Earlier this month, I wrote about the abundance of opportunities facing young people, and our inability to properly adjudicate between these choices. We are wealthy and miserable, and one not need look at the terrifying rise in deaths of despair and sharp decline in birth rates to be convinced: we have seen many of our own friends and family members develop addictions to alcohol, Adderall, and worse.
My prescription — which is far from complete — was the adoption of a formative worldview, one which judges opportunities, discerns life choices, and approaches decision making in these most interesting times with a view towards our formation, rather than our instant gratification. This requires a conscious effort from each of us to defy the conventional consumerism of our time, which whispers a vicious lie in our ears, one as old as time: “your fulfillment comes from satisfying your desires, and rendering yourself unto your impulses.”
“Instead of defaulting to this consumerist framework,” I argued, “we should start looking at our choices -- particularly those of us early in our careers; in the dawn of our lives -- with an understanding of how we wish to be formed.”
I continue to stand by this thesis, not least because of how much this column resonated with so many young people (it was by far my best performing post on this platform, and it received a warm welcome from a young crowd on LinkedIn). Nonetheless, this mode of living requires further explanation. My previous column ought to have instilled a sense of hope: others feel how you do, and you and I are not destined to lead miserable lives. But our hope must not be without substance. We must think more concisely about how we can lead meaningful lives, and then engage in the trying work of actually leading such lives.
We must tie together our high aspirations with our bounded existence. In technical terms: we must connects means and ends.
So, what does it truly mean to lead a life of formation rather than of consumption? How does this mode of living truly differ from a life lived in the pursuit of goods, things, and people to be consumed by the autonomous self?
Before we can answer this, we must clarify what our consumerist “default” setting is, and what it leads us to do. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks puts it succinctly in the opening chapter of Morality: “The market gives us choices, and morality itself [becomes] just a set of choices in which right or wrong have no meaning beyond the satisfaction or frustration of desire.” Essentially, “Ethics is reduced to economics.” Our moral world is warped by a market morality that implicitly defines our ultimate fulfillment in life — what the Greeks called eudaimonia (though the market morality version of this is what a Big Mac is to Wagyu beef) — by our capability as rational, autonomous individuals to maximize our efficiency and consume as many goods and services as possible. We are reduced to creatures of desire. Like the serpent who tempted Eve in the Garden, we slither on our bellies.
An addiction to this worldview, perhaps most popularly promulgated by economists, leads many such people to question why everyday Americans say they’re so alienated and frustrated with their lives, especially in light of rising incomes and steady economic growth. How could we be wealthy and miserable? Such a state of affairs is not only anathema, but beyond the comprehension of the brightest of minds. But the answer to this dilemma is quite simple, at least for those of us willing to venture beyond the cave of economic utility: our base understanding of fulfillment is woefully incomplete. Man is more than a beast of burden. Unlike the serpent, we have upright spines. We can stand upright.
We are more than rational utility maximizers stimulated by hits of serotonin. We are more than dogs conditioned by external stimuli to sit, lie down, and wag our tails — or, at least, we can be more. And we yearn for more. There is some spark in each of us that reaches upwards and outwards, no matter the lies we tell ourselves about what it means to be happy. As it happens, life is about more than consuming goods and indulging fleeting sensual pleasures. Being human is more than the sum of our flesh, the meat between our ears, and the minute-by-minute cacophony of impulses we feel buzzing about in our skulls and all throughout our nervous system.
We are more than dogs conditioned by external stimuli to sit, lie down, and wag our tails.
Moreover, if our fulfillment is defined by the number of choices we have and our power to choose between all of these choices, then we surely must have some rubric for which choices to choose from. Our market morality provides no such rubric, barring desire. For many centuries, institutions like the family, churches, local communities, and other touchstones would have guided our decision making process. While we still retain certain relics from this bygone era — we still value marriage, despite high divorce rates; we still place some moral capital in sexual restraint, even if chastity is rarely practiced; we still like the idea of family, even if many of us are failing to form families — most Americans lack any grounding in these communities, or in the moral traditions which might inform them. We lack the moral vocabulary and framework which might otherwise provide us scaffolding for how we structure our desires.
As formative institutions and traditions continue to decline, we are left at sea without a compass — even if we command the mightiest of galleons, own the newest iPhones, and drive the most advanced electric vehicles. We are wealthy beyond imagination, and we have no idea what to do with all of our treasure.
This is definitionally tragic — and we’re almost justified in declaring our contemporary affluence a Pyrrhic victory — but our circumstances afford us an incredible opportunity. From beyond the horizon of despair, we can’t help but make out the crack of dawn.
Our hope is this: we have all the raw material we require to build not only more fulfilled individual lives, but a more fulfilled common life.
From beyond the horizon of despair, we can’t help but make out the crack of dawn.
In my next column, I plan to move beyond this diagnosis, and towards a solution. The market morality of our time which has warped our moral universe and made it increasingly difficult for all of us to make decisions has been sufficiently described here. Next, we will explore what a formative worldview actually looks like, and how it can be actualized in our own lives; in our own time.