I鈥檝e worked hard for everything I have and have had nothing given to me聽鈥 no intergenerational wealth in our family. My friends are all inheriting piles of money as their parents pass away, and many are retiring years before they thought they鈥檇 be able to. They are so pleased their kids, too, will never have to worry about money. They are mostly from working class, immigrant backgrounds and their parents worked hard and sacrificed a lot. I鈥檓 excited for them and for their plans, and admire their parents鈥 hard work. But I also feel sad I鈥檒l never have that myself, or be able to offer it to my kids. How do I deal with my complex emotions around wealth and equality within my own peer group? 聽
Status anxiety is nothing new in human society. We are hierarchical primates, after all, and position is part of how we make sense of ourselves and the world. But there are certain features of our current spectral form of human life聽鈥 the age of postmodern techno-capitalism, let鈥檚 call it聽鈥 that make everything worse. Not only do we continue to gauge winners and losers by how much filthy lucre they possess, even as money is revealed over and over as a collective delusion; we also have far more opportunity for invidious public comparison.
Social media are often cited as the scourge here, rightly enough; but here they are as much symptom as disease. Relentless online self-presentation means that someone鈥檚 number of claimed friends or followers, combined with images of beautiful them enjoying the weather in far-flung Instagrammed photo shoots, make everyone else into a loser. Human interaction, always shot through with judgment, is sucked into a society-wide one-up vortex of Freudian minor narcissism. Tiny differences that once might have rankled as relative first-world luxury levels now eat away at the soul.
Take a deep breath. Good fortune is not distributed evenly, sure, but that fact needn鈥檛 be corrosive of your own well-being. Concentrate on what you have, especially goods achieved by your own effort and talent. Just accept that some annoying people born on third base will think they鈥檝e hit a triple. So it goes. If it makes you feel better, remind them that somebody somewhere worked hard for whatever privileges they enjoy. And it鈥檚 okay to give yourself a pat on the back for being self-made.
If you鈥檙e structurally minded, lobby for stiffer estate and capital gains taxes. Accumulated wealth is a great underminer of equality and mutual respect. Don鈥檛 be fooled by arguments that inheritance levies work to tax wealth twice. The tax is on the transaction, not the money. Birthright lotteries are already unfair; we don鈥檛 have to let them become insanely unjust as well.
Help! The news cycle is getting me down聽鈥 and no matter how I try I can鈥檛 get away from it. I鈥檓 living in fear of recession, of war, of inflation. I鈥檇 like to live each day with joy and purpose聽鈥 the way the self-help books suggest we do. Any tips?
The writer Jia Tolentino nicely captures the texture of this strange up-to-date form of fear. The root of our anxiety, she , 鈥渕ight be whatever strange thing is currently happening with time.鈥 The wrack of constant helpless emergency is made worse by the smartphone聽鈥 鈥渁 device that makes me feel like I am strapped flat to the board of an unreal present.鈥 The phone, she says, 鈥渆ats time; it makes us live the way people do inside a casino, dropping a blackout curtain over the windows to block out the world, except the blackout curtain is a screen, showing too much of the world, too quickly.鈥
Ironically, the most vocal complainants about screen enslavement are often the ones most comprehensively hooked on it. This sickening addiction is not much different from what drives those underground palaces of broken dreams, where drinks are cheap and the slot machines run all night. The scary twist is that screentime is not only compulsive, but often directed at genuinely worrying features of the world. We quickly go from real concern to crippling compassion fatigue and then to dead-eyed detachment or indifference.
ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW
ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW
Now the pixelated unreality of what we see, the deliberate blurring of fact and fiction, truth and disinformation, just compounds the cognitive vertigo. Our critical faculties deteriorate before our eyes. How can you stem the tide of babbling chatbot text flooding the discursive field? How render more detectable the deep-fake videos that now pass for human beings? The self-help books advise living in the moment and being here now. But what if 鈥渢he moment鈥 is a fractured dead zone, and 鈥渢he now鈥 a yawning chasm drained of reality?
Seriously: consider ditching your smartphone and closing out your social feeds. Start a media fast and keep it going. Read actual books. Get involved with real people in real spaces. Walk outside. Volunteer at a soup kitchen. Talk to children. Cook for others. Commune with companion animals. True purpose and joy won鈥檛 be found anywhere but inside your lived life. So live it! Put down the paper or close your browser right now, and go.
Need existential advice from a philosophical adviser? Send your dilemmas and questions to聽agoodlife@thestar.ca聽and we鈥檒l guide you to your good life.
Opinion articles are based on the author鈥檚 interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events. More details
Mark Kingwell is a professor of philosophy at the University of
Toronto.
To join the conversation set a first and last name in your user profile.
Sign in or register for free to join the Conversation