something is wrong

This note last modified November 30, 2022

I am obsessed with how easy it is for people to figure out that something is wrong with their lives, while it’s extremely difficult to figure out what that something is.

Sometimes its simple and inconsequential — someone is angry at their friends because they are hungry. Sometimes its more intense — someone getting angry at their significant other because they feel the relationship is falling apart, but don’t fully understand what the friction comes from.

It’s easy for people to exploit this. “Do you feel miserable? It’s probably because you’re unattractive. Buy our makeup!”. “Is your town falling apart? Blame immigrants instead of trying to fix these problems.”

philosophy and laypeople
- In addition, thinking about philosophy trains my brain to think in abstractions, and makes me used to the idea of challenging my own beliefs. While I absolutely have my flaws, there are a great many people who are not used to this style of thinking, and become stuck in their ways, unable to understand why they are lashing out or sticking so strongly to the ideas that they hold dear.
forcing the symptoms
- A happy family eats dinner together, but a family that eats dinner together is not necessarily happy. I think that people who realize that something is wrong often put a bandage on things by forcing things into the mold of “appears good.”
conspiracy theories
- Conspiracy theories play into the temptation of clarity in response to the recognition that something is wrong. They recognize on some level that the way society is built leads to unfulfillment and oppression, but look for the simplistic answer that there is a single unified evil that is doing the oppressing and can (in theory) be taken down, instead of the reality that the world is more complex, buffeted around by forces beyond anyone’s control, and that evil doesn't really exist
capitalist realism
- Mark Fisher calls it a state of low expectations, where one understands that something meaningful is missing
Cyberpunk 2077
- One thing that I’ve been thinking about lately is the inherent friction between people’s ease at seeing that something is wrong but our difficulty at figuring out what is wrong. It’s easy to say “my life is shit, I’m depressed all the time, and cruel people keep getting away with things”, but it’s really tough to have the critical thinking skills to think that it might be the cause of a system you’ve grown up with your whole life, something that has been propagandized into you as good (or at the least, normal). At the worst cases, this leads to people lashing out at immigrants, or commies, or whatever buzzword they’ve been talking about recently (and let’s be real, people on the left do this too, but I digress). At it’s best (but still just as insidious), it leads to the neonliberalism that the video talked about, a frustration with the world that doesn’t present any alternatives.