Hunting For Meaning (AKA Can't Buy Me Love)

I awoke yesterday feeling rather “blah.” Not depressed, just bored and unmotivated. As much as I loathe my job, I often find that I’m unsure of what to do with my free time. Sometimes I play video games, but the ol’ 360 has been overheating, so I figured I’d give it a rest. I love to read, but I’m currently slogging through a book on Tolkien, and the prose is as dense as if Tolkien himself had written it; I just wasn’t up for it today.
So, as I often do, I began to think about food. I love food, and, while I am a maddeningly picky eater, I can generally find enjoyment in food when my enjoyment of other things has waned. Thus I began to think about the gyros and cinnamon rolls that are available at a mall 30 minutes away. It was tempting to make the trip, despite the fact that I have a hard time justifying a 30-minute drive just to get some food. As a further justification, I thought about getting a David Foster Wallace book while I was there, ignoring the fact that the Borders probably wouldn’t have it.
I was just getting myself psyched up to go when a thought occurred to me: buying things makes me feel good and, I assume, has a similar effect on others. I began to wonder why this was. Perhaps, I thought, the act of buying things commandeered a vestigial drive to hunt. Perhaps my act of “hunting” out a book provided satisfaction to that primal part of me that would have been satisfied by bringing down a deer.
It then occurred to me that I had read something similar to this a month or three ago. A scientist had said that gender differences in shopping behavior reflected gender roles from when humans were primarily hunter-gatherers. Thus, a man’s desire to shop quickly, to swoop into a store in Navy SEAL-like fashion and then leave in a similarly no-nonsense manner, was due to a genetic proclivity to hunt in the same way. Conversely, a woman’s desire to dawdle, to carefully inspect each item, and to look for just the right things in a number of places (as opposed to just one), was due to the care necessitated by the act of gathering (for it is necessary to know what is ripe, what is poisonous, etc. before bringing it home to eat).
Upon remembering the article, I was first and foremost dismayed. Any of you who know me are probably aware that I have a fantastic memory for certain things, but an abysmal memory for others. I started to wonder how often “my” good ideas were something I ingested and forgot, and then came bubbling back up into consciousness. A disturbing thought, since I do my best to live an honest life. I would hate to steal someone else’s ideas, regardless of the fact that I’d be unaware of it.
I quickly shunted that thought aside (that way lies madness), and focused instead on money. Why is it so important to people? It seems to me that spending money is somehow just the filling of a void. Like a gambler who gets a rush from winning, we get a rush out of spending money, out of procuring things that we feel we need or want. But there’s nothing inherently necessary about money in a survival sense. True, we in the developed world need money to buy food and pay bills, but, in the grand scheme of things, money is valueless. It is only worth what we think it’s worth.
So what’s the deal? What void is spending money, an inherently worthless act, filling? Again, I thought of the hunter-gatherer issue. Is it really that simple? Are we spending money simply to satiate a largely obsolete behavioral drive? And if so, why are so many of us miserable?
I’m starting to think that this is exactly what is going on. I think that we’ve taken the necessity of hunting (or living off the land in all manner of ways) and distorted that drive, in a Freudian manner, into something else: a desire for things. I think the reason many of us are miserable is because we’ve lost all sight of what is truly important in life, something that living off the land reminds us of.
Think about it. When one lives in a hunter-gatherer society, what is important? Your priority is, first and foremost, the survival of yourself and the ones you love. In order to survive you need very specific things. You need water, food, and the shelter from the elements provided by clothing and a home. That’s about it. Even medicine, generally in the form of plant matter, is a luxury (but even that is about survival).
If you live this kind of life, you live on the razor’s edge of survival. There are times when food is plentiful, but waste is unacceptable even then, for there will certainly be times when food is scarce. Thus you learn the value of moderation. You learn to value your life and family, for hard times might literally mean the death of yourself or the ones you love. Not only that, but killing an animal for food gives one an intimate understanding of life and death. Therefore, living the life of a hunter-gatherer can be said to give one a very harsh but realistic perspective regarding what is important: life and family.
Much of today’s world has no such equivalent. We don’t experience that razor’s edge. We live in luxury. We have water piped into our homes, and thus have no need to walk to the river to fill gourds; we have vast buildings filled with foodstuffs, so we need not spend days in the wild hunting. We have our problems, but in comparison they are petty and insignificant.
And yet we still have these drives, that need to procure that allowed us to reach today’s more luxurious reality. But these needs have been distorted into a mockery of their former selves. When an American says they “need” something, ninety-nine times out of a hundred they mean that they simply want it. In a very real sense, our actions have been robbed of their importance by our society’s excesses. Yes, we need to work to buy food, but the work in and of itself is generally valueless. Our actions don’t lead directly to our survival; they lead to money, which in turn leads to survival. That one extra step robs us of something important, and it’s a lack that many of us feel, even if we fail to understand it.
So what do we do? We distract ourselves. Think about what you spend your money on. I don’t know about you, but my main expenses are food, gasoline, bills of all sorts, and entertainment. I’m practically dirt poor, but I still find money every month for high-speed Internet access, cable TV (although I don’t pay much; I bribed the cable guy $50 to keep off most of the filters, so I get pretty much all the non-premium channels for about $15 a month), and the odd book or DVD. I believe entertainment has become something of a necessity for us because it distracts us from the meaninglessness of our lives.
Unfortunately, there are those out there who are very much aware of our “need” for entertainment, even if they are unaware of its origin (and I doubt they care). All they need to know is that money can be made when people are unhappy. This is something that has been building for centuries (Got the gout? Try Johnson’s Revolutionary Snake Oil Elixir! Guaranteed to cure a number of maladies and miseries!), but manipulating the misery of the masses was turned into an artform in the 20th century.
While I don’t know the exact origins of psychological manipulation in advertising, I’m sure that the budding discipline of psychology had much to do with the efficaciousness of 20th century ads. It’s likely that many who studied the subject failed to find a job in private practice or academia (or got kicked out, as John B. Watson did), and turned to advertising instead, for understanding human behavior makes it much easier to manipulate. Regardless, advertisers most certainly began using data from the psychological field to sell their products. In other words, they preyed upon our desires and insecurities to make a buck.
I find this behavior repulsive, but it’s a fact of life. Think about the Saturday morning cartoons that my generation loved so dearly. Yes, we were treated to hours of cartoons that we loved, but we were also subjected to hours of advertising as well. Hell, some cartoons were literally created as vehicles to sell toys. We were watching 22-minute commercials, interrupted by commercials! If you believe that this does not have a profound effect on a young child’s mindset, then I admire your naïveté or devotion to self-delusion.
In a very real sense, the term “TV programming” is a literal term. Advertisers are smart enough to know that if you manipulate someone while they’re young, they cease to question that manipulation, or even believe that they’re being manipulated in the first place. They simply take for granted that they need all that “stuff” out there.
Please don’t misunderstand: I’m not some conspiracy theorist who believes there’s some cabal of rich men manipulating every aspect of the world to work in their favor. I do, however, believe that this world is full of greedy people who would step over the bodies of the ones they love if it was profitable enough. Does a little psychological manipulation matter to someone who is willing to allow his factory to pollute local drinking water? Not when there’s profit in it.
And that’s what it’s all about: profit. Instead of survival, our society’s greatest "need" has become money, to the extent that there are thousands, if not millions, of companies out there who are seeking profit to the detriment of everyone else. Deforestation? How else do we find the land to maximize our soybean farming? Pollution? Increases our profit margins! Devastation of world fish populations? Who cares how many fish there are in the sea, as long as they end up on someone’s plate? We’ve become a society of pimps and whores, which is pretty ironic considering that prostitution is illegal.
But whether we are the pimp or the whore, the oppressor or the oppressed, our actions are motivated by that void, that sense of ennui. It’s such a pervasive part of our lives that many of us don’t even recognize its existence. We just heap money and things into it, hoping to feel better for a little while. Just like a drug addict. And I’m honestly unsure what’s worse: the fact that so many of us feel the same way but haven’t acknowledged it (let alone found a solution), or the fact that there are people who have realized it and decided to make a profit off of it, and thus exacerbated the situation
Regardless, our civilization is buckling under the weight of its own excess. We’re ancient Rome, just waiting for some “barbarians” to come along and exploit our weaknesses. Or perhaps the greedy are the barbarians, and we’re in the process of dying. I can’t help but think we’ve already gone too far. But who can say? Not I. I just hope that if and when we fall, those who pick up the pieces (if any exist to do so) learn from our mistakes. I hope they learn that divorcing oneself from reality to such an extent that money becomes their god and goal is a mistake that will always lead to disaster.
Some of us may be miserable at times. We may feel frustrated by and out of touch with the society that we live in, but at least we’ve realized that money can’t buy us love. Or happiness. Or wisdom.
But it sure does buy a wealth of distractions, doesn’t it?

The Buddhist: Meaninglessness & Its Meaning*

This is a slightly modified version of a blog originally written on July 26th, 2008.

I was lying in bed late one night, trying to wrap my brain around the meaning of existence, when I was confronted with the enormity of the universe. Its vastness in both time and space is truly incomprehensible to the human mind, but that didn't stop me from trying to understand it.
Let's put down our burgers and remotes and think about this for a second. One hundred years ago, our use of electricity was still in its infancy and Ford had only been making cars for about five years. Go back one thousand years (a period of time already hard to grasp), and the Roman Empire had been dead for over five hundred years and it'd be nearly another five hundred until Columbus "discovers" the Americas. Ten thousand years ago, there was not a written word to be found on the face of the planet. Jump back four to eight million years and you get our ancestral line breaking off from our nearest relatives, the chimps and bonobos.
Fewer than ten million years into the past and *poof* any sign of man is gone. Go back sixty-five million years and you'll see the end of the dinosaurs. About four billions years in the past, and you'll get the beginnings of life on this planet. Another five hundred million years or so will get you the formation of the Earth, and even that is only in the most recent third of the universe's estimated 13.73 billion years of existence.
13.73 billion years. In an industrialized nation such as the US, your average individual is going to have a life span of approximately seventy-five years. How could anything we do in 75 measly little years matter, compared to 13.73 billion? The answer is simple: it doesn't. Nothing you or I do will matter in the grand scheme of things. We could destroy this entire planet and the universe wouldn't even notice.
Some people may find this depressing. I find it comforting. First of all, this knowledge assures me that, no matter how badly I screw up, in the end, none of my mistakes will be that important. Second, it means that we have to create our own meaning.
We all experience life in different ways. Two people can take part in the same event and have two completely different experiences (think of the fans rooting for opposite teams at a football game). The only difference is their perception of what occurred, and this is influenced by the unique experiences each individual had when growing up, how and where they were raised, etc. In a certain sense, all we are is a jumble of mobile associations, associations that form through the interaction of genetics and environment, and are expressed through personality and behavior. We can take some measure of control over our lives by recognizing these associations and attempting to alter them when they are faulty. Instead of thinking, "I failed, therefore I suck," try "I failed, therefore I suck at this (at least for now)."
We're all dying. There's no escape. The only way to reach any measure of immortality is to affect the people around you in such a way that they remember you when you're gone. (Unless you believe in an afterlife, in which case you'll be hangin' with His Holiness for eternity. Hopefully.) This kind of immortality is achieved through acts both good and bad (think Gandhi vs. Hitler).
So what do you want to be remembered for? Money? Fame? Power? Personally, I'd like to be remembered the way I remember my Grandma: as someone who, though flawed, did her best to end up a better person than she was when she started, and who tried to help others achieve the same goal. I don't need the entire world (or any of it, really) to remember me, but it'd provide a small measure of comfort on my deathbed to know that I made those close to me just a tiny bit better.
We are all flawed. The trick is to not only recognize this truth (and accept it), but to see it as a starting point for growth.

*Thanks to Wiki for allowing me to double check some of the specifics of this blog. They're probably wrong, but it's easier than hunting through mounds of textbooks.