What Do We Compare Ourselves To?

The Blackout was total, and it was worldwide. There was no electricity, no lights, no air conditioning, no easily-accessed refrigeration, and everyone went without.

I’m talking about the blackout of 1812, in fact, of all the years before 1812, 1820, 1830, 1840, when there was no electricity and no one really missed it.

They didn’t miss it because their neighbors didn’t have electricity, they didn’t miss it because they had never had electricity.

And so, compared to what?

We navigate our days on this planet by looking around, by understanding what is going on in the culture, and then making a decision about our state.

Ambien

Ambien is a popular sleep medication, particularly in the United States.

Here’s the question, how much extra sleep do you get if you take Ambien, as directed?

According to one study, 18 minutes.

You get 18 extra minutes of sleep over an eight-hour period of time by taking this powerful drug. So if you’re only getting 18 minutes to sleep with a drug with side effects, why on earth do people take it?

Well, it turns out that Ambien is an amnesiac.

It makes you forget that you didn’t sleep. If you forget that you didn’t sleep, apparently, for many people, the next day is better because you’re not carrying around a story of defective sleep. You’re not wondering whether other people slept better than you, that somehow you’re behind.

Back before the big blackout of 1840, when people went to sleep, they often woke up at one o’clock in the morning, had a snack, hung out with family and they went back to sleep or what was called Second sleep.

It was normal to not sleep in one place for eight or nine hours in a row.

So, compared to what?

Marketing and Mass Media

And marketers are complicit in our dissatisfaction, because as mass media came along, industrialism was also on the rise, and they were the perfect couple.

Industrialists needed a way to sell more stuff. They were making more stuff than ever before, and mass media was this magical tool that helped them sell more.

And usually, when we think about mass media we say “well ok,” because you can put an ad in front of a lot of people.

But the other thing that radio and then television did was sell people around the world on peace and prosperity on “the American dream,” and on, “attainable satisfaction,” that if you just bought this item, your life would get better.

If we think about the great sitcoms of the 1960s, most of them involved lives that could at least be visualized by most people who were watching them.

That the distance between you and them wasn’t that wide.

It was just enough to create dissatisfaction that could be solved by working a few more hours, working a little bit harder, figuring out how to get the money, borrow it if necessary, to buy that next item.

And so the ratchet started to spread.

It was endorsed (and paid for) by mass marketers because they understood that if they could sell people on Ovaltine creating family harmony, well, then people would go buy some Ovaltine.

And the carrot strapped to the front of the donkey kept the donkey moving, step by step, trying to bite the carrot.

But over time, what the media has done is move the carrot further and further away.

Maybe it started with the TV show Dallas but my guess is it started probably before that. Because we now saw the lives of people, royalty, that we could never hope to attain. Not just the royalty of spending money for a ranch or a private jet, but the unobtainable beauty that so many of the people in the movies or television were parading around.

The fairytale lifestyle.

All of these things became unobtainable.

And so the gap kept widening.

What the media did was give us something to compare to that we couldn’t get our hands on.

It was frustrating as opposed to incentivizing.

Social Media and Doomscrolling

And then we enter the world of social media. Social media was supposed to be this thing of authenticity. Social media was supposed to be your neighbor, your friends, your classmates.

But, grooming went on. Social grooming.

How do I put myself forward in the most perfect way possible? If my day has 1000 moments, how do I find the four moments that are so perfect that are worth sharing, and put them online for people to see?

Well, if you’re surrounded by nothing but that, then “compared to what” starts to kick in.

And at the very same time, breaking news and catastrophizing got turned up many notches.

During the Vietnam War you got the newspaper once or twice a day, you watched Walter Cronkite, and that was it. That was all the media that was available for the typical person to consume.

Now, the catastrophes are around every corner. They are around every corner for 24 hours a day.

Doomscrolling is a business model.

There are billionaires who make a profit by making you feel nervous, by making you feel like you have to doomscroll some more. Somehow looking for solace, looking for a way to make it all go away.

And so we’ve got these two pillars in front of us on a regular basis.

On one hand, the perfect life, the convenient life, the easy life, the magical life, the life of a princess. There it is. You can see it with one click.

But then turn around… there are the catastrophes waiting around every corner. All the things that just can’t possibly work.

Making Things Better By Making Better Things

I don’t want to minimize either one of these things as useful motivators.

We need to be aware of defects in our culture and society so we can do something about them.

Walter Cronkite was a hero for pointing up how toxic the Vietnam War was. Not just to people in the United States but to the victims in Southeast Asia.

And in our current environment, citizenry needs to speak up and stand up and do something about the injustices that are all around us.

But it doesn’t mean it’s useful for it to be the narrative of our entire day.

Those things we aspire to, those perfect cabinets made by the carpenter on YouTube, or that perfect complexion that we see in a cosmetic video, well, we get something out of vicariously experiencing joy or delight or perfection.

I certainly don’t want that to go away completely, but I think we need to remind ourselves that if someone’s going to make a profit by manipulating us and changing our state, they’re likely to try.

It’s up to us to decide whether or not we want to take the Ambien. Whether or not we want an amnesiac. Whether or not we want to sign up for a life of dissatisfaction.

Or, if our time would be better spent weaving together community and making things better by making better things.