Comedian Marc Maron recently chastised fellow comedian Bill Maher with what he deemed “desperate chasing of relevance,” and this notion captured for me something that I’ve observed in sessions with patients.
In The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-First Century, psychoanalyst Carlo Strenger discusses the dread of being invisible — or, egads, merely “ordinary” rather than extraordinary humans — against a cultural backdrop that worships fame, wealth, optimizing, and “maxxing.” Because the ideals promoted by our infotainment-based society are inherently unreachable, most of us are “doomed to fail or fall short,” a condition that places us on hamster wheels of continual desperation to remain relevant while retaining the facade of looking calm, cool, and collected.
Strenger notes that pop-spirituality and self-help, including the dynamic that Ron Purser decries in his brilliant book McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality, have replaced religion as our primary coping mechanism and that this replacement ultimately exacerbates our anxiety rather than ameliorating it. Neither our society’s spiritual ideals, nor material ideals, nor reputational ideals are ever attainable, which keeps all of us on hamster wheels chasing relevance, including the celebrities, artists, billionaires and gurus we most admire. Strenger believes that human beings carry a deep need “to matter, make a difference, and feel a significant purpose” within whatever frame of reference is defined as important by their society. Since the birth of the Internet, “living out loud” and deeming oneself a “public figure”, trying always to remain relevant by producing new content (like this blog), appears to be the context, backdrop, or the stage in which and on which we fret.
One hundred seventy-five years ago at Walden Pond, Thoreau observed that most people “lead lives of quiet desperation,” a condition absorbed in silence, mowing the lawn and paying a mortgage, while a private hopelessness accumulates week after week. From growing up with a television that had four stations (plus a public access channel) to now existing in a world with billions of sites and apps that transmit simulacra, the quiet desperation that is normal to the human condition according to Thoreau has now magnified into a loud desperation of people trying to remain relevant.
For almost twenty years I have taught classes on authenticity, and I have come to believe that almost everything we do in public, including the way we speak and the clothing that we wear, is performative. This observation updates what psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called “The split subject.” Lacan proposed that we become alienated from ourselves — split — the moment we are “thrown into language,” to borrow Heidegger’s phrase: the moment we begin using words to express ourselves rather than cries and smiles. The split I would locate today runs between the self we consider to be authentic, the person we are when we are alone in our bathrooms, and the performative self we present to the world, such as the person we are on social media. My books and workshops give students tools to be more authentic, more congruent, and less hypocritical.
Having dared to update Lacan, now I will update Thoreau as well: Where Thoreau located quiet desperation, I am witnessing a rise à la Marc Maron in what I would call “loud desperation,” a general condition affecting a generation that treats every post like another ticket in a perpetual lottery of social relevance and going viral. For me in Los Angeles, this condition becomes especially vivid in the adult children of parents who built something financially substantial — a business, a real estate portfolio, art, music, etc. — something that now includes a family trust that is the result of several generations of labor. For the people in my community who were born sliding into home plate, who grew up surrounded by the spoils of family accomplishment, what I’ve observed in sessions, from a largely unconscious awareness that they cannot do better than their parents financially, is a desperation to be relevant. However, in contrast to Thoreau’s quiet desperation, what I have witnessed today is loud desperation — the loudness is often inadvertent, but it is loud nonetheless.
I do not believe Steve Jobs ever introduced himself by saying, “I’m Steve Jobs, I am a founder,” and yet my community remains full of people introducing themselves precisely this way, borrowing the vocabulary of accomplishment before having done the accomplishing. This “fake it until you make it” level of inauthenticity is loudly desperate. OK, so your parents or grandparents worked hard, invested in real estate, and set up funds that enable you to avoid a 9-5 job, but anointing yourself a “Founder” (it costs $750 to start an LLC) or a “Public Figure” is an exaggeration at best. I like what Warren Buffett said, “I’m giving my children enough money to do something but not enough to do nothing.”
Douglas Coupland gave Generation X a determining ditty when he declared that we’re the first generation to have less financial potential than our parents — something documented thirty years later by economist Thomas Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Conversely, and somewhat ironically, what we lack in earning potential, thanks to the internet, we’re making up for in social relevance.
But before turning up the volume on your pitch deck or glossy new podcast, just know that all of the money in the world does not and will not insulate anyone from feeling desperately irrelevant. Just ask Perez Hilton or Paris Hilton or any of the influencers desperately going to extremes to capture ten seconds of your attention that they can ultimately transmute into revenue.
For the rest of us… let’s just try to keep it quiet.