Modern life is out of control. This is well known, in fact, it is so well known that we have entire industries dedicated to the attempts to put it back “under control”. Yet we organize and structure and tidy and balance to no avail, because modern life is out of control. Too little and too late we occasion to ask why, and too quickly and too easily we pass over and forget the answers we happen upon like interesting stones in the yard.
The truth is, modern life is out of control by design. Not because of some grand conspiracy of gold-souled elites gathered in a quasi-religious secret society plotting the capture of wealth and power; that is a symptom of the problem, a consequence. The problem is, like most things, a problem of time and space and feelings.
Time is a construction of industrialization, like the taming of a wild river to support shipping and prevent floods, we have chained time to the factory and the railroad and the office to support efficiency. Space is a construction of industrialization, like the penning in of livestock for safekeeping, we have drawn lines on the map and filled up the boxes with people who, lured from their lives of subsistence by the promise of luxury to urban pens, must now trade their bodies and minds for survival. Feelings are the bit that keeps us on the path of industrialization, like a horse, once broken, is steered down the path, we are steered by the hollow promises of advertisements, influencers, and opinion makers.
We are stressed because we are in a hurry, we are in a hurry because we have too much to do, we have too much to do because we must provide not only for ourselves and our families, but for the buyers of our minds and bodies.
We are stressed because there is not enough to go around, there is not enough to go around because we are too densely packed, we are too densely packed because density commodifies our minds and our bodies.
We are stressed because we want to feel better about ourselves, the world, and our place in the world, we want to feel better because we’re told that we feel bad, we’re told we feel bad because it justifies our stress, it justifies our stress because it distracts us away from the reality that we are selling our minds and our bodies to survive.
The design of modern life is emergent. There is no architect, no master plan. There is reality. Reality is the result of generations of adaptation to change, of reaction to that adaptation creating more adaptation. Industrialization is not evil. Industrialization leading to urbanization is not evil. Urbanization leading to consumerism is not evil. Yet, the natural, obvious outcome of this Industrialization > Urbanization > Consumerism route we have taken is that life is stressful. And instead of admitting the truth that we’ve taken a wrong turn and ended up in an undesirable place, we continue to double-down, committing to scale and growth and speed at all costs, and with it to stabilizing the whole by keeping the individual on edge, desperate, and willing.
And from this there are winners, and those winners do seek to manipulate the world so that they will remain winners, and that looks like conspiracy or machination or exploitation. But the effects of this are not root causes, rather they are just the localized ripples in the bigger ocean of emergent behaviors. And even if we were to wave a magic wand to remove them, what remains would still be governed by the man-made artifacts of time and density, and from them of scale, and from that the psychology of consumption. Want is the root cause. Want of luxury, of leisure, of ease. Existence is hard, and achieving a degree of mastery over it so that we can be free to enjoy for ourselves the labor of our minds and bodies is justified.
The portrayal, for our benefit, of the pleasure of these wants for the least cost is the amplification of this root cause. Trading our minds and bodies for a shortcut to this enjoyment has not worked out for anyone except the winners. It has not worked out because by trading our minds and bodies for this shortcut, we have transformed the game from one where everyone can win, to one were in order to have a few winners, multitudes must lose.
Instead of building an industrialized world that became the foundation for a connected world that dismantled this unstable, fragile, and temporary step in the overall progress of humanity, we didn’t. We chose to make this temporary step the destination. We chose to keep the system that chains us to efficiency in time. We chose to keep the system that locks us into pens of resources. We chose to keep the system of mind games.
Modern life is out of control because it feels better than accepting reality. Modern life is out of control because we chose to make modern life be out of control.
And that means we can chose to make a modern life that is in control. One where we reject the psychology of consumption. One where we dismantle the pens and take off the chains. And it starts by ignoring the winners. Deprive them of that rent-free place in your mind that they live and tell you to feel bad about yourself. Buying something new won’t fix how you feel about yourself. Fixing something broken will. Maintenance is the physical manifestation of hope. Fixing things is you, as a human, asserting your domination over reality because you are sapient and reality is a construction of sapience. Fixing things is ordering them and order is the antiseptic of chaos. Order walks back the decay of entropy. On a cosmic scale, that might be meaningless, but on the scale of a person, of a family, of a city, or of a nation, it matters. Putting things right when they are broken is control.
Modern life is not out of control, modern life is broken. And we can fix it.