Wow, a rare opportunity for me to share my private diary with the world. I copied down a paragraph from this decent New Yorker article, my emphasis:
The persistence of the American Dream, Berlant suggests, amounts to a cruel optimism, a condition "when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your own flourishing." We are accustomed to longing for things that we know are bad for us, like cigarettes or cake. Perhaps your emotional state is calibrated around a sports team, like the New York Knicks, and despite hopes that next season will be better you vaguely understand that you'll be let down anyway. But our Sisyphean pursuit of the good life has higher stakes, and its amalgam of fantasy and futility is something that we process as experience before we rationalize it in thought. These feelings, Berlant says, are the "body's response to the world, something you're always catching up to."
My comments: "There is almost too much to unpack and unthread here: the superficial appeal of chastising desire and tunneling through illusion into "flourishing," which itself seems illusory. How many illusions are there? Truth, productivity? Happiness itself? The questions seem elementary and thus almost childish." The tell-tale signs of depression are all over my "what if happiness is just fake, mannnn?" riposte, yeah I know, but the idea that this dynamo of desire and frustration quietly drives half your gestures in waking life... yeah, that had some resonance. I'll think about it some more.
Johann Hari is a dangerous and dishonest man. https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2018/jan/24/antidepressants-please-please-do-not-just-abandon-your-meds-johann-hari
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jan/02/johann-hari-interview-drugs-book-independent
I knew this already but I had missed the fact that he's also good mates with Russell Brand.
The first quote (assuming it's not fabricated) is hilarious because it's obviously pre Ozempic, a solution to obesity that completely ignores all its "deep causes in our culture" and addresses the real deep cause - some people really like eating unhealthy food, and this is an injection that makes them not like it quite so much.
This seems like a weaker version of Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided.
2: Yeah, I looked him up and found that out. But still wanted to use the quote!
3: I might be wrong, but I think the agency is slightly different between Bright-Sided and Cruel Optimism. With the former, I think of how cancer patients are (sometimes) relentlessly told to think positively. It's supposed to lead to better outcomes, and so it's a mark of health or virtue or something.
The Cruel Optimism (under the Purser version) is more the way that society shortchanges the fight against societal ills. I'm remembering Smearcase stating elsewhere that sometimes social work felt like prescribing therapy for poverty. Swapping in a cheaper, false, individual solution instead of dealing with the actual societal problem. Heebie University does this kind of thing all the time. Then the Bright-Sided is the marketing strategy used to sell the Cruel Optimism Fix.
The second quote is largely unrelated to reality, both when it was written thirteen years ago and now. None of the "fantasies of the good life" Berlant complains about were, or are, unachievable, and many are a lot more achievable now than before.
Durable intimacy? Divorce rate in the US has been falling since 1979.
Upward mobility? Static.
Job security? Perceived job insecurity measured by polls peaked in 2010, and (pandemic aside) it's been falling ever since. Consistently low unemployment means that this has some backing in actual facts.
Political and social equality? Berlant was writing at a time when gay marriage was illegal in the US. Now it isn't. Racial economic inequality hasn't worsened in the last 20 years; in other spheres there has been constant improvement (still a lot to be done).
Ideals are good even if you don't live up to them. Ambitions of doing better don't stop you being happy, nor are they unachievable even if not everyone manages to achieve them.
I agree that ghis is a really important strand of culture to understand. I probably don't understand. Two thoughts, one suggesting adaptation, the other change:
The second of Buddhism's four noble truths is that the source of suffering is desire and ignorance. If we didn't crave an artificial version of a good life, we'd crave something worse, the life of an idiot mogul say, or a lifetime supply of intoxicants and junk food.
Our ideas of a good life have changed sources, now they come from images and words produced by a culture industry driven by the hope of profit. In the past, the ideas came from religion and from political rulers, also possibly from personal examples, which were in the foreground of experience because less privacy and no media.
6 is a monumental comment. I can only marvel.
I think the idea of "cruel optimism" is recognizable, and I appreciated the OP highlighting it.
I also suspect that, in practice, if it becomes a common phrase it will just be used to dunk on people, rather than enriching our sense of the world -- it seems unfortunately well suited to be used in a, "[such-and-such] is the worst; who's with me" sort of way.
Written before seeing 6, which is a good comment.
NickS, you'd probably get something out of the New Yorker piece I linked. I'm just going to share the WTF piece of it more widely:
Shortly after the publication of "Cruel Optimism," Berlant began to sense a subtle, atmospheric disturbance. In September of 2012, she offered a diagnosis on her blog:Many of you would say that Donald Trump was excluded from the Republican convention, has no traction as a political candidate, and is generally viewed as a clown whose spewing occasionally hits in the vicinity of an opinion that a reasonable person could defend. But I am here to tell you that he actually won the Republican nomination and is dominating the airwaves during this election season. He is not doing this with "dark money" or Koch-like influence peddling. He has done this the way the fabled butterfly does it, as its wing-flapping sets off revolutions.Berlant felt Trump's spectral presence everywhere, his bluster mimicked and channelled by the Party establishment. Though hardly a man of nuance, he had tapped into the subtleties of affective politics. She called it "the Trumping of Politics."
That's wild. I was parenting an infant and writing a dissertation in 2012, and I have absolutely no recollection of anything Trump did or said, nor of any of his "bluster mimicked and channelled by the Party establishment." I remember looking up briefly to see Romney saying a bunch of Thatcheresque things to the effect that there is no such thing as society, but was Trump actually a presence for any of the rest of you back then? I would have mocked the fuck out of that blog post, I'm sure.
Berlant died in 2021 and is memorialized here (with they/them pronouns, not reflected in the 2019 New Yorker piece).
Isn't the divorce rate falling mostly an artifact of the declining marriage rate?
I think the only problem with the piece linked in 1 - which is making Ajay bristle uncontrollably in 6 - is that they're framing it as a new trend, instead of just an interesting thing. Not everything has to be ascendant to be interesting, but journalists tend to believe otherwise.
I'm not quite following: are you saying that Berlant's critique isn't unusually applicable to the world of 2011, and so saying that "[i]ts timing was serendipitous" is overstatement by Hua Hsu? That's fair, but he's also talking about trends in literary theory (following publication dates and so on). That stuff is always late to the party, bizarrely prescient blog posts aside, but dating the trend is fairly straightforward.
13, stronger: because marriage is now a "capstone" decision, more often made by people who are already doing better than average.
(Don't know how good the evidence for that is! )
I got married when I was still an asshole. But that was the style in the 90s.
Damnit, I could read it this morning but didn't have time to finish it, and now it's paywalled. I was going to go fetch the quote that made me think that.
But at any rate, " are you saying that Berlant's critique isn't unusually applicable to the world of 2011, and so saying that "[i]ts timing was serendipitous" is overstatement by Hua Hsu?" yes!
"some people really like eating unhealthy food, and this is an injection that makes them not like it quite so much"
FTFY. For obesity it doesn't really matter if the food is "healthy," just how much you eat (and drink), right? (Of course "healthy" food can help with other things, like say cholesterol.)
I know intellectually that 6 is true, and yet it seems really hard to shake the feeling that lots of things are worse than they were in 2005, and I'm not sure how exactly to square that.
One element is the social pressure on lefties to constantly be unhappy, because saying anything is good is just showing your privilege and means you're a bad person. Another is the rise of algorithmic media which prioritizes upsetting things, but I've been doing a better job of cutting that out of my life, so I don't think that's it.
For me personally of course the main factor is the decline of academia in general, and the university that I work at in particular. And there I do really think things are objectively worse now than in the past.
More generally there's:
1. Phones are bad for happiness (even though they're useful for a lot of things and so are also hard to give up)
2. The rapidly increasing cost of rent (both for residential and commercial) has all sorts of terrible effects on society (even if you bought a house in time for it not to directly affect you).
3. The pandemic really sucked, and the post-pandemic rise in antisocial behavior I think is real and also bad for happiness.
20:
4. Health insurance gets more expensive and more people have high deductible insurance while the experience of dealing with the medical system has gotten worse.
5. Childcare has gotten more expensive and harder to find, while lower-middle non-poor and middle class people get no help paying for it. (Baumol's cost disease means that some of the increase is inevitable; that's why people need help.)
I'm a little skeptical of 4, things were very bad before the ACA, so even if they've gotten a little worse recently I'm not sure it's meaningfully worse. (Though I'm a bit of an exception in that I have a "High Deductible" plan that's kinda awesome, so maybe I'm missing some broader trends.) Here the healthcare problem is mostly wait times and lack of providers taking new patients. Which is kinda parallel to the housing thing, we just decided not to build new houses or medical schools at some point and now there's severe shortages.
Building a medical school here would ruin the character of the neighborhood.
NickS, you'd probably get something out of the New Yorker piece I linked.
Thanks; it's paywalled for me, but I'll see if I can find it.
Childcare is a great point though. It's apparently been growing at twice inflation for 30+ years
On the other hand, that one really doesn't affect me (even indirectly, as most of the people I know with kids either have kids in school or parents who do childcare), so it's not great at explaining why I feel sad.
20: All the statistics in the world aren't going to answer the question of why people willingly sabotage their own best interests, you know? Even the epidemiology of mental illness -- for that matter, even the physiology of mental illness -- is pretty poorly understood. A lot of this stuff is not knowable.
However, the fallacies I'm encountering as I try to reply have reminded me of this 2010 classic.
22: We got health reform in 2005, so we've had access for a while. "Lack of providers taking new patients" is what I was talking about. And even if you have a doctor, it's harder to get a primary care appointment." I know lots of people who avid going to doctors because of our-of-pocket costs.
I agree that it's parallel to the housing thing. It's all of a piece. We have workforce shortages in childcare providers as well.
There are two medical schools within five miles of my house. If you count osteopathic medicine.
There is a classic tweet along these lines - Let me just implement an individual solution to this societal problem, that should be fine.
Wait, I just realised! 8 was sarcasm! It was trying to be patronising and rude! That completely passed me by. So sorry.
I know intellectually that 6 is true, and yet it seems really hard to shake the feeling that lots of things are worse than they were in 2005, and I'm not sure how exactly to square that.
I honestly think part of it is that humans are not good at remembering pain. Physical pain in particular - I can think back to when I've been badly injured, and I can remember my actions, I can remember screaming and so on, but I can't recollect the sensation of pain in the way that I can recollect other sensations, like feeling hungry, or the way the snow felt underfoot, or the smell of smoke. And I think the same is true of unhappiness and suffering more generally, it fades in the memory compared to more pleasant events. If you spent a lot of 2005 being sort of generally miserable, you probably won't remember that as clearly as you remember the good bits. Recent misery is still memorable.
. If you spent a lot of 2005 being sort of generally miserable, you probably won't remember that as clearly as you remember the good bits.
There's definitely something to that. I remember, in my early 30 often quoting a line from Dykes To Watch Out For in which Mo is complaining about her life and then says, "at least I'm not in my 20s anymore"
I remember intellectually that I spend much of my 20s feeling anxious and unsure about what I was doing with my life. But now, in my late 40s, I think about my 20s and emotionally just remember being young and having free time and energy.
Stipulating that 6 is in large part true, I think it does illustrate how the Optimism stuff works to undermine good feelings and any sense of progress. It sets the*baseline* as unremitting progress, so somewhat similar to "I earned that raise, the Dem* president screwed me on inflation," my lot should be improving is assumed and any deviations are judged harshly. I think in the US, for instance, ever since we got Morninged in America (which was kind of a secular prosperity gospel) many people feel that things should be improving constantly. And politicians (especially the right) have used that to their advantage. In 2004 we launched a stupid and evil war but the mantra was keep shopping. 2008 was too big to ignore, but people wanted instant rebound (so that + racism= tea party--and also Obama/Rahm/ finance guys were way too cautious although they avoided the horn that was inflation I guess). And a fucking global pandemic is going to reset the baseline for a bit, with scarcities, inflation, and what not,
*Both sides judged but one much, much more harshly.
20: One element is the social pressure on lefties to constantly be unhappy, because saying anything is good is just showing your privilege and means you're a bad person.
Was talking about this with my daughter the other day on the context of the election results. She made pretty much this point and how it chills anyone on the D side talking about how some part of their life has improved due to government action.
It is sort of a Reverse Prosperity Gospel. Your success illustrates you flaws and inherent evilness. I do think to some degree it is both psycholofgically and electorally damaging.
In 2005, I turned 47. It's not impossible for a 66 year old to feel better about life than a 47 year old, but it's not that likely.
I really don't think I'm misremembering and ages 23-29 really were just great for me, and the main reason I don't think I'm misremembering is that I remember the times before (17-23) and after (29-33) as significantly less enjoyable.
35: Traditionally happiness is U-shaped, with 40s as the worst age, and people being happier in the 20s and 60s than their 40s. E.g. this survey paper:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7529452/
But recently there's been some suggestions that this strong pattern has broken down:
https://news.asu.edu/20241024-health-and-medicine-ushaped-happiness-universal
Of course it's social science so usually none of it is reproducible...
30: I'm sorry. It's rare that I'm in a bad enough mood to hit "post" on that shit. I didn't mean it to be patronizing, exactly -- I was genuinely marveling at your overwhelming confidence. It did also read like a brief for cultivating positivity and tenacity even in the face of long odds: the "Ambitions of doing better don't stop you being happy" line made me picture a gallant young man, or perhaps a couple, blithely leaping up the stairway of accomplishment from blessing to blessing. There's nothing useless or wrong or stupid about any of that; it's just rigid.
The book (which I haven't read, am unlikely to read, and am not in any way defending) is about affect in particular, so I imagine it's about the way feelings twist fantasies away from reasonable ideals and ambitions. I would also imagine that rationality doesn't play much of a role.
If you spent a lot of 2005 being sort of generally miserable, you probably won't remember that as clearly as you remember the good bits.
This is so interesting to me. I guess depression basically is the problem of not being able to flush the misery caches, but I remember periods of unhappiness vividly. Really vividly. In those periods when treatment or good fortune have held the depression at bay, actually, there's a clear amnesia around unhappiness, and then when it comes back, it all comes back.
Oh wait, that second one is about different populations, I was thinking of a different paper... Maybe this one?
A lot of the things that feel worse disproportionately hit people in their early 20s. Homeownership went out of reach for anyone not making six figures in about 18 months in Utah. College debt is nuts, even if the real cost is declining now, but the options for no college degree are non-starters. The only reason that daycare isn't twice the mortgage is that mortgages tripled.
So if you were a 20 year old in 2020, a lot of things that you expected would be achievable for yourself in the next decade just aren't. So the fact that homeownership is up and divorce rates are down mean jackshit to young people who don't have a girlfriend/boyfriend, whose rents are up 200% and are working two jobs to try to afford college. Locally, if you couple that with a vision of life that meant never ever leaving Utah* and marrying young, yeah, it's not great vibes. The fact that it's great for people in their 50s doesn't matter much.
*I get it but as a Rust Belt kid, it's hard to fathom.
I think in the US, for instance, ever since we got Morninged in America (which was kind of a secular prosperity gospel) many people feel that things should be improving constantly.
IIRC the US frontier didn't completely close until the 1960s -- there was still homesteading land in Alaska until then. I'd happily tie Didion's tideline to that -- until then the most miserable person in town could actually light out for elsewhere. I have to believe that makes a lot of difference to the temperature they leave behind.
Was it here we talked about the 1970s malaise being partly from the Boomers all wanting houses and childcare at once?
Homesteading in Alaska continued until the 1970s.
I think in the US, for instance, ever since we got Morninged in America (which was kind of a secular prosperity gospel) many people feel that things should be improving constantly
Before 1985 Americans were known for their stoical, silent endurance, profound austerity, and utter resistance to change? This is surreal.
It is worth noting that Berlant wrote what they wrote in her mid-fifties, probably around the time that they were diagnosed with the cancer that eventually killed them. It reminds me slightly of another article posted here a few years ago, about how popular music wasn't nearly as good now as it was in the 1980s, there was nothing new or exciting in pop culture, everything was drab and unimaginative ... and then you look into who wrote it and find out that it was a music critic who killed himself eighteen months later after suffering from severe clinical depression. Terrible for him, and one feels nothing but sympathy, but you do also think: maybe his assessment of the state of modern music reflected that?
A lot of the things that feel worse disproportionately hit people in their early 20s. Homeownership went out of reach for anyone not making six figures in about 18 months in Utah. College debt is nuts, even if the real cost is declining now, but the options for no college degree are non-starters. The only reason that daycare isn't twice the mortgage is that mortgages tripled.
I think this is a miss and a hit. The miss is: home ownership for people in their 20s right now is actually ahead of the two previous generations in their 20s. 27% of Gen Z own a home. At that age, 24% of millennials and 23% of Gen Xers owned a home.
"Maybe it's unusually bad in Utah, though?"
No, it's unusually good in Utah, where more under-35s own a home than in pretty much every other state. https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2024/11/21/utah-homeowners-among-america-youngest
But the hit is that a lot of things really did become rapidly worse in the early 2020s, in a way that they hadn't done in a while, and rapidly worse for younger people in particular, who have no clear memories of the GFC to compare it with, and who were already carrying a bit of an isolation burden from COVID.
45 was that Mark Fisher? Because he's come up twice in unrelated conversations since yesterday and that would make three times.
44: OK. In the light of the still dark morning here I see that did not capture whatever the hell I was trying to say, Probably not worth trying to rescue whatever "thought" it was...
After a couple of attempts at reformulating ,something something, mismatch of people's political expectations with reality as the long postwar boom stopped floating almost everyone's boats. For instance political punishment of attempted political responses to negative realities in the world (Bush Sr. tax cuts punishment, vs, Bush Jr., mid-term shellacking in 2010, Covid malaise elections (not just US, of course)).
But never mind.
But the hit is that a lot of things really did become rapidly worse in the early 2020s, in a way that they hadn't done in a while, and rapidly worse for younger people in particular, who have no clear memories of the GFC to compare it with, and who were already carrying a bit of an isolation burden from COVID.
I have a vague belief that despite Trump doing every last thing wrong, we're headed for a period of prosperity and he'll get the credit, just due to lucky timing.
If, just once in my adult lifetime, a Republican president could serve his term and not have the economic result be the worst performance since the Great Depression, that would be nice.
Changes in longitude, changes in ... uh ... er, nevermind. Anyway, it's lunchtime and my employer generally expects me to be awake when I'm in the office.
So cool.
https://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/galleries/2021/lunar_transit
NASA is an American agency. They should have had the moon transit past North America.
Hawaii is fucking dead center! Do you how long we had to wait for that!?
To 41 and 45, one of the weird things illustrated here is that it's really common nowadays for people to be like "yes things are fine for me, but look how bad it's gotten for these other people" but then when you look into it that's not actually a problem and those other people are also like "yes things are fine for me, but what about etc." and around we go.
Which isn't to say things are good, just that I feel like there's a lot of confusion about what the actual problems are. Or course in Cala's case there is an obvious problem: her employer. Stats are useful and personal information is useful, but we're often awash in vibes which don't seem to match either the people we know or the stats.
Those generational homeownership figures need to be adjusted for net debt and debt service relative to income, as Cala indicated.
My parents had a big house. I have a small house.
Actually my house is medium. But it's crammed with stuff and people.
I'm in a waiting room and there's a guy that looks like Trump from an alternative universe where his parents were poor. Same build, same face, same hair color. But he's wearing jeans and a U.S. Marines t-shirt and hat.
He just stood up. He's shorter than Trump by quite a bit and not wearing a diaper.
AIUI what show up very consistently as the biggest contributors to life satisfaction are marriage/partnership and having children. The latter is falling precipitously across essentially all HIC and most MIC, and I think the latter is too.
My guess is that raising a baby is such a tremendous time/worry/money sink, getting through that makes everything else seem better in comparison.
Er, 66 to 64.
Those generational homeownership figures need to be adjusted for net debt and debt service relative to income, as Cala indicated.
Alternatively: no, they don't, because the original claim was that home ownership was out of reach for everyone not earning six figures, and this isn't true.
But, yes, sure, let's look at housing costs in the US (rent and mortgage payments) as a proportion of income over the last forty years, see if that's changed.
No, it hasn't.
So young people today are spending about as much as they always have on housing. For more of them than in previous generations, that's mortgage payments on a house they own, not rent. Which is good.
And, of course, they're richer than any previous generation in real terms, so they have more money left over after paying for shelter than any previous generation.
So it looks like the CEO of UnitedHealthcare was assassinated in broad daylight in midtown Manhattan.
47: it was Mark Fisher! Back in 2017. http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_15826.html
69: I just put that in a comment.
Dr. Oz, the nominee for CMS administrator, owns a lot of United stock.
The CEO was in town for the annual Investor's conference. I think it was at the hotel. NY Times said taht the shooter knew where Thompson would be and used a silencer.
That's pretty considerate. If Manhattan has a failing, it's all the noise.
69 et seq.: I'm torn between "welcome to 1990s Moscow" and "maybe a salutary reminder that insurance that works and high taxes on millionaires and upwards is the compromise but there are other options available." Maybe also an observation that the anti-abortion movement engaged in a lot of domestic terrorism and look where it got them.
72 he's having a moment. Too bad he's not around anymore to know
I just don't believe in aborting CEOs after the 2600th week.
I was told there would be a wall.
Traditionally happiness is U-shaped, with 40s as the worst age, and people being happier in the 20s and 60s than their 40s. . . . But recently there's been some suggestions that this strong pattern has broken down:
Funny, seeing that it occurred to me that the generation which had the highest Trump vote share was Generation X* and, if the pattern was holding, you would think that would be a cohort hitting the upswing of the happiness curve.
* I'm ashamed
I always heard happiness as an adult was bell shaped and your 40s were peak happiness. At that age you have general maturity to give less fucks but you're still young enough to basically do what you want to do physically and cognitively.
64
Psychologically Gen Z seems way worse off than older generations. They are so anxious and fragile in a way that I find a little shocking. I think growing up with a social life and community that's half on social media is really pernicious. Loneliness is a huge problem and apparently COVID broke dating. I'm older but I have young kids and when I wade onto parenting subreddits they're filled with ridiculous levels of anxiety and support for fairly antisocial behavior (e.g. cutting off your entire family for 6 months after birth to avoid the possibility of illness, cutting off family members over benign annoyances). Obviously reddit isn't necessarily representative of all parents but I do think it reflects a larger "vibe." There are less communal spaces for people to exist in community and the ones around often cost money. A lot of parents want to "optimize" parenting and this is a larger part of younger culture--everything is quantified so you can "optimize" your life in every aspect, reinforced by instagram. As a result people are stressed and freaking out about doing everything wrong all the time instead of taking a breath and enjoying life.
I'm not really on social media and don't really care about people's fancy vacations or how to get the perfect night's sleep or how much protein I should be eating but I fall prey to the all the ads telling me I should be optimizing how I save for retirement or choose my healthcare plan, etc. It really stresses me out and then I tell myself that I don't have to do an optimal job, I just have to do a "good enough" job, to borrow from Bruno Bettelheim who stole it from someone else.
I tell myself that I don't have to do an optimal job, I just have to do a "good enough" job, to borrow from Bruno Bettelheim who stole it from someone else.
I have been recently thinking again about David Roberts essay on "The Medium Chill" (plenty of people have written on the topic, but it's a good piece): https://grist.org/living/2011-06-28-the-medium-chill/
80/81: I think we need to make you more anxious and fragile over your terrible pseud. Can you make one out of three rhyming words for long, time, and lurker? Anagram?
Mmmmaybe not anagrams, actually, unless you're dying to be True King MerloL or something. It's not the best hand.
(Related: this why can't we change our usernames? Reddit thread made me laugh until I cried.)