The Vise
What's squeezing the meaning out of modern life.
There has been a fair amount of writing about the negative impacts of the financialization of modern life, and most of it has been very on point. But I think this is actually only one of the two massive social pressures that is leading to counterintuitive behaviours, self destructive decision making, and a general sense of malaise that many of us are projecting at each other on a day to day basis.
People are feeling caught, between the wave of financialization that is turning everything about their life into an investment, and the wave of pathologization that is turning everything about their self into a diagnosis.
You’ve heard about financialization at this point, but to recap: when everything can have monetary value, everything will. Not only your education, career path, and life choices, but sports becoming primarily about gambling, prediction markets turning the rest of your life into a betting opportunity, and single-stock retail investing turning every waking moment into a respectable casino. This has seeped into our broader optimization culture, as well. You obsessively track your diet and exercise, buy three separate devices to quantify yourself, and then validate your investment by changing how you work out, how you eat, and how you rest. You worry about doing it “wrong” despite knowing movement is good for you in and of itself. You judge your progress by a graph, not a feeling. You benchmark yourself against others and start looking for more and more hacks, to increase the comparative return on your investments. The spectrum starts with an Oura ring and a supplement Huberman mentions, and ends with injecting grey-market unapproved peptides from a foreign factory. And that’s not even talking about the people evaluating the cost benefits of GLP-1s versus groceries.
The broader social implications of this mindset is showing up in interesting places. Materialists builds an entire narrative on whether or not it’s possible or wise to love someone who isn’t a good ‘investment’. Social media content openly discussing the arbitrage of attractiveness as a mate, for a life of easy privilege. When people are feeling economically at risk, and the world order is crumbling, money becomes the only form of purpose available.
When everything is finance, and finance is everything, meaning is harder to come by.
The second pressure is one I’m seeing a lot less conversation about, but I think it’s as important. When I talk about pathologization, what I’m referring to is the way personality traits and social dynamics seem to have been displaced in broader culture with diagnoses and disfunction. Some of this is a side effect of the rise in therapy-speak in day to day life, where very specific concepts are taken out of context and wielded as a bludgeon; a common one is ‘emotional labour’ but another greatest hit are accusing other people of being narcissistic or sociopathic because you don’t get along with them. This trend went into overdrive during the pandemic, when a huge cohort of people started to self-diagnose with ADHD, autism, and anxiety disorders, often with little more evidence than relating to a TikTok video and the content of a subsequent google search. Obviously, each of these things are real. Obviously, many people will need actual (ideally professional) help learning how to manage or live with these types of neurodiversity. But there’s value in people being allowed to be shy, or nervous, without treating it as a condition, too.
One of the most visible examples of this ongoing trend of pathologization is in dating. People are identifying themselves on platforms by their self-diagnosed mental health conditions, which is fine. But the discussion has also shifted to one of attachment styles, broad pronouncements of abusive behaviour, and even medicalizing concepts like infatuation as “limerence”. We are slowly turning more and more average social interactions into problems to be solved or avoided, turning more or less neutral traits into flaws.
When you internalize this mindset and language, you don’t really get to have a personality, anymore. You become a collection of conditions and traumas, defined entirely by things outside of your control. Who you are beyond diagnoses becomes limited to what you own and what you like rather than how you behave or what you feel. For all the accusations about capitalism robbing us of individuality, capitalism never told you to feel bad for having a crush on someone you’re dating.
This is the vise. On one side you have a creeping financialization that makes everything about you a quest to optimize your worth, financially and quasi-financially. On the other side you have the least zen deconstruction of the self possible, where you are reduced only to a collection of diagnoses, trends, and accumulations.
Money replacing meaning. Diagnosis replacing identity.
This is maybe the best explanation for what I’ve seen described as nihilism in today’s youth. If your entire value is judged on your monetary worth, which is hugely influenced by the circumstances of your birth, and your identity is shaped primarily by diagnoses which are ALSO thought to be heavily influenced by who your parents are… we’re entering an oddly fatalist version of an individualistic society, where we openly suggest that you have limited control over who you are and what you achieve… but we’re going to judge you for it anyway.
There is a huge opportunity to credibly step outside these pressures, the two sides of this vise, without trivializing the importance of money, or the validity of mental health and neurodiversity. But in order to step outside something, you need to be able to see it first.