted at number 1 on Billboard Hot 100, and has broken all streaming records known to man. As far as songs go, it’s a testament to the power of the teenage heartbreak anthem genre. Some things don’t (and rightfully shouldn’t) change. Rodrigo’s singing evokes Billie Eilish, Adele and Lorde all in one, and the lyrics Taylor Swift-ish. The song has, I must admit, a strange power to pull in listeners of all ages. Check it out.
Beyond its raw emotions, the song’s success was fueled by Tiktok, that digital slot machine into which you can insert a song, pull the lever, and hope that it snowballs into fame and fortune. Rodrigo invited her fans on Tiktok to indulge in the same emotions she did, and respond they did. Over one million Tiktoks have been set to “Drivers License.”
In the classic 1930 essay “Economic Possibility of Our Grandchildren,” the economist John Maynard Keynes forecast that the 21st century’s work week would last just 15 hours. The chief social challenge of the future would be the difficulty of managing leisure and abundance, he said. “For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem,” Keynes wrote, “how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well."
Strangely, that prediction has not panned out. In 2015, 22 percent of men without a college degree, aged 21 to 30, had not worked at all during the prior twelve months. The steep drop in the employment rate of this group triggered a cultural, economic and social decline. These younger, lower-skilled men are less likely to marry, and more likely to live with parents. What are they doing with their time? Are they happy? They spend 75% of their leisure with video games, and they are happy, or at least, report higher satisfaction than this age group used to, historically.
On the other hand, 90 years after Keynes’ prediction, work and not leisure has come to define the lives of affluent Americans. Elite American men are the world’s chief workaholics. They work longer hours than poorer American men, and rich men in other countries. Work has become the closest thing they have to fun. What is going on?
One theory is that attractive employment for poorer men has disappeared, replaced by cheap entertainment. The fastest growing jobs are no longer masculine or require muscle. As entertainment becomes cheaper and commoditized, it becomes more accessible to the poor and is more likely to be regarded as inferior by the elite. Another theory offers that the elite’s puritan work ethic has transformed itself into a secular religion of industriousness, a kind of pluralistic ignorance. Which is to say, rich people work long into the night not because it is the moral thing to do, but because they are matching the behavior of similarly rich peers. “He went to Ohio State and NYU Law just like me, and if he works 17 hours on Tuesdays, so should I.” Surveys show many participants would secretly prefer to sleep more and work less. No surprise there.
A third theory is about the leakiness of things. Thanks to the ubiquity of smart devices, leisure and work are leaking into each other. For example, music used to be something we listened to in our cars, and televisions were things found in our homes. Now, smartphones have become instruments of both professional connectivity and leisure. When I open Twitter or stream a show, am I panning for a nugget of golden insight or am I taking a leisure break? A novel I read or the history book on my table can inspire a weekly letter. Every moment of my downtime could, in theory, surface an idea that promises to revolutionize my life or work or both. When a boss knows that her workers have smartphones, she knows they can all read emails on Saturday mornings. When does work happen? When does leisure happen? It is becoming harder to tell.
Keynes may not have got the work-leisure forecast right but he did predict that the rich would struggle to transition to a more leisurely lifestyle. “The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance,” he wrote, “but it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.”
Stay calm and carry on. Abundance is coming. The Vaccine is always at hand. Have a wonderful week ahead.