Breaking Down the Movie into Its Parts
Microaggressions: Death by a Thousand Cuts
Gaslighting: “Don’t trust your senses. I’ll tell you what the reality is.”
Learned Helplessness
Unintentional Vs. Intentional Racism, Atlanta, Sylvia the Nanny
Fear the Cling to Power from Economic Disparity, Atlanta and Reparations
The Grounded Place: What does it mean to be grounded?
Resistance
Brain stealing is a metaphor for cultural appropriation
Metaphors and Easter Eggs
Resistance Vs. Victimization
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1C Revised Essay Assignments for Lecture
Essay 1:
Dieting Is a Fool’s Errand (same)
Essay 2:
Workism and Groupthink Compromise Critical Thinking and Exploits Employees
The Assignment
Read Derek Thompson's essay "The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable." Then compare the idea of Workism to one or more of the following documentaries and TV shows: WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, and Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, and Severance. For your comparison of Thompson’s essay and the documentaries, develop a thesis that addresses the claim that fraudsters rely on Workism and Groupthink to create a colossal breakdown of critical thinking that causes employees, investors, and customers to become dangerously gullible to the false promises of these mad grifters. As a result, the employees are exploited. Is the following claim legitimate? Why or why not? Explain. Be sure to have a counterargument-rebuttal section in your essay before you reach your conclusion.
Lectures based on the following:
Derek Thompson essay
Burnout generation essay
Fyre
The Inventor
WeWork (and you have the book)
Severance
Chaos Monkeys (book)
Best-selling author of Chaos Monkeys and tech entrepreneur Antonio Garcia Martinez has said that young people right out of college with no organizing principle to their lives and no understanding of the psychological underpinnings of religion redirect their spiritual hunger and find a sort of religious substitute by working for tech companies. These companies become a surrogate for religion, shared transcendent experience, meaningful connection, higher purpose, and the sense of feeling special. To foster this sense of communal mission, the workers can practically live at the tech site, often a large campus, where the employees have access to cappuccino bars, gourmet cafeterias, laundry services, state-of-the-art gyms, yoga studios, wellness centers, and libraries.
The workers live in a glorified dorm where they not only work but become indoctrinated in the virtues of their company CEO who becomes their Dear Leader, a false messiah figure, who persuades everyone that they are on a mission to change the world, create disruption that will bring humanity together, and other saccharine bromides in the service of manipulating the employees to toil long hours and drink the Messiah’s Kool-Aid.
Popular culture is rife with books, movies, TV series, and documentaries about this phenomenon. Megalomania, hyped promises, grift, fraud, and the Cult of the Personality are addressed in the TV series Silicon Valley, Severance, WeCrashed, The Dropout, and Devs and in the documentaries WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, and Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened. Combining the Cult of the Personality with Groupthink, there is a colossal breakdown of critical thinking that causes employees, investors, and customers to become dangerously gullible to the false promises of these mad grifters.
There is yet another factor in breaking down critical thinking, the cult-like attitude toward work itself, explained in Derek Thompson's essay "The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable." The Cult of the Personality, Groupthink, and Workism are part of a potent cocktail for manipulating young people at the workplace. This topic is becoming an obsession of mine, and I suspect I will have my critical thinking students write an essay on this topic.
Essay 3
Read “Winter Dreams” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Swimmer” by John Cheever, watch the Netflix comedy special Homecoming King by Hasan Minhaj, the Netflix documentary White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, the Chris Rock documentary Good Hair; the documentary Fake Famous on HBO; the 4-part documentary LuLaRich on Amazon Prime; the movie Uncut Gems; and the movie Private Life. Comparing at least 2 of the works, develop a thesis that illustrates the destructive power of the chimera and its defining characteristics: The chimera hijacks the brain; the chimera causes us to lose our sense of time until it is too late; the chimera “sells” us a false notion of happiness that makes us grotesque; the chimera causes us to seek substitutes for basic human needs such as love, acceptance, belonging, and achievement; the chimera promises us an easy life--Hakuna Matata--then steals everything from us; the chimera is the promise of Ultimate Perfection or Uber Alles that becomes a sort of Holy Grail; the chimera promises to heal the wounds of loss and regret but only makes those emotional wounds worse than before.
Pairing the Above Works for a Comparison with Specific Chimera Focus:
Comparison One: In “Winter Dreams” and Homecoming King, Dexter and Hasan go on a futile quest for the Great White Princess as a way of achieving status and belonging.
Comparison Two: In “Winter Dreams” and “The Swimmer,” Dexter and Neddy lose all sense of time as they get lost in their chimera of glamor and youth.
Comparison Three: In White Hot and Good Hair, the documentaries address how cultural and racial ideals brainwash people into conforming to the “perfect look.”
Comparison Four: In Fake Famous and LuLaRich, the enticement of the easy life--Hakuna Matata--and glamor impede people from living a real, authentic life.
Comparison Five: In Uncut Gems and Private Life, a black opal and the promise of a baby serve as a chimera for happiness, fulfillment, self-control, and status even as the characters’ lives unravel into more and more self-loathing and chaos.
7 Lectures:
“Winter Dreams”
“The Swimmer”
Homecoming King
White Hot
Fake Famous
Uncut Gems
Private Life
Essay 4 Same
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8-27 to 12-16
1A 4605 Online
1A 4606 Online
1C Monday and Wednesday 10:15-12:20
1C Monday and Wednesday 2:15-4:20
Office: 12:20-1:20
1A Zoom hours: Tuesday and Thursday 2-3:15
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Paragraph 4: They suffer from grandiosity and the false ascent.
Paragraph 5: They must overcome their denial.
Paragraph 6: They must clean their room.
Paragraph 7: They must embrace Cal Newport's notion of the Craftsman's Mindset.
Newport's Career Manifesto
A CAREER MANIFESTO: Be a Craftsman or a Craftsperson
Career advice has fallen into a terribly simplistic rut. Figure out what you’re passionate about, then follow that passion: this idea provides the foundation for just about every guide to improving your working life.
The Career Craftsman rejects this reductionist drivel.
The Career Craftsman understands that “follow your passion and all will be happy” is a children’s tale. Most people don’t have pre-existing passions waiting to be unearthed. Happiness requires more than solving a simple matching problem.
The Career Craftsman knows there’s no magical “right job” waiting out there for you. Any number of pursuits can provide the foundation for an engaging life.
The Career Craftsman believes that compelling careers are not courageously pursued or serendipitously discovered, but are instead systematically crafted.
The Career Craftsman believes this process of career crafting always begins with the mastery of something rare and valuable. The traits that define great work (autonomy, creativity, impact, recognition) are rare and valuable themselves, and you need something to offer in return. Put another way: no one owes you a fulfilling job; you have to earn it.
The Career Craftsman believes that mastery is just the first step in crafting work you love. Once you have the leverage of a rare and valuable skill, you need to apply this leverage strategically to make your working life increasingly fulfilling. It is then — and only then — that you should expect a feeling of passion for your work to truly take hold.
The Career Craftsman thinks the idea that “societal expectations” are trying to hold you down in a safe but boring career path is a boogeyman invented to sell eBooks. You don’t need courage to create a cool life. You need the type of valuable skills that let you write your own ticket.
The Career Craftsman never expects to love an entry level job (or to stay in that job long before moving up).
The Career Craftsman thinks “is this my calling?” is a stupid question.
The Career Craftsman is data-driven. Admire someone’s career? Work out exactly how they made it happen. The answers you’ll find will be less romantic but more actionable than you might expect.
The Career Craftsman believes the color of your parachute is irrelevant if you take the time to get good at flying the damn plane in the first place.
“Drivel” of the Passion Mindset
Or if you reject the craftsman mindset, you can have the passion mindset, which asks how much value your job is offering you.
Newport argues it is only by producing the craftsman mindset that you can create work that you love.
In terms of maturity, the craftsman mindset is the approach of a mature, fully realized human being.
What are the Five Habits of a Craftsman?
1: Decide what capital market you are in. There are 2 kinds of markets –
Winner-take-all: One killer skills with a few winners all over the world (e.g. Hollywood scriptwriter)
Auction: Diverse collection of skills. Here, there are many different types of career capital and each person might generate their own unique collection (e.g. CEO of a Fortune 500 company)
2: Identify your capital type. Ignore this if you are in a winner-take-all market as there’s only one type of capital. (i.e. be among the top 10 script writers in the world to make it in Hollywood)
For an auction market, however, seek open gates i.e. opportunities to build capital that are already open to you. Open gates get us farther faster. Skill acquisition is like a freight train: Getting it started requires a huge application of effort, but changing its track once it’s moving is easy. (e.g. keep moving upwards in an organization and then laterally instead of trying to move laterally and start from scratch)
3: Define “good.” Set clear goals. For a script writer, the definition of “good” is clear – his scripts being taken seriously.
4: Stretch and destroy. Deliberate practice – that uncomfortable sensation in our heads that feels like a physical strain, as if neurons are physically re-forming into new configurations.
5: Be patient. Look years into the future for the payoff. It’s less about paying attention to your main pursuit, and more about your willingness to ignore other pursuits that pop up along the way to distract you.
Six. What is the power of control and how does control result in job happiness?
Giving people more control at work increases their happiness, fulfillment, and engagement.
But you cannot earn safe control without career capital. Think of the lady who quit her job to run yoga studios. She had to go on food stamps.
Paragraph 8: They must learn to serve the community and "love people, not things."
Arthur C. Brooks’ essay “Love People, Not Pleasure.”
"Love People, Not Pleasure" by Arthur C. Brooks
One. Happiness Fallacy:
That a life of power and money can afford you pleasures that will result in happiness. Brooks looks at the most powerful, wealthy people chronicled in history, and even they are miserable 99% of the time.
Part of this misery is due to the "hedonic treadmill," the idea that we acclimate to pleasure so that whatever it is we're addicted to for a spike in endorphins, we become numb to it to the point that we crash and sink into a depression.
All pleasures start out with a spike in dopamine, which becomes addictive, but eventually we need more and more stimulation to experience pleasure and we inevitably burn out.
Jeff Henderson becomes wealthier and wealthier and lives a more and more reckless lifestyle, accumulating cars, flying to Las Vegas with his posse, and his extravagant lifestyle attracts the attention from law enforcement, the feds.
My wife's friend has a cousin who poses with her boyfriend for Instagram photographs, and she has hundreds of thousands of followers. This model can never get enough "likes" and followers. She's addicted to social media attention, she's a slave to posing with her boyfriend for attention, and she is progressively getting more and more miserable. But she can't see her misery. She is in denial.
Like the Instagram model, Jeff Henderson is operating under the fallacy that unbridled pleasure is the key to happiness, and in the process, he fails to develop real connections with people.
Two. The Unhappiness Fallacy:
Actually, we're dealing with two fallacies: That unhappiness is a bad thing and that unhappiness excludes happiness.
Unhappiness is not bad. Unhappiness is normal. Life is full of evil and conflict, so a certain degree of unhappiness is a normal thing.
In fact, addressing evil and engaging with conflict gives life meaning, so we must not avoid unhappiness. Rather, we must struggle against the things that make us unhappy.
Also, unhappiness is a state of hard work that leads to positive outcome. Imagine the piano player who is unhappy playing tedious scales and arpeggios on the piano, but all in the service of improving on the piano.
In life, we are miserable if we don't progress and improve towards a meaningful goal, and this type of progress requires focus, isolation, sacrifice, and hard work, the kind that is not associated with happiness and pleasure.
Every semester, I will have about two or three "star students" in a class. These are hard-working perfectionists who take so much pride in their work that if I were a CEO of a company I would hire those 3 students out of a class of 30. I said such to an employer who called me about a former student, and based on my testimony the student got the job.
Such students are not enamored by short-term pleasure. Such students embrace sacrifice, hard work (not hanging out with their buddies at night so they can study), and see a certain amount of drudgery and unhappiness as essential to achieving their goals.
The second fallacy is that unhappiness excludes happiness. Actually, according to Arthur C. Brooks, the most happy people can simultaneously experience unhappiness.
As Brooks observes:
What is unhappiness? Your intuition might be that it is simply the opposite of happiness, just as darkness is the absence of light. That is not correct. Happiness and unhappiness are certainly related, but they are not actually opposites. Images of the brain show that parts of the left cerebral cortex are more active than the right when we are experiencing happiness, while the right side becomes more active when we are unhappy.
As strange as it seems, being happier than average does not mean that one can’t also be unhappier than average. One test for both happiness and unhappiness is the Positive Affectivity and Negative Affectivity Schedule test. I took the test myself. I found that, for happiness, I am at the top for people my age, sex, occupation and education group. But I get a pretty high score for unhappiness as well. I am a cheerful melancholic.
Three. Misguided Attempts at Happiness Backfire
We can look to all sorts of addicts to see how their addiction, an attempt to escape misery and find pleasure, backfires and results in misery. Of course, there is drug addiction, but there are many others: social media attention, Swiss timepieces, shoes, cars, getting ripped muscles, etc. But the drug eventually becomes the poison. As Brooks explains:
Have you ever known an alcoholic? They generally drink to relieve craving or anxiety — in other words, to attenuate a source of unhappiness. Yet it is the drink that ultimately prolongs their suffering. The same principle was at work for Abd al-Rahman in his pursuit of fame, wealth and pleasure.
Four. Intrinsic Vs. Extrinsic Happiness
Intrinsic happiness refers to character building, the state of our soul, defined by the connections we make with others, creative pursuits, our contributions to society, and our ability to find meaning in suffering.
Extrinsic happiness refers to the materialistic script society hands us: Go to college, get a job so you can make money to buy lots of stuff, show off your stuff to family and friends to win their approval, curate your "amazing existence" on Facebook, etc. Then die and have hundreds of people weep at your funeral.
According to Brooks, intrinsic happiness is the way to go. He writes:
Consider fame. In 2009, researchers from the University of Rochester conducted a study tracking the success of 147 recent graduates in reaching their stated goals after graduation. Some had “intrinsic” goals, such as deep, enduring relationships. Others had “extrinsic” goals, such as achieving reputation or fame. The scholars found that intrinsic goals were associated with happier lives. But the people who pursued extrinsic goals experienced more negative emotions, such as shame and fear. They even suffered more physical maladies.
This is one of the cruelest ironies in life. I work in Washington, right in the middle of intensely public political battles. Bar none, the unhappiest people I have ever met are those most dedicated to their own self-aggrandizement — the pundits, the TV loudmouths, the media know-it-alls. They build themselves up and promote their images, but feel awful most of the time.
That’s the paradox of fame. Just like drugs and alcohol, once you become addicted, you can’t live without it. But you can’t live with it, either. Celebrities have described fame like being “an animal in a cage; a toy in a shop window; a Barbie doll; a public facade; a clay figure; or, that guy on TV,” according to research by the psychologist Donna Rockwell. Yet they can’t give it up.
That impulse to fame by everyday people has generated some astonishing innovations. One is the advent of reality television, in which ordinary people become actors in their day-to-day lives for others to watch. Why? “To be noticed, to be wanted, to be loved, to walk into a place and have others care about what you’re doing, even what you had for lunch that day: that’s what people want, in my opinion,” said one 26-year-old participant in an early hit reality show called “Big Brother.”
And then there’s social media. Today, each of us can build a personal little fan base, thanks to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the like. We can broadcast the details of our lives to friends and strangers in an astonishingly efficient way. That’s good for staying in touch with friends, but it also puts a minor form of fame-seeking within each person’s reach. And several studies show that it can make us unhappy.
Five. Jeff Henderson's memoir Cooked is largely about a man who transitions from an extrinsic quest for happiness to an intrinsic quest.
Henderson is miserable and suffering from soul rot during his obsession with finding extrinsic notions of happiness, but his soul finds redemption and he becomes a happier man when he helps the community and his family through an intrinsic search for happiness.
Six. Extrinsic Happiness Is Born from Our Inner Reptile
Our Inner Reptile desires dominance and reproductive success by showing signs of power. Therefore, our instincts are to get as rich, famous, and powerful as we can. But Brooks observes that these unbridled instincts can backfire.
As Brooks observes:
From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that we are wired to seek fame, wealth and sexual variety. These things make us more likely to pass on our DNA. Had your cave-man ancestors not acquired some version of these things (a fine reputation for being a great rock sharpener; multiple animal skins), they might not have found enough mating partners to create your lineage.
But here’s where the evolutionary cables have crossed: We assume that things we are attracted to will relieve our suffering and raise our happiness. My brain says, “Get famous.” It also says, “Unhappiness is lousy.” I conflate the two, getting, “Get famous and you’ll be less unhappy.”
But that is Mother Nature’s cruel hoax. She doesn’t really care either way whether you are unhappy — she just wants you to want to pass on your genetic material. If you conflate intergenerational survival with well-being, that’s your problem, not nature’s. And matters are hardly helped by nature’s useful idiots in society, who propagate a popular piece of life-ruining advice: “If it feels good, do it.” Unless you share the same existential goals as protozoa, this is often flat-out wrong.
More philosophically, the problem stems from dissatisfaction — the sense that nothing has full flavor, and we want more. We can’t quite pin down what it is that we seek. Without a great deal of reflection and spiritual hard work, the likely candidates seem to be material things, physical pleasures or favor among friends and strangers.
We look for these things to fill an inner emptiness. They may bring a brief satisfaction, but it never lasts, and it is never enough. And so we crave more. This paradox has a word in Sanskrit: upadana, which refers to the cycle of craving and grasping. As the Dhammapada (the Buddha’s path of wisdom) puts it: “The craving of one given to heedless living grows like a creeper. Like the monkey seeking fruits in the forest, he leaps from life to life... Whoever is overcome by this wretched and sticky craving, his sorrows grow like grass after the rains.”
Seven. Extrinsic Happiness Makes Us Users of People
Brooks writes:
This search for fame, the lust for material things and the objectification of others — that is, the cycle of grasping and craving — follows a formula that is elegant, simple and deadly:
Love things, use people.
Jeff Henderson up to about page 100 or so of his memoir, loves things and he uses people.
Eight. Most of us sleepwalk through life in our quest for pleasure
Brooks observes that our default setting is to seek pleasure and use people, and that most of us aren't even aware of this fact because we are "sleepwalking." As he writes:
This was Abd al-Rahman’s formula as he sleepwalked through life. It is the worldly snake oil peddled by the culture makers from Hollywood to Madison Avenue. But you know in your heart that it is morally disordered and a likely road to misery. You want to be free of the sticky cravings of unhappiness and find a formula for happiness instead. How? Simply invert the deadly formula and render it virtuous:
Love people, use things.
Only because Jeff Henderson hit rock bottom and had his "butt handed to him on a stick" did he wake up from his sleepwalking ways and go on a heroic journey to find redemption for his soul. He learned to love people and use things.
Mastering the 6 Components of Signal Phrases
Sample List of Signal Phrases (active as of 2-29-20)
When you cite material, paraphrases and summaries are with few exceptions superior to direct quotations.
Successful College Students Master the 6 Components of Signal Phrases
Review Complete 6 Components of Signal Phrases
One. Vary your transitions so you're not only using "say" and "write."
Two. Transition from your own writing to quoted or paraphrased material.
Three. Vary your location of the signal phrase, beginning, middle, or end.
Four. Provide credentials of the person being cited in your signal phrase.
Five. Provide correct in-text citations for MLA format, as provided by Purdue Owl.
Six. Return to what you just cited and analyze its significance to your argument.
Signal Phrases
Purpose to Make Smooth Transition
We use signal phrases to signal to the reader that we are going to cite research material in the form of direct quotes, paraphrase or summary.
You can also call a signal phrase a lead-in because it leads in the quotation or paraphrase.
Grammarian Diana Hacker writes that signal phrases make smooth transitions from your own writing voice to the quoted material without making the reader feel a "jolt."
For students, signal phrases are an announcement to your professor that you've "elevated your game" to college-level writing by accessing the approved college writing toolbox.
Nothing is going to make your essay more impressive to college professors than the correct use of signal phrases.
Purpose to Provide Context
Signal phrases not only establish authority and credibility. They provide context or explain why you're using the sourced material.
Example:
As a counterpoint to Yuval Noah Harari's contention that Foragers lived superior lives to Farmers, we read in culture critic Will Day Brosnan: "Elsewhere, I wondered the extent to which Harari was projecting an idealistic (even Rousseauian) vision of a noble savage on pre-state peoples. His depiction of a foraging lifestyle (‘A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve’) unencumbered by the complexities and worries of civilisational living could be read as reactionary atavism."
Same Example with Different Context:
Concurring with my assertion that Harari is misguided in his Noble Savage mythology, we read in culture critic Will Day Brosnan: "Elsewhere, I wondered the extent to which Harari was projecting an idealistic (even Rousseauian) vision of a noble savage on pre-state peoples. His depiction of a foraging lifestyle (‘A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve’) unencumbered by the complexities and worries of civilisational living could be read as reactionary atavism."
Different Example for Supporting Paragraph
Further supporting my contention that not all calories are equal, we find in science writer Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories that there are statistics that show . . ."
Signal Phrase Comprised of Two Sentences
English instructor Jeff McMahon chronicles in his personal blog Obsession Matters that his opinion toward comedian and podcaster Nate Nadblock changed over a decade. As McMahon observes: "Since 2010, I had found a brilliant curmudgeonly podcaster Nate Nadblock a source of great comfort & entertainment, but recently his navel-gazing toxicity, lack of personal growth, and overall repetitiveness has made him off-putting. Alas, a 10-year podcast friendship has come to an end."
Use the above templates and don't worry: you're not committing plagiarism.
As a counterpoint to X,
As a counterargument to my claim that X,
Giving support to my rebuttal that Writer A makes an erroneous contention, Writer B observes that . . .
Concurring with my assertion that X,
Further supporting my contention that X,
Writer X chronicles in her book. . . . As she observes:
Purpose of Credentials: Establishing Authority and Ethos
We often include credentials with the signal phrase to give more credibility for our sourced material.
The acclaimed best-selling writer, history professor, and futurist Yuval Noah Harari excoriates the Agricultural Revolution as "the greatest crime against humanity."
Lamenting that his students don't enjoy his music playlist in the writing lab, college English instructor Jeff McMahon observes in his blog Obsession Matters: "Two-thirds of my students in writing lab don't hear my chill playlist over classroom speakers because they are hermetically sealed in their private earbud universe content to be masters of their own musical domain."
You don't have to put the signal phrase at the beginning. You can put it at the end:
"The Agricultural Revolution is the greatest crime against humanity," claims celebrated author and futurist Yuval Noah Harari.
You can also put the signal phrase in the middle of a sentence:
Racism, sexism, worker exploitation, and pestilence afflicted the human race during the Agricultural Revolution, claims celebrated futurist Yuval Noah Harari, who goes on to make the bold claim that "the Agricultural Revolution was the greatest crime perpetrated against humanity."
"Covid-19 fears make me recall Don Delillo's novel White Noise," writes Jeff McMahon in his blog Obsession Matters, " especially the Airborne Toxic Event chapter in which pestilence affords us a rehearsal for our own mortality."
Varying placement and types of signal phrases helps you avoid monotony, makes you a more impressive writer, and gives you more ethos.
Partial List of Signal Phrases
acknowledges adds admits affirms agrees answers argues asserts claims comments concedes confirms contends counters counterattacks declares defines denies disputes echoes endorses estimates finds grants illustrates implies insists mentions notes observes predicts proposes reasons recognizes recommends refutes rejects reports responds reveals speculates states suggests surmises warns writes
Examples of a signal phrases:
We are fools if we think we were put on Planet Earth to be happy. That is the fantasy of a four-year-old child. Ironically, this infantile pursuit of happiness makes us unhappy. In the words of John Mellencamp: “I don’t think we’re put on this earth to live happy lives. I think we’re put here to challenge ourselves physically, emotionally, intellectually.”
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. As we read in Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits' essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Variation of the above:
The idea of a meritocracy is that a healthy society allows people with merits, regardless of their economic privilege, to rise to the top of the power hierarchy. However, such a meritocracy does not exist as privilege, not merit, is the dominant force of acquiring power. According to Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits in his essay "How Life Became an Endless Terrible Competition": "Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages. But the dominant causes of this skew toward wealth can be traced to meritocracy. On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges."
Toolbox of Explaining Transitions
After you present the signal phrase and quoted, summarized, or paraphrased material, what do you write?
You explain what you just cited.
To do so, you need a toolbox of transitions:
Writer X is essentially saying that
In other words, X is arguing that
By using these statistics, X is making the point that
X is trying to make the point that
X makes the cogent observation that
X is essentially rebutting the philosophical movement that embraces the position that
X's main point is that
The essence of X's claim is that
Here is a good college link for in-text citations.
Here is a good Purdue Owl link for in-text citations.
Review Complete Package of Signal Phrases
One. Vary your transitions so you're not only using "say" and "write."
Two. Transition from your own writing to quoted or paraphrased material.
Three. Vary your location of the signal phrase, beginning, middle, or end.
Four. Provide credentials of the person being cited in your signal phrase.
Five. Provide correct in-text citations for MLA format, as provided by Purdue Owl.
Six. Return to what you just cited and analyze its significance to your argument.
Arthur C. Brooks’ essay “Love People, Not Pleasure.”
"Love People, Not Pleasure" by Arthur C. Brooks
One. Happiness Fallacy:
That a life of power and money can afford you pleasures that will result in happiness. Brooks looks at the most powerful, wealthy people chronicled in history, and even they are miserable 99% of the time.
Part of this misery is due to the "hedonic treadmill," the idea that we acclimate to pleasure so that whatever it is we're addicted to for a spike in endorphins, we become numb to it to the point that we crash and sink into a depression.
All pleasures start out with a spike in dopamine, which becomes addictive, but eventually we need more and more stimulation to experience pleasure and we inevitably burn out.
Jeff Henderson becomes wealthier and wealthier and lives a more and more reckless lifestyle, accumulating cars, flying to Las Vegas with his posse, and his extravagant lifestyle attracts the attention from law enforcement, the feds.
My wife's friend has a cousin who poses with her boyfriend for Instagram photographs, and she has hundreds of thousands of followers. This model can never get enough "likes" and followers. She's addicted to social media attention, she's a slave to posing with her boyfriend for attention, and she is progressively getting more and more miserable. But she can't see her misery. She is in denial.
Like the Instagram model, Jeff Henderson is operating under the fallacy that unbridled pleasure is the key to happiness, and in the process he fails to develop real connections with people.
Two. The Unhappiness Fallacy:
Actually, we're dealing with two fallacies: That unhappiness is a bad thing and that unhappiness excludes happiness.
Unhappiness is not bad. Unhappiness is normal. Life is full of evil and conflict, so a certain degree of unhappiness is a normal thing.
In fact, addressing evil and engaging with conflict gives life meaning, so we must not avoid unhappiness. Rather, we must struggle against the things that make us unhappy.
Also, unhappiness is a state of hard work that leads to positive outcome. Imagine the piano player who is unhappy playing tedious scales and arpeggios on the piano, but all in the service of improving on the piano.
In life, we are miserable if we don't progress and improve towards a meaningful goal, and this type of progress requires focus, isolation, sacrifice, and hard work, the kind that is not associated with happiness and pleasure.
Every semester, I will have about two or three "star students" in a class. These are hard-working perfectionists who take so much pride in their work that if I were a CEO of a company I would hire those 3 students out of a class of 30. I said such to an employer who called me about a former student, and based on my testimony the student got the job.
Such students are not enamored by short-term pleasure. Such students embrace sacrifice, hard work (not hanging out with their buddies at night so they can study), and see a certain amount of drudgery and unhappiness as essential to achieving their goals.
The second fallacy is that unhappiness excludes happiness. Actually, according to Arthur C. Brooks, the most happy people can simultaneously experience unhappiness.
As Brooks observes:
What is unhappiness? Your intuition might be that it is simply the opposite of happiness, just as darkness is the absence of light. That is not correct. Happiness and unhappiness are certainly related, but they are not actually opposites. Images of the brain show that parts of the left cerebral cortex are more active than the right when we are experiencing happiness, while the right side becomes more active when we are unhappy.
As strange as it seems, being happier than average does not mean that one can’t also be unhappier than average. One test for both happiness and unhappiness is the Positive Affectivity and Negative Affectivity Schedule test. I took the test myself. I found that, for happiness, I am at the top for people my age, sex, occupation and education group. But I get a pretty high score for unhappiness as well. I am a cheerful melancholic.
Three. Misguided Attempts at Happiness Backfire
We can look to all sorts of addicts to see how their addiction, an attempt to escape misery and find pleasure, backfires and results in misery. Of course, there is drug addiction, but there are many others: social media attention, Swiss timepieces, shoes, cars, getting ripped muscles, etc. But the drug eventually becomes the poison. As Brooks explains:
Have you ever known an alcoholic? They generally drink to relieve craving or anxiety — in other words, to attenuate a source of unhappiness. Yet it is the drink that ultimately prolongs their suffering. The same principle was at work for Abd al-Rahman in his pursuit of fame, wealth and pleasure.
Four. Intrinsic Vs. Extrinsic Happiness
Intrinsic happiness refers to character building, the state of our soul, defined by the connections we make with others, creative pursuits, our contributions to society, and our ability to find meaning in suffering.
Extrinsic happiness refers to the materialistic script society hands us: Go to college, get a job so you can make money to buy lots of stuff, show off your stuff to family and friends to win their approval, curate your "amazing existence" on Facebook, etc. Then die and have hundreds of people weep at your funeral.
According to Brooks, intrinsic happiness is the way to go. He writes:
Consider fame. In 2009, researchers from the University of Rochester conducted a study tracking the success of 147 recent graduates in reaching their stated goals after graduation. Some had “intrinsic” goals, such as deep, enduring relationships. Others had “extrinsic” goals, such as achieving reputation or fame. The scholars found that intrinsic goals were associated with happier lives. But the people who pursued extrinsic goals experienced more negative emotions, such as shame and fear. They even suffered more physical maladies.
This is one of the cruelest ironies in life. I work in Washington, right in the middle of intensely public political battles. Bar none, the unhappiest people I have ever met are those most dedicated to their own self-aggrandizement — the pundits, the TV loudmouths, the media know-it-alls. They build themselves up and promote their images, but feel awful most of the time.
That’s the paradox of fame. Just like drugs and alcohol, once you become addicted, you can’t live without it. But you can’t live with it, either. Celebrities have described fame like being “an animal in a cage; a toy in a shop window; a Barbie doll; a public facade; a clay figure; or, that guy on TV,” according to research by the psychologist Donna Rockwell. Yet they can’t give it up.
That impulse to fame by everyday people has generated some astonishing innovations. One is the advent of reality television, in which ordinary people become actors in their day-to-day lives for others to watch. Why? “To be noticed, to be wanted, to be loved, to walk into a place and have others care about what you’re doing, even what you had for lunch that day: that’s what people want, in my opinion,” said one 26-year-old participant in an early hit reality show called “Big Brother.”
And then there’s social media. Today, each of us can build a personal little fan base, thanks to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the like. We can broadcast the details of our lives to friends and strangers in an astonishingly efficient way. That’s good for staying in touch with friends, but it also puts a minor form of fame-seeking within each person’s reach. And several studies show that it can make us unhappy.
Five. Jeff Henderson's memoir Cooked is largely about a man who transitions from an extrinsic quest for happiness to an intrinsic quest.
Henderson is miserable and suffering from soul rot during his obsession with finding extrinsic notions of happiness, but his soul finds redemption and he becomes a happier man when he helps the community and his family through an intrinsic search for happiness.
Six. Extrinsic Happiness Is Born from Our Inner Reptile
Our Inner Reptile desires dominance and reproductive success by showing signs of power. Therefore, our instincts are to get as rich, famous, and powerful as we can. But Brooks observes that these unbridled instincts can backfire.
As Brooks observes:
From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that we are wired to seek fame, wealth and sexual variety. These things make us more likely to pass on our DNA. Had your cave-man ancestors not acquired some version of these things (a fine reputation for being a great rock sharpener; multiple animal skins), they might not have found enough mating partners to create your lineage.
But here’s where the evolutionary cables have crossed: We assume that things we are attracted to will relieve our suffering and raise our happiness. My brain says, “Get famous.” It also says, “Unhappiness is lousy.” I conflate the two, getting, “Get famous and you’ll be less unhappy.”
But that is Mother Nature’s cruel hoax. She doesn’t really care either way whether you are unhappy — she just wants you to want to pass on your genetic material. If you conflate intergenerational survival with well-being, that’s your problem, not nature’s. And matters are hardly helped by nature’s useful idiots in society, who propagate a popular piece of life-ruining advice: “If it feels good, do it.” Unless you share the same existential goals as protozoa, this is often flat-out wrong.
More philosophically, the problem stems from dissatisfaction — the sense that nothing has full flavor, and we want more. We can’t quite pin down what it is that we seek. Without a great deal of reflection and spiritual hard work, the likely candidates seem to be material things, physical pleasures or favor among friends and strangers.
We look for these things to fill an inner emptiness. They may bring a brief satisfaction, but it never lasts, and it is never enough. And so we crave more. This paradox has a word in Sanskrit: upadana, which refers to the cycle of craving and grasping. As the Dhammapada (the Buddha’s path of wisdom) puts it: “The craving of one given to heedless living grows like a creeper. Like the monkey seeking fruits in the forest, he leaps from life to life... Whoever is overcome by this wretched and sticky craving, his sorrows grow like grass after the rains.”
Seven. Extrinsic Happiness Makes Us Users of People
Brooks writes:
This search for fame, the lust for material things and the objectification of others — that is, the cycle of grasping and craving — follows a formula that is elegant, simple and deadly:
Love things, use people.
Jeff Henderson up to about page 100 or so of his memoir, loves things and he uses people.
Eight. Most of us sleepwalk through life in our quest for pleasure
Brooks observes that our default setting is to seek pleasure and use people, and that most of us aren't even aware of this fact because we are "sleepwalking." As he writes:
This was Abd al-Rahman’s formula as he sleepwalked through life. It is the worldly snake oil peddled by the culture makers from Hollywood to Madison Avenue. But you know in your heart that it is morally disordered and a likely road to misery. You want to be free of the sticky cravings of unhappiness and find a formula for happiness instead. How? Simply invert the deadly formula and render it virtuous:
Love people, use things.
Only because Jeff Henderson hit rock bottom and had his "butt handed to him on a stick" did he wake up from his sleepwalking ways and go on a heroic journey to find redemption for his soul. He learned to love people and use things.
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English 1A Essay Assignment
Read Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century and Jonathan Haidt’s essay “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid” and develop an argumentative thesis that connects the forces of autocracy with the forces of dehumanization.
Barbara T. Walter’s book How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them, Jonathan Haidt’s essay “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” and watch the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma.
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Read Jonathan Rauch’s book The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Haidt’s essay “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” and watch the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. Then develop an argument that addresses the following claim: The “epistemic crisis” in which Americans live in different “reality silos” is so catastrophic that we need to find solutions to repairing that fractured reality. How might proposed solutions compromise the First Amendment and free speech? With social media doxing people and with misinformation leading to reckless behavior in the face of a pandemic and threatening democracy itself, how do we address the problem of free speech in the age of weaponized misinformation? How does the politicization of everything lead to distrust in institutions? How does social media create a “race to the bottom”? Regarding how we treat free speech, are we in a “damned if we do, damned if we don’t” situation? Explain.
Introduction Paragraph
In paragraph 1, draw from Rauch’s book, Haidt’s essay, and The Social Dilemma to define the “epistemic crisis” and the different “reality silos” that have polarized Americans.
Thesis Paragraph
In paragraph 2, present your thesis with a structure that could like like one of the following 3 examples:
To address the crisis of the “epistemic crisis” we need to get to the root of systemic misinformation by _____________, _____________, ______________, and _______________________.
Attempts to mend the “epistemic crisis” are doomed to fail because ________________, _______________, _____________, and __________________________.
The “epistemic crisis” is a fabricated problem created by partisan hacks in order to silence marginalized voices that give vent to unpopular political ideas. This fabrication is evident when we examine ______________, __________________, ________________, and _____________________.
Body Paragraphs 4-7, support your claim or thesis.
Paragraphs 8 and 9, write 2 counterarguments and 2 rebuttals.
Paragraph 10, your conclusion, an emotionally powerful restatement of your thesis.
Last page: Works Cited with 4 sources minimum in MLA format.
Recommended 4th Source in addition to above:
Podcast: "Social Media Is Ruining Everything with Jonathan Haidt," from Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps.
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How Tech Grifters Use Workism and Groupthink to Manipulate People
The Assignment:
Develop a thesis for a 1,200-word essay that answers the following question: How do the new Tech Grifters take advantage of Workism and Groupthink to manipulate their employees, investors, and consumers?
The Method:
Watch at least of two of the following three documentaries:
Then compare how the grifters featured in these documentaries use Workism, explained in Derek Thompson’s Derek Thompson's essay "The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable” and Anne Helen Petersen’s “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation” and Groupthink explained Karen Webster’s “The Dangers of Groupthink” and PYMTS’ “Theranos Guilty Verdict Shows the Dangers of Groupthink.”
Suggested Outline:
Paragraph 1: Summarize the major points in Derek Thompson’s and Anne Helen Petersen’s essays.
Paragraph 2: Develop a thesis that compares at least 2 tech gurus’ 5 similar patterns of manipulative behavior that takes advantage of Workism and Groupthink.
Paragraphs 3-7, your body support paragraphs
Paragraph 8, your conclusion, a dramatic restatement of your thesis
Works Cited, your last page which should have an MLA format of citations with the following:
Workism and Groupthink Compromise Critical Thinking
Best-selling author of Chaos Monkeys and tech entrepreneur Antonio Garcia Martinez has said that young people right out of college with no organizing principle to their lives and no understanding of the psychological underpinnings of religion redirect their spiritual hunger and find a sort of religious substitute by working for tech companies. These companies become a surrogate for religion, shared transcendent experience, meaningful connection, higher purpose, and the sense of feeling special. To foster this sense of communal mission, the workers can practically live at the tech site, often a large campus, where the employees have access to cappuccino bars, gourmet cafeterias, laundry services, state-of-the-art gyms, yoga studios, wellness centers, and libraries. The workers live in a glorified dorm where they not only work but become indoctrinated in the virtues of their company CEO who becomes their Dear Leader, a false messiah figure, who persuades everyone that they are on a mission to change the world, create disruption that will bring humanity together, and other saccharine bromides in the service of manipulating the employees to toil long hours and drink the Messiah’s Kool-Aid. Popular culture is rife with books, movies, TV series, and documentaries about this phenomenon. Megalomania, hyped promises, grift, fraud, and the Cult of the Personality are addressed in the TV series Silicon Valley, Severance, WeCrashed, The Dropout, and Devs and in the documentaries WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, and Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened. Combining the Cult of the Personality with Groupthink, there is a colossal breakdown of critical thinking that causes employees, investors, and customers to become dangerously gullible to the false promises of these mad grifters. There is yet another factor in breaking down critical thinking, the cult-like attitude toward work itself, explained in Derek Thompson's essay "The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable." The Cult of the Personality, Groupthink, and Workism are part of a potent cocktail for manipulating young people at the workplace. This topic is becoming an obsession of mine, and I suspect I will have my critical thinking students write an essay on this topic.
Excerpts from Derek Thompson’s Essay
Workism
The economists of the early 20th century did not foresee that work might evolve from a means of material production to a means of identity production. They failed to anticipate that, for the poor and middle class, work would remain a necessity; but for the college-educated elite, it would morph into a kind of religion, promising identity, transcendence, and community. Call it workism.
Replacements for Traditional Faith
The decline of traditional faith in America has coincided with an explosion of new atheisms. Some people worship beauty, some worship political identities, and others worship their children. But everybody worships something. And workism is among the most potent of the new religions competing for congregants.
What is workism? It is the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose; and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.
Arms Race for Status
Perhaps long hours are part of an arms race for status and income among the moneyed elite. Or maybe the logic here isn’t economic at all. It’s emotional—even spiritual. The best-educated and highest-earning Americans, who can have whatever they want, have chosen the office for the same reason that devout Christians attend church on Sundays: It’s where they feel most themselves. “For many of today’s rich there is no such thing as ‘leisure’; in the classic sense—work is their play,” the economist Robert Frank wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “Building wealth to them is a creative process, and the closest thing they have to fun.”
The Cult of Workism Helps Employers Take Advantage of Employees
Even as Americans worship workism, its leaders consecrate it from the marble daises of Congress and enshrine it in law. Most advanced countries give new parents paid leave; but the United States guarantees no such thing. Many advanced countries ease the burden of parenthood with national policies; but U.S. public spending on child care and early education is near the bottom of international rankings. In most advanced countries, citizens are guaranteed access to health care by their government; but the majority of insured Americans get health care through—where else?—their workplace. Automation and AI may soon threaten the labor force, but America’s welfare system has become more work-based in the past 20 years. In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which replaced much of the existing welfare system with programs that made benefits contingent on the recipient’s employment.
What’s Wrong with Workism?
There is nothing wrong with work, when work must be done. And there is no question that an elite obsession with meaningful work will produce a handful of winners who hit the workist lottery: busy, rich, and deeply fulfilled. But a culture that funnels its dreams of self-actualization into salaried jobs is setting itself up for collective anxiety, mass disappointment, and inevitable burnout.
Choosing Between the Force of Goodness or the Mercurial Forces of Money and the Free Market
One of the benefits of being an observant Christian, Muslim, or Zoroastrian is that these God-fearing worshippers put their faith in an intangible and unfalsifiable force of goodness. But work is tangible, and success is often falsified. To make either the centerpiece of one’s life is to place one’s esteem in the mercurial hands of the market. To be a workist is to worship a god with firing power.
Today’s Generation Is Raised from Childhood to be Brainwashed into Believing in the Cult of Workism
As Anne Helen Petersen wrote in a viral essay on “Millennial burnout” for BuzzFeed News—building on ideas Malcolm Harris addressed in his book, Kids These Days—Millennials were honed in these decades into machines of self-optimization. They passed through a childhood of extracurricular overachievement and checked every box of the success sequence, only to have the economy blow up their dreams.
Social Media Contributes to the Cult of Workism
The second external trauma of the Millennial generation has been the disturbance of social media, which has amplified the pressure to craft an image of success—for oneself, for one’s friends and colleagues, and even for one’s parents. But literally visualizing career success can be difficult in a services and information economy. Blue-collar jobs produce tangible products, like coal, steel rods, and houses. The output of white-collar work—algorithms, consulting projects, programmatic advertising campaigns—is more shapeless and often quite invisible. It’s not glib to say that the whiter the collar, the more invisible the product.
Since the physical world leaves few traces of achievement, today’s workers turn to social media to make manifest their accomplishments. Many of them spend hours crafting a separate reality of stress-free smiles, postcard vistas, and Edison-lightbulbed working spaces. “The social media feed [is] evidence of the fruits of hard, rewarding labor and the labor itself,” Petersen writes.
Workism Breeds Overwork Without Higher Wages
There is something slyly dystopian about an economic system that has convinced the most indebted generation in American history to put purpose over paycheck. Indeed, if you were designing a Black Mirror labor force that encouraged overwork without higher wages, what might you do? Perhaps you’d persuade educated young people that income comes second; that no job is just a job; and that the only real reward from work is the ineffable glow of purpose. It is a diabolical game that creates a prize so tantalizing yet rare that almost nobody wins, but everybody feels obligated to play forever.
Excerpts from “How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation” by Anne Helen Peterson
Self-Optimization Is a Form of Exploitation
As American business became more efficient, better at turning a profit, the next generation needed to be positioned to compete. We couldn’t just show up with a diploma and expect to get and keep a job that would allow us to retire at 55. In a marked shift from the generations before, millennials needed to optimize ourselves to be the very best workers possible.
And that process began very early. In Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, Malcolm Harris lays out the myriad ways in which our generation has been trained, tailored, primed, and optimized for the workplace — first in school, then through secondary education — starting as very young children. “Risk management used to be a business practice,” Harris writes, “now it’s our dominant child-rearing strategy.” Depending on your age, this idea applies to what our parents did or didn’t allow us to do (play on “dangerous” playground structures, go out without cellphones, drive without an adult in the car) and how they allowed us to do the things we did do (learn, explore, eat, play).
Harris points to practices that we now see as standard as a means of “optimizing” children’s play, an attitude often described as “intensive parenting.” Running around the neighborhood has become supervised playdates. Unstructured day care has become pre-preschool. Neighborhood Kick the Can or pickup games have transformed into highly regulated organized league play that spans the year. Unchanneled energy (diagnosed as hyperactivity) became medicated and disciplined.
Young People’s Intrinsic Self-Worth Dependent on the Job
But these students were convinced that their first job out of college would not only determine their career trajectory, but also their intrinsic value for the rest of their lives. I told one student, whose dozens of internship and fellowship applications yielded no results, that she should move somewhere fun, get any job, and figure out what interests her and what kind of work she doesn’t want to do — a suggestion that prompted wailing. “But what’ll I tell my parents?” she said. “I want a cool job I’m passionate about!”
Those expectations encapsulate the millennial rearing project, in which students internalize the need to find employment that reflects well on their parents (steady, decently paying, recognizable as a “good job”) that’s also impressive to their peers (at a “cool” company) and fulfills what they’ve been told has been the end goal of all of this childhood optimization: doing work that you’re passionate about. Whether that job is as a professional sports player, a Patagonia social media manager, a programmer at a startup, or a partner at a law firm seems to matter less than checking all of those boxes.
Social Media Creates Illusion That Job Provides Shared Meaningful Experiences
One thing that makes that realization sting even more is watching others live their seemingly cool, passionate, worthwhile lives online. We all know what we see on Facebook or Instagram isn’t “real,” but that doesn’t mean we don’t judge ourselves against it. I find that millennials are far less jealous of objects or belongings on social media than the holistic experiences represented there, the sort of thing that prompts people to comment, I want your life. That enviable mix of leisure and travel, the accumulation of pets and children, the landscapes inhabited and the food consumed seems not just desirable, but balanced, satisfied, and unafflicted by burnout.
And though work itself is rarely pictured, it’s always there. Periodically, it’s photographed as a space that’s fun or zany, and always rewarding or gratifying. But most of the time, it’s the thing you’re getting away from: You worked hard enough to enjoy life.
The social media feed — and Instagram in particular — is thus evidence of the fruits of hard, rewarding labor and the labor itself. The photos and videos that induce the most jealousy are those that suggest a perfect equilibrium (work hard, play hard!) has been reached. But of course, for most of us, it hasn’t. Posting on social media, after all, is a means of narrativizing our own lives: What we’re telling ourselves our lives are like. And when we don’t feel the satisfaction that we’ve been told we should receive from a good job that’s “fulfilling,” balanced with a personal life that’s equally so, the best way to convince yourself you’re feeling it is to illustrate it for others.
For many millennials, a social media presence — on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter — has also become an integral part of obtaining and maintaining a job. The “purest” example is the social media influencer, whose entire income source is performing and mediating the self online. But social media is also the means through which many “knowledge workers” — that is, workers who handle, process, or make meaning of information — market and brand themselves. Journalists use Twitter to learn about other stories, but they also use it to develop a personal brand and following that can be leveraged; people use LinkedIn not just for résumés and networking, but to post articles that attest to their personality (their brand!) as a manager or entrepreneur. Millennials aren’t the only ones who do this, but we’re the ones who perfected and thus set the standards for those who do.
“Branding” is a fitting word for this work, as it underlines what the millennial self becomes: a product. And as in childhood, the work of optimizing that brand blurs whatever boundaries remained between work and play. There is no “off the clock” when at all hours you could be documenting your on-brand experiences or tweeting your on-brand observations. The rise of smartphones makes these behaviors frictionless and thus more pervasive, more standardized. In the early days of Facebook, you had to take pictures with your digital camera, upload them to your computer, and post them in albums. Now, your phone is a sophisticated camera, always ready to document every component of your life — in easily manipulated photos, in short video bursts, in constant updates to Instagram Stories — and to facilitate the labor of performing the self for public consumption.
Technology and “Efficiency” Equal Exploitation
But the phone is also, and just as essentially, a tether to the “real” workplace. Email and Slack make it so that employees are always accessible, always able to labor, even after they’ve left the physical workplace and the traditional 9-to-5 boundaries of paid labor. Attempts to discourage working “off the clock” misfire, as millennials read them not as permission to stop working, but a means to further distinguish themselves by being available anyway.
“We are encouraged to strategize and scheme to find places, times, and roles where we can be effectively put to work,” Harris, the Kids These Days author, writes. “Efficiency is our existential purpose, and we are a generation of finely honed tools, crafted from embryos to be lean, mean production machines.”
But as sociologist Arne L. Kalleberg points out, that efficiency was supposed to give us more job security, more pay, perhaps even more leisure. In short, better jobs.
Yet the more work we do, the more efficient we’ve proven ourselves to be, the worse our jobs become: lower pay, worse benefits, less job security. Our efficiency hasn’t bucked wage stagnation; our steadfastness hasn’t made us more valuable. If anything, our commitment to work, no matter how exploitative, has simply encouraged and facilitated our exploitation. We put up with companies treating us poorly because we don’t see another option. We don’t quit. We internalize that we’re not striving hard enough. And we get a second gig.
Posted at 01:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
I reserved the computer lab H103 for my English 1A class so that instead of meeting in H301, the students and I will meet in H103 on the following days from 2:15 to 4:20:
March 2, March 7, March 30, April 4, May 4, May 9, June 6, and June 8.
Best,
Jeff McMahon
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Office Hours Spring 2022
Monday & Wednesday:
1:00-2:15
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From 2-13 to 6-11
English 1A 4603
English 1A 6315
English 1C 4628
English 1C 4629
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