Is the Self-Actualization Workism Narrative a Counter to Doomscrolling?
Much has been said about the grifters like Adam Neumann who manipulate new generations of workers whose hunger for meaning makes them ripe for exploitation.
Much has been said about “meaning junkies” who feel compelled to curate their Self-Actualization Narratives on social media. These narratives offer a false optimism that contradicts stagnant wages, long work weeks, and job burnout.
Perhaps this Self-Actualization Narrative is a coping mechanism for all the collective doom and misery Americans have suffered in the last several years, especially since the pandemic. This collective misery often manifests in an addiction called Doomscrolling, the compulsion to look for pessimistic apocalypse scenarios on Twitter and other media platforms.
How we cope or maladapt to doom is addressed in Charlie Warzel’s essay “The Cost of Engaging with the Miserable.”
Warzel observes that many of us have become addicted to doom, helplessness, and outrage. As he writes, with a special emphasis on Twitter:
On the doom machine, feeling helpless and hopeless is easier than ever. Our politics, institutions, and reality itself seem fractured. Perhaps the only salve is to fight on the doom machine over who’s to blame. Inevitably, this makes us feel worse instead of better. So why do we keep doing it? It seems that many of the extremely online are drawn to the doom, and that should make us concerned about the health and future of our public digital spaces.
When journalists and academics talk about the morass of hate and lies online, they tend to focus on tech platforms, rightfully so. The platforms are immensely powerful, and their design can encourage radicalization and the spread of conspiracy theories, amplifying the most toxic forces in our culture.
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Hunger for Toxicity
Is this toxic doomscrolling equal to the toxic positivity of the Self-Actualization Narrative about Workism? I think so.
Being overly pessimistic or optimistic are forms of maladaptation. Both miss the mark.
There is a demand, even an addiction, to the above forms of toxicity. That we crave such poison speaks volumes about how diseased we are as a society.
Collective Misery Can be a Form of Groupthink
Just as collective Self-Actualization Narratives can be a form of Groupthink, so can Collective Misery. As Warzel writes:
But online garbage (whether political and scientific misinformation or racist memes) is also created because there’s an audience for it. The internet, after all, is populated by people—billions of them. Their thoughts and impulses and diatribes are grist for the algorithmic content mills. When we talk about engagement, we are talking about them. They—or rather, we—are the ones clicking. We are often the ones telling the platforms, “More of this, please.”
This is a disquieting realization. As the author Richard Seymour writes in his book The Twittering Machine, if social media “confronts us with a string of calamities—addiction, depression, ‘fake news,’ trolls, online mobs, alt-right subcultures—it is only exploiting and magnifying problems that are already socially pervasive.” He goes on, “If we’ve found ourselves addicted to social media, in spite or because of its frequent nastiness … then there is something in us that’s waiting to be addicted.”
Misery, famously, loves company—and, however shallow, social media provides that in droves. It’s worth asking: What if the internet so frequently feels miserable, and makes those of us posting and reacting feel miserable, because so many people are miserable in the first place? What if we all absorb that misery at scale online and, sometimes unwittingly, inflict it on one another?
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Workism and Collective Misery Are Opposite Sides of the Same Coin
As a society, we tend to diverge upon two extremes, the Self-Actualization Narrative of Workism and the Collective Misery Narrative of doomscrolling. Both narratives appear to be false and maladaptive. Both narratives appear to be toxic.
Our maladaptation is reflected in crucial quality-of-life statistics that are all in decline and make doomscrolling a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. As we read:
Misery is measurable. By global standards, Americans are relatively happy. But some indicators are troubling. From 1959 to 2014, the average life expectancy in the United States increased by nine years. Since then, the trend has reversed, and the pandemic led to a sharp decline—life expectancy dropped by a full year in 2020. According to data collected by the Brookings Institution, from 2005 to 2019, an average of 70,000 Americans died annually from “deaths of despair,” such as overdose and suicide. Economic trends show declining social mobility. Mental-health issues are on the rise, especially among young people. The surgeon general warned this month of “devastating” consequences, quoting a 2019 survey that found that “one in three high school students and half of female students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, an overall increase of 40% from 2009.” He cited stressors such as climate change, racial injustice, and income inequality.
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It almost seems the young employees curating their “amazing work lives” on social media are whistling by the grave. Their happy narrative is a form of denial of what is actually happening to us as a society. Their happy narrative seems to be a contradiction to the rising mental health issues that afflict young people in greater numbers. Underneath the happy narratives are “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.”
Sharing and Transfering Misery to Others
Misery loves company. No one wants to live in a state of toxic misery alone. It’s less unbearable if we live in Misery Communities and can take satisfaction in spreading misery to others. As we read:
Ample evidence suggests that alienated and angry people have built communities around shared grievances. More broadly, millions of Americans feel left behind, under siege, and out of opportunities. The acceptance and fellowship that online communities bring, be they subreddits and Facebook groups or anonymous message boards, allow grievance to harden into a full-fledged identity. Under the influence of true believers and cynical grifters alike, these feelings frequently turn to hate.
Misery is a powerful grouping force. In a famous 1950s study, the social psychologist Stanley Schachter found that when research subjects were told that an upcoming electrical-shock test would be painful, most wished to wait for their test in groups, but most of those who thought the shock would be painless wanted to wait alone. “Misery doesn’t just love any kind of company,” Schachter memorably argued. “It loves only miserable company.”
The internet gives groups the ability not just to express and bond over misery but to inflict it on others—in effect, to transfer their own misery onto those they resent. The most extreme examples come in the form of racist or misogynist harassment campaigns—many led by young white men—such as Gamergate or the hashtag campaigns against Black feminists.
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Preaching the Gospel
Just as the members of Workism preach the gospel of the Self-Actualization Narrative, members of Doomscrolling preach the Misery Narrative. Being afflicted with one of the two narratives compels both parties to spread their message. We need to expand the group to feel validated.
Algorithms Encourage Misery
Social media and misery are friends because misery is extreme and extremism gets clicks. Getting clicks is the business model for social media, so the more extremely miserable the better as far as social media platforms like Facebook are concerned. As we read:
Let’s be clear: Tech platforms have blood on their hands. The leaked Facebook Papers are just the latest evidence of how Facebook’s obsession with growth has exacerbated civic problems globally. Many of the big internet companies have standardized privacy invasions and surveillance as integral to their business model. They’ve accelerated destabilizing political and cultural trends such as QAnon. Facebook and Twitter’s greased, algorithmic rails offer a natural advantage to their most shameless users. The platforms call themselves neutral actors, but they aren’t just exposing our reality; they’re also warping it.
“Our data show that social-media platforms do not merely reflect what is happening in society,” Molly Crockett said recently. She is one of the authors of a Yale study of almost 13 million tweets that found that users who expressed outrage were rewarded with engagement, which made them express yet more outrage. Surprisingly, the study found that politically moderate users were the most susceptible to this feedback loop. “Platforms create incentives that change how users react to political events over time,” Crockett said.
This is the irony of the democratization of speech in action: The platforms don’t just spark unrest and incubate hatred; they also show us a depressing truth about the state of this country offline, independent of technology. In a recent essay, the journalist Joseph Bernstein asked whether social media is “creating new types of people, or simply revealing long-obscured types of people to a segment of the public unaccustomed to seeing them.” Both things can be true.
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Social Media Creates Extremists Who Curate Extreme Narrations
If you’re on a social media platform like Facebook and you want lots of clicks, likes, and comments, you need to present an extreme:
Either you show how happy and self-actualized you and your family are by posting your family under a Hawaiian waterfall or biting into malasadas guava pastries at a hipster cafe in Kuai or your kids graduating kindergarten or you go the opposite track: You post articles about doom, gloom, and conspiracy.
No one gives a you-know-what about your nuanced analysis of anything. People hunger for extremes, bombast, and earth-shaking drama. Welcome to social media. Welcome to extremism.
Workism is part of that extremism.
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