Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.

Karl Polanyi

Could there be anything more demoralizing than having to wake up in the morning five out of seven days of one’s adult life to perform a task that one secretly believed did not need to be performed?

David Graeber

Every so often, I’m struck but the psychological mismatch of our super-sophisticated consumption vs. the general tedium and deference to authority that come with most jobs. Consumption is now turbo-charged, with apps, livestreams, same-day delivery, and the ubiquitous faux-social interactions on social media, which all give incredible agency and power to every consumer, regardless of place, occupational strata, or educational achievement. As long as there is WiFi, the power flows, even if the dollars aren’t always sufficient to deliver commensurate material results.

But many jobs are the opposite, especially in retail, health care support, the catchall service sector, and other roles that usually involve working on the front lines with customers and clients. And ironically, at many of these jobs, the same technologies that amplify the power of the consumer are used to reduce the agency of the worker.

At home on the couch, armed with smartphone or tablet (or Google glasses now, I guess – hard to keep track), the consumer is queen or king, surfing easily through time, space, history, digital store shelves, and pools of romantic prospects (real or virtual). But that same domestic figure of royalty, when transported to their place of employment, is immediately subsumed under both the old-style command structure of businesses small and large, arrangement that demand subservience to physical bosses (who usually suck), and the new control mechanisms of modern management, where all sorts of tech platforms, culminating in AI, are used to vet job applicants, chop up functions, create content, automatically evaluate performance, or often just to eliminate jobs that can be done better or cheaper by a machine, an offshore worker, or a non-benefitted contractor/temp.

The result of this dissonance — the mismatch between the omnipotent couch consumer and the beleaguered and surveilled laborer — is the growing army of workers who look either massively distracted or completely checked out on the job, glancing at their phones at every possible moment. Who hasn’t seen a restaurant server, airport gate agent, or supermarket stocking clerk use even just 10 seconds of down time to see what might be happening in their phone-world?

I think this is more than just a case of addiction to social media and scrolling in general, although that is certainly part of it. The deeper truth is that people in crummy jobs are fleeing the non-agency and un-freedom of their workplace, and retreating into that digital realm where they are the lords of their own curated kingdoms (largely algorithm-driven, an ironic reduction of agency). You can literally see that transition on their faces: vacant stares and bored, monotone speech when performing work functions, and then lit-up eyes and intensive focus when slipping into that virtual Shangri-La.

The late, great David Graeber captured a crucial aspect of this reality, by highlighting just how much of our current labor landscape is comprised of “bullshit jobs.” Back in 2018, he estimated that more than half of our jobs are actually pointless, which not only deliver no intrinsic benefits to the workers, but actually do psychological harm to people, because spending most of your waking life doing things that you believe don’t matter is not a recipe for mental or societal health.

But it actually goes even deeper than that, I think. Anywhere from 30-40% of Americans report actively disliking or hating their jobs, while 60-70% feel disconnected or uninspired at work. This is more than just unhappiness with bullshit jobs per se. This is a sign that people are accurately sussing out the true nature of consumer capitalism itself, a relentless machine that, as I noted in my last post, doesn’t give a shit about people’s lives, and will doggedly pursue maximum value extraction/commodification and profit generation, regardless of the consequences for humans and their communities.

Along with the mismatch between the omnipotent consumer and the neutered worker comes a larger discrepancy, one spun out of good old fashioned advertising (still the most powerful of enticement vehicles) and the new-fangled suite of virtual lifestyle fantasies, creations of the now-ubiquitous social media influencers. This new brand of online celebrity, which has become the occupational preference for younger generations (53% of Gen Z views it as a reputable career option), is itself a bizarre, self-referential display of the mismatch between omnipotent consumption and useless work. In the influencer world, being a celebrity is itself the “work,” and the economy that is supposed to grow up around that celebrity universe (app designers, content editors, micro-marketing managers, etc.) is supposed to transcend and obsolesce older ways of working and earning a living. But of course, in reality, the influencer landscape looks just like the larger economic picture: the big platform corporations capture almost all of the direct revenue, and influencer and content creation revenue is unbelievably top-heavy. Around 85% of content creators make less than a living wage, with 45% earning $1000 or less per year.

So Americans are not only dispirited by the dissonance between their power as consumers and their impotence as workers. They also sense that the whole system itself is promising a wonderful world of products and services, forever expanding via economic growth to create amazing new jobs and opportunities, while in reality we are churning out economic precariousness, political dysfunction, psychological despair, and ecological collapse. As our households shrink (average US household is now around 2.5, with 30% being a single individual), and our intermediate institutions disappear or change from free to pay-to-play, and as long-term friendships continue to dwindle, we are left with the uncomfortable sense that our physical and online pursuit of consumption, both of material things and virtual experiences, has become a last hallucination of a dying civilization, a forever-receding mirage of happiness which cannot heal or hide the destructive and unsustainable nature of our way of life.