Part 1 of this retrospective focused on the events and education that allowed me to see the world in a different way than most people, and to appreciate the depth and complexity of human being. In Part 2, I outlined how this different world view affects how I think and act daily, and how others with a similar world view might also benefit. Most of the guidance in Part 2 is based on my experiences in growing up, and if you don’t share that background, it probably won’t resonate and mean much to you. That’s the main reason I refuse to engage in philosophical discussions with people who don’t already have that background: my perspective doesn’t “scale well”, to borrow a term from systems engineering. My concerns and my solutions work well for me and for others like me, but they will undoubtedly fail as a prescription for most people. Part of this lack of scaling is because I have been able to insulate myself from many of the day-to-day concerns that affect others, such as having to work at awful jobs, or having to deal with people who do not value education, or having a close-knit family structure that prevents a lot of questioning of personal values. Because my background is so much different from others, what I value as worth living for is mostly foreign to others, and is something that I cannot share socially, at least in an explicit way.
Part 3 takes a quick look at how much has changed since I was growing up and was more involved in the workplace. It’s not an in-depth analysis of our current culture and its values, because I am not qualified to do that from my rather insulated perspective, but it does point out some of the areas where I have serious concerns about our current state and its apparent direction. One of the reasons for looking at these changes is that there are times when I feel I should be reaching out to help others who haven’t been as fortunate as myself. However, every time I have such thoughts, I end up feeling frustrated that this world isn’t mine to change and that nobody wants to change, anyway.
The world has changed
The emergence of large-scale automation, the increasing use of technology in our lives, and the flourishing of the social sciences have all contributed to a world that is substantially different from the one we navigated in the 60’s through the end of the last century. I think that overall, it is much more difficult today to learn about your cultural history, question reality, understand the social orders, and find a more meaningful and fulfilling life than when we grew up. This section describes some of the changes that I think are the most important to a person like me.
Freedom to learn
In Part 1, I noted that when I grew up, there were a lot more opportunities to “experiment” culturally, socially and economically than today. For example, I went to a major university that charged a mere $50 a quarter for tuition, and that allowed me to take enriching courses that I otherwise could not justify. You can look at charts from studies on social mobility and wealth disparity and see how much more difficult it is to “get ahead” in today’s world, and how much more difficult it has become to enjoy a wide range of social experiences without being born into a wealthy family. There are still many opportunities to learn in good schools, but rising tuition costs have put these opportunities out of reach for many people like me. Given these high costs, students today are pressured to put more emphasis on career preparation. A recent study at the University of Maryland showed a steady decrease in humanities majors to almost one-half from 2010 to 2022, whereas the number of computer science majors has tripled. If that study is an indicator of a national trend, then clearly, more students are worried about career preparation than getting the more traditional “well-rounded” education.
Freedom to “question reality”
To question how we form thoughts and where this reality we live in “comes from”, we need to understand how ideas evolve and change. That is, we need an historical perspective to appreciate how thoughts take place in a social context, and to understand that the context changes through time. However, we live in a technological world where it is sometimes difficult to understand how the complex devices around us have come to be. We take for granted those cell phones and computers and social media on an interconnected web of information, and it can be difficult to stand back and understand this complex world and imagine how it would be otherwise.
I grew up in a time when technology was just starting to become highly refined. Our electronics were rather crude, with transistor radios and the transition from vacuum tube computers and very simple home appliances. Our mechanical devices were also crude, as automobiles didn’t last very long and required regular maintenance and manufacturing equipment wasn’t automated with robotics under computer control. Since we could witness technology in its early crude formative years, we are able to appreciate how technology evolved, and we can look at technological devices with less awe and more disdain. Maybe there are other compensating factors, but it seems that it is more difficult now to question the things around us and appreciate how different things were 100 years ago.
Freedom to question the social order
I’ve always been curious why the social turbulence of the 60’s seemed to fade away without resurging. In the last 50 years the wealth disparity has increased dramatically, which I expected would create greater discontent and rebellion. However, the race riots and marches and protests of our youth have died down, despite the increasing disparities in wealth, social and education opportunities, and general living conditions. There has been a strange calm that I don’t understand.
That rebellious spirit of the 60’s, in which so many people reacted to the staid social order of the post-war 50’s, wasn’t profound enough to continue for many years, and we haven’t seen that level of social protest in the years since then. It almost feels as though another round of large-scale social upheaval is no longer possible. Although a strong social order has some great benefits, it’s probably a sign of hopelessness when people are no longer willing to rise to fight for ideological principles and social justice and other “worthy” causes.
People have changed
Our modern society is much different that when I grew up, with different types of people than who we worked with. There are still many interesting and profound souls in today’s world, but there seems to be more people who are “lost”, without a clear purpose in life and without much desire to even have one. The following subsections describe some of the different types of people that concern me the most, and who seem to be found in greater numbers in today’s world:
People who are lonely and unhappy
Many researchers have claimed that in today’s social media environment, there is a rise of loneliness associated with more superficial relationships and fewer close or “deep” relationships. This video discusses that issue rather well and doesn’t need further comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSQjk9jKarg.
The 2024 World Happiness Report shows a significant decline in happiness in the U.S. among people under 30 to place it 62nd among all nations surveyed, and a 2022 Harvard study shows a 20-year decline in happiness for the 18 to 25 age group (see this NYT article: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/20/us/world-happiness-report-finland-us.html). The authors of these studies cite several reasons for these changes, but the only point I am trying to make here is that there is evidence to indicate that people have changed over the past several decades. As the Harvard study notes, they are less happy, have poorer mental and physical health, lack a sense of purpose, have fewer close social relationships, and have less financial stability.
People who misuse the social sciences
Another type of people that we didn’t see as prominently in my youth are those who tend to “pidgeon-hole” others into neat categories. You can do a Google search on the term “types of people” and find various ways to group people according to personality types, social behavior, sexual orientation, or several other categories. This link is one of those that discusses several classification schemes: https://positivepsychology.com/big-five-personality-theory/.
There are two problems with lumping people into categories, such as a “Type A” personality. First, this process tends to strip away our belief in free will and reduces personal responsibility by blaming our actions on our biology and our formation at birth. The excuse keeps coming up that “I can’t help it—that’s just the way I am,” or the more radical version: “I need to be who I am.” These people invoke the social sciences that study cultures and define these categories based on large-scale statistical analysis. However, for the social sciences these categories are simply demonstrated types of behaviors, but the careful social scientist does not take that additional step of claiming that these behaviors represent different types of people. Putting people into social or psychological categories seems a lot more common now that it was when I was growing up, perhaps because we believe those categories have been validated by social science.
Second, putting people in categories is a way of minimizing and dismissing others, and it shuts off dialogue. Instead of listening to other people and trying to benefit from their experience, we tend to classify them as a “so and so” and dismiss them as having nothing new to offer us, without listening to what they might offer. The poor souls like me who have tried very hard all their life to defy categorization find this lack of listening and quick dismissal especially frustrating.
People mired in misinformation and bad science
One of my favorite internet memes is a page with this saying:
Do y’all remember, before the internet, that people thought the cause of stupidity was the lack of access to information? Yeah. It wasn’t that.
With the Internet and initiatives like Wikipedia, we now have access to historical accounts, technical data, original sources, documentaries and so many other quality sources of information. However, the Internet has also provided a voice to misinformation and the opinions of idiots. We are flooded with false accounts of history, bad and sometimes harmful information, shallow opinions, phishing, porn and other perversions. Overall, this wonderful resource has helped people get access to truth and a better understanding of history, but it has also spread misinformation and helped normalize bad science.
Good science is characterized by rigorous thinking, where you start with validated models of the world and apply them to things or events, making sure there are no contradictions or inconsistencies. It requires critical thinking skills to ensure that your input data is true and accurate and that the models have been applied logically. However, there is a depressingly large number of public posts on the Internet that draw bad conclusions from bad information, and where there is no evidence of careful critical thinking throughout their arguments. This problem has become almost scary in this age of social media, where people who don’t appreciate or know how to practice science can publish nonsense and enjoy a large audience for their posts. We had plenty of people who lacked critical thinking skills back in our day as well, but they didn’t have the opportunities to publish and disseminate falsehoods and display their poor thinking skills as they do today.
People lost in “celebrity” and emotion work
There is some recent literature that attempts to explain our fascination with celebrity and how our expectations for celebrities have evolved over the last few decades. More importantly, these expectations have shaped modern culture and have changed how we try to present ourselves to others, particularly in the workplace. This relationship with celebrity is not something that we needed to deal with when I was growing up, but it has become a major cultural current, so it is worth looking at in this section that addresses how the world has changed.
Many of the studies on celebrity reference the work of social scientist Arlie Russell Hochschild, who maintains that human emotions—joy, sadness, anger, elation, jealousy, envy, despair—are, in large part, social. This position is fully consistent with Heidegger’s account of moods discussed earlier in this retrospective (see the article by Robertson). For both Heidegger and Hochschild, our culture provides us prototypes or templates for expressing inner states, that get interpreted or analyzed as “emotions”. Hochschild coins the term “emotion work” to refer to the act of trying to change in degree or quality an emotion or feeling. She also uses the term “managing emotions” and “deep acting” in place of emotion work. Emotion work is the effort to perform the ‘right’ feeling and ultimately even ‘feel’ the right feeling according to the rules of the setting and often in the service of commerce.
One example of “emotion work” that Hochschild provides is at a funeral when we our feelings do not fit the situation, such as when the bereaved has a desire to feel a sense of relief that a burden of long-term care has been lifted, or experiences a sense of elation at the thought of an inheritance. In this case, our feelings do not align with the social expectation of feeling sad. Other examples she cites include the smoothly warm airline hostess, the ever-cheerful secretary, the un-irritated complaint clerk, the undisgusted proctologist, or the teacher who likes every student equally. In each case, there is work required to make feelings consistent with the needs of the situation, and to conform to the social rules or guidelines. Back when I was young, there were people we identified as “phoney” who engaged in “emotion work”, and who we dismissed as shallow. But the level of this work in today’s world, particularly in the celebrity arena, seems far greater and more practiced, and this manipulative work seems much more common and integrated into our modern society.
This concept of “emotion work” is taken as a starting point in the paper on celebrity by Heather Nunn and Anita Biressi, and they apply that concept to the demands of celebrity. Their work focuses on “celebrity culture”, which Wikipedia defines as
…a high-volume exposure to celebrities’ personal lives on a global scale. It is inherently tied to consumer interests where celebrities transform their fame to become product brands. …This “culture” is created when there is common knowledge within a society that people are interested in celebrities and are willing to alter their own lives to take part in celebrities’ lives.
The modern celebrity culture became prominent in the 1930s and ’40s, through gossip columnists such as Walter Winchell, but it has flourished with the emergence of media productions such as Reality television, the ghosted autobiography and the “tell-all” interview.
Nunn and Biressi argue that our modern society has trended toward a celebrity culture because of both capitalism and the ‘democratizing sentiments’ of an apparently accessible culture. The celebrity figure offers a model of personal success which reinforces the idea of individual achievement and social success as attainable by all. Further, they argue that modern society forces us to negotiate in the public realm to be regarded as socially successful. The popularity of social media and public interaction tools such as Facebook (with over three billion monthly active users), Instagram and TikTok demonstrate this trend toward more public negotiation.
Nunn and Biressi cite the work of Richard Sennett, who discusses an ideology of intimacy that has arisen from our fascination with the psychology of private life. Sennett argues that the advent of modern psychology and of psychoanalysis as a doctrine has resulted in a standardization of unconscious life and the models of personality attached to it. As a result, we have produced formulas for the calculation of the public expression of suffering, regret, apology and reparation. This is the same argument as presented in Part 2 of this retrospective, that discusses the oversimplifications of “emotions”. It’s these calculated emotions that are the “emotion work” of the celebrity, as these public expressions are what the audience wants to see, and the celebrity needs to meet those expectations.
Their paper provides a wealth of examples from various Reality TV shows and intimate interviews, that invariably demonstrate the celebrity’s road to self-understanding, through confession, introspection, and ultimately finding the peace of an improved self. The authors point out the celebrity oftentimes needs to admit to a tragedy or serious dysfunction, with a long-running difficult psychic journey to be happy against adversity, complicated by fame and the media spotlight. The authors point out that this is “truthful” or “authentic” confession is typically part of the pact between the celebrity and their follows, and “selling” those emotions is the deep acting that constitutes the emotion work that Hochschild describes.
In some ways, this fascination with celebrity culture seems innocuous, as much of celebrity watching is simply entertainment and escapism. But the authors of this paper quote Sternberg, who argues that this task of “emotion work” has also become engrained in politics and the modern workplace, where we are expected to “shape the persona in consonance with market forces.” The successful corporate worker will mimic the strategies of the celebrity: “To truly advance his value on the market, the ambitious performer must be willing to calculatedly adapt persona to the desires of the audience.” Probably even more insidious is the celebrity culture impact on young people posting on social media performance sites such as TikTok, where young users market their “emotion work” for their followers. The need to publicly display one’s inner states in a way that meets other’s expectations is an unfair burden for someone growing up in today’s world.
The main reason this section is in this retrospective is that this modern emphasis on selling yourself to meet current social expectations is one of the reasons I felt I needed to retire. I had worked for many years without needing to be concerned about my attitude or my “emotional relationships” with coworkers or conforming to popular social norms, but in later years those issues, and the emotion work required to maintain the right image, became an increasing part of the job. I never needed a public life to have success in engineering, and I certainly didn’t need to follow celebrities and their deep acting to feel fulfilled in my personal life. That’s another way in which the world has changed, and for me, it is yet another way in which we have become less authentic and more concerned with outward appearances rather than hidden beauty.
Gooood People
There is a populist notion that people are at their most “natural” and most human when they reject the values of the “educated elite”. Populism makes an implicit claim that common working people are a morally good force with wholesome values, and that it is not necessary to “improve” oneself through education or religious or other cultural conversions. The term “gooood” people is sometimes used to describe them, where the vowels in the word “good” have been drawn out or even extended by several syllables.
I can often get along fine with these people in initial meetings, as I usually try to say something that shows I share some of their interests, and that is an effective “ice-breaker”. I don’t deny that these people usually have a strong moral character that makes their social groups effective, but there are two major issues that I have with such people.
First, they typically shun the pursuit of truth and history, and have a “live for today” mentality. As a result, they are not “deep thinkers”, and lack the fertile soil and even the seeds needed to produce beautiful works. There is usually a monotony of thought that has taken over in place of interesting ideas, where vapid TV shows and simple physical pleasures have become the pinnacles of their culture. Their world is more of a flat wasteland than a world of beauty and depth, without much hope of ever giving birth to great literature, great music, or exciting cultural growth. If you are looking for profound thinking and the beauty of an iceberg, you won’t find it among the gooood people.
But the second issue I have with gooood people is that there are often strong currents of violence due to deep-seated animosity hidden in their moral goodness. There have been several major populist movements throughout history that have led to violence in overthrowing the corrupt elite establishment, so there is ample evidence that populism can lead to hatred and violence. There is resentment that ultimately builds up, directed toward those in power or those who are viewed as elites in other ways, such as teachers of history, philosophers, civil rights advocates, or even religious leaders. This resentment can be exploited by demagogues who provide overly simplistic answers to complex issues or by politicians who promise to address their resentment with poorly thought-out solutions. Because these gooood people usually have poorly developed critical thinking skills, they are susceptible to believing these simplistic answers and promises of a better life. When that happens, that moral goodness can get overrun by violence and hatred in the name of vengeance.
Gooood people have been around for many generations, but the numbers seemed to have increased rather dramatically since the previous decade. Otherwise, how could a demagogue like Trump have been able to achieve such a huge following to become president of the United States? Also, those poorly developed critical thinking skills help bad science flourish, so these gooood people are often the ones posting poorly researched and historically inaccurate nonsense on the internet.
So what?
So, the world has changed, and people seem to have changed, so the question becomes: what should I do about it? How should I adapt to the new order, and what role should I strive for and what social responsibilities do I have in my later years? And are things really going downhill for modern culture, or are there signs of hope that we are about to emerge into a revitalized culture that will once again bear the fruit of great art and beauty? There is also the question that has terrorized my wife for so many years: “are you really that hard-assed about maintaining and asserting your values?”. That’s a lot of questions, but some of those are just “teasers” that need to be addressed elsewhere. There are only two questions that really matter to me: 1) what should I do in my later years, and 2) will things get better?
My short-term plans
I have avoided trying to share my perspectives with others, with the one exception of my wife. As I noted in earlier sections, there is a huge responsibility that comes with changing other people’s ideas about the world, and it is too easy for people to become dependent on you. I don’t need people around me to share my views, and I don’t need a lot of support from others. I have plenty of hobbies and I’m in a good relationship. As a result, I can live pretty much anywhere and feel comfortable with my life and with those around me.
Living in a small town in the mountains puts you among many gooood people, but one of the virtues of gooood people is that they are generally easy-going and for the most part they don’t believe in forcing their values on others. On the other hand, a large suburban area will give you many neighbors who are more self-absorbed and tend to be much more judgmental and who are more likely to classify you and be more dismissive. There also seem to be a lot more neighbors in the suburbs who suffer from loneliness and other “instabilities”. Our neighbors in the suburbs were also often unable to be self-sufficient, as we saw a shocking level of incompetence in being able to take care of a house, or to deal with a wide range of “first-world problems”. My preference between these two choices would be living in the mountains, although I think that living in a college town somewhere would suit me best.
I’ve often felt an obligation to help others and wondered whether I should be more active in the community. That would no doubt require some compromises in values, but nobody can swim against the currents of modern culture without growing tired, and everybody needs to follow the flows to some extent. But every time I have those thoughts of reaching out and helping others, I get a feeling that I am just trying to meet some ideal of being generous and giving, and then it doesn’t feel like something I really want for myself. It’s probably something I should try, but with so many projects going on, I’ve never followed through. Also, I don’t have the academic background to express my values and beliefs in ways that are meaningful to others. I am fine with just posting technical help on my website, audiodevelopers.com, and I try to inspire others to enjoy the hobby of fine audio design. I always try to post designs in a way that will encourage others to think “way outside the box”, and I feel that maintaining this website fulfills my social obligation to help others.
So, my current situation of living in a small town, mostly isolated from others, but plugged into online technical communities, is fine for me, and I don’t feel any need to change.
My long-term plans
Unfortunately, we all slow down, we suffer the effects of old age, and we all eventually die. Barbara and I are at the age where we need to think about what would happen if one of us died before the other, and how we would take care of a large house and all those health issues that arise from old age. Living in the mountains can be hard on you physically, as the weather can be challenging and there are always things that need to be fixed. And not having sidewalks and parks close by makes it a lot more difficult to keep yourself and pets in decent shape.
We know that eventually we will need to move from here and get closer to other family members, as we will start to be less self-sufficient as our abilities deteriorate even more. We haven’t started to talk about this yet, although I have been working on house repairs that I know will be necessary should we need to sell the house and move elsewhere. We still need to come up with some long-term plans and need to get more serious about those plans very soon.
My predictions for the future
The increase in unhappiness and loneliness in the under-30yr demographic should be a major concern for anyone hoping that our modern culture will “turn a corner” soon. Furthermore, we have a neighbor here who believes that Donald Trump was sent by God to save us, and I know that this sentiment is shared by many others in the 30-60yr demographic. Given that grim fact, it’s probably up to the shrinking baby boomer generation to shake things up (again). But that’s not likely unless they get far more involved with today’s technology and find ways to communicate across two generations to the under-30 population. And with rising wealth disparity and less access to quality education, that newest generation is going to find it difficult to start a social revolution that will improve our well-being, which the Harvard study identified as “happiness, health, meaning, character, social relationships, and financial stability”.
Much of our current condition derives from the massive changes in technology and the effect of social media, and maybe we will develop a more productive and beneficial relationship with technology. But it still feels like we have a long way to go, especially with the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI).
AI can very efficiently analyze large data sets for patterns, similar to the way the human brain relies on stored patterns learned through its interaction with the world. AI can recognize human input from handwriting to speech and by analyzing sources like Wikipedia, it can formulate responses to questions that would have been difficult for humans to answer several years ago. We are just beginning to feel the impact from modern AI, as many manufacturing and service jobs have already been eliminated by more cost-effective robots. This trend will continue as AI is applied in more domains. As AI emerges as an economical solution for a wide range of both manufacturing and service industry jobs, there will likely be increasing social disruption and wealth disparity. I’ll make a prediction here that the greatest challenge from Artificial Intelligence will come when it can model the social rules that underlie “emotion work” described in the section on celebrity. Those social rules are not overly complex and don’t require meditative thinking, so I am sure we will see “emotion programming” soon enough. I don’t know whether that will scare people into a more productive relationship with technology and celebrity or cause even more social decline, but it is quite clear that AI is going to dramatically impact our culture in the future.
Given these evolving challenges from rapidly changing technology and the still-prevalent fascination with demagogues like Donald Trump, it feels like we have a way to go before turning a corner. And, if we can believe Hölderlin, the saving power, or hope, will be there when there is danger. Some people are starting to speak of the dangers of technology and the dangers of demagoguery, but it will take a chorus rather than a few voices to move people to sense those dangers.
Of course, technology opens many new possibilities that could be the foundation for improved well-being. For example, sites like YouTube have allowed new freedoms for artistic expression and provided new ways to learn about a wide variety of subjects. There are even quite a few videos with lectures from Dreyfus discussing Heidegger, along with an amazing array of videos discussing topics in math, physics, and many other sciences, as well as great musical performances. And, although it might be an anomaly, there are studies showing a resurgence in classical music: https://www.honest-broker.com/p/six-recent-studies-show-an-unexpected. So, maybe we are on a good path in our relationship with technology and just need a cultural upheaval or a hero to emerge who will help us embrace our humanity. In the meantime, we’ll be hiding out in our cabin in the mountains.