What does it mean to be a winner or a loser?
Our topic today is looking mighty deeply into the goals of life itself. Bear with me! 123Ish author Dominus took a crack at the concept trying to tie down "The Loser Mindset" - But really, what constitutes winning and losing in today's society? There used to be goalposts, but now they've moved.
Just recently, NY Magazine pondered why so many Millennials now seem to identify as Socialists. When the story posted on Reddit, commenter Sam474 rang in with a pithy observation: See, American kids are brought up to believe that "America is the greatest country in the world," and that they must work hard and sacrifice a lot to be successful. Then they get online and find out that Europeans get free health care, free child care, free school, years of vacation time, employment insurance… on and on. They get jealous, and well they should.
European systems aren't even pure Socialism, just a blended Socialist Democracy. They have just as much of a free market as anybody else. But they get a safety net too.
Where does this tie in with our discussion? At the point where we have to notice that society dictates your standards of winning and losing.
In a society of worker ants, the idle grasshopper is the sinner. That moral fits just great in an agrarian society where you have a {one crop = one fed person} ratio.
But hang on, we have a new society forming all over the world now where machines do lots of the work. When automated production is supplying our basic needs for free when more and more machines replace human labor, what becomes of our almighty Protestant Work Ethic now?
Who Moved My Cheese?
That's the title of a popular business book near turn-of-century about changing motivations in work and life, but those sneaky cheese-movers have returned to strike again since then. I explained how technology chokes out jobs way back here, but there's a more direct way to pose the problem. This guy:
Popular Internet meme, but have you ever really studied this picture?
My phone does all this and more. When modern economists ask "What's killing the malls?" and answer "Amazon," it's not that simple!
I can dial up any movie in history and watch it on my tablet. Thirty years ago, I had to buy a VCR/DVD, a TV, cables to hook all that up, batteries for the remote, and then buy a separate DVD for each movie I wanted to see. Wait, how would I have found out about obscure Italian directors who made Giallo Exorcist knock-offs in the 1970s? I would have to buy a big book of all of Leonard Maltin's reviews to find out about them in the first place. Phones have replaced every part of the movie consumption experience but the popcorn.
All that time I spend playing phone games would have been spent on a console and individual game cartridges for that. Every time I pull up Google Maps, I don't have to buy a paper map. I do my banking online now, so that saves trips to the bank. I don't use the postal service so much, so no need for envelopes, stationery, or stamps. I do most of my reading now electronically, so no need for books, magazines, or newspapers. The same goes for listening to music. You wouldn't believe how much we used to spend on the biggest stereo system we could afford, tweaking with speakers, arguing about woofers, and then we'd have to buy individual albums too.
There are even considerable secondary effects. Less need to shop around town for all this stuff is less wear and tear on my car and shoes, so I buy less gas, fewer tires, fewer clothes because I can lounge around the house all day in my sweats nattering on my laptop on Twitter. Wait a minute, I work from home doing this, so "nattering on Twitter" is part of my job description anyway.
Technology killed a lot of consumerism, point blank. And with it has gone the retail jobs. Your success in life used to be dictated by your career path, but what happens now that there may very well be a generation whose success in life isn't attached to a job? Because we face a future where jobs are no longer guaranteed for everyone.
Other Avenues For Success
What do we define as success or failure in life? For each of us, the question becomes an internal, subjective one, rather than an objective. Some might define success as raising a family, advancing through the ranks in a military, becoming a world-renowned poet, or whatever your personal goal becomes. But we have to accept at some point that not everybody wants to have a goal at all - some people just want to exist. We used to define this as being lazy or failure, but we're still on our way to building a society where we don't need to work so much.
That Vox video says what I used to think. But now I've seen that when automated AI drivers replace all the truck drivers, we can't just send them all to school to learn to be Java programmers. True, in the past and currently, we just open new markets to replace the old outdated ones. And good riddance, who wants horses and buggies clogging the streets after we get automobiles? The idea of Universal Basic Income covers the other half of the question of the post-work economy.
Now, here again, that video strives to reassure us that no, really, people won't all turn into alcoholic bums when they get free money from the state. Honest and truly, we'll all become more productive.
Do you know what the next step in our social evolution is? Letting people become alcoholic bums.
No, really! Go ahead, Joe Sixpack, enjoy that early retirement! Spend your whole life playing video games and toking that bong. By excluding yourself from the system (just like you would have anyway on the old welfare standard), you have automatically shown us that you don't feel you have anything to contribute, and we're done arguing with you. Rather than force you to become yet another surly barista at Starbucks who rolls his eyes at our coffee orders, we'll let you check out and become that most irreplaceable role of Capitalist utopia: The Idle Consumer. Furthermore, you open up that job you would have taken to an ambitious gopher who wants to work their way up to indie record producer, and who has a good enough attitude to care about coffee orders in the meantime.
Look, we understand. When we've been defining success as "earn a big pile of money" for this long, we tend to get millionaires protesting that they don't pay enough taxes. Yes, you heard right: World-class billionaires (Bill Gates, Warren Buffet) are now complaining they make too much money and want to redistribute the wealth. Do you know what the problem is? They've run out of things to buy because we broke shopping. The malls are dying, you know. We do everything with phones now.
How Do I Still Be A Winner Anyway?
I have no general formula for you. I'm sorry. Your path to success will be based on your individual goals now. It isn't just "go to school, go to work, work until you're almost dead" anymore.
I CAN give you my example, however. By every metric, I count myself as a smashing success. I'm not nearly rich enough to be comfortable, but by writer's income standards, I'm knocking it dead. But I have satisfactions other than dollars to count.
I get to do what I love to do. I work from home, close by family and pet. My finger is on the pulse of the emerging industry by working in social media online; my job is robot-proof. I get to inform people, fascinate them, intrigue them, make them laugh, and give them new intellectual nuggets to chew on. I'm my own boss; if I don't like the cut of my client's jib, I can move on to a new one. I do not feel compelled to do anything against my morals.
The child I once was would be proud of the adult I am now. That's such an outstanding thing to be able to say!
I'm just not the kind of person who measures success in material wealth. I count myself richer for the experiences I've had and the life I've lived, the moments I'll remember. I'm no Gandhi, I do appreciate getting to be financially comfortable and staying there, but no further. I don't need a yacht. My pleasures are so simple that a mere hike in the woods makes my whole month.
There's plenty of people in society who would look at me and call me a loser: Brainless jocks who see all life as a bloodthirsty competition. Heartless capitalists who would scoff at my letting my conscience get in the way of getting rich. Psychotic anti-intellectuals who spit on my very craft because they think reading is for faggots. These people routinely confront me both online and in real life, and I drive them CRAZY. They get in my face and scream and rage. I love it.
Work for your happiness, don't interfere with others' happiness more than you absolutely can't help, and you're a success.