While traveling throughout China, I met a friend who at one point texted me about some thoughts she had while she slowed down in vacation:
This summer, I realized that life is essentially about finding things to do when there’s nothing else to do. I felt so bored that I wanted to find something to do. Working felt busy, but there was an unnoticed sense of fulfillment that filled the time, without me having to think about anything related to life. Then I thought about modern society: after people have essentially no need to worry about basic necessities like finding food and drink, everything they do is essentially just finding things to do to fill their time and cope with boredom.
That’s why human societies have established main tasks for individuals, such as going to school as a child, studying diligently, then falling in love, getting married, having children, and subsequently working hard for the well-being of their families throughout their lives. This way, people’s lives are not left with too much idle time, and they can look back on their lives and see that they have seemingly accomplished something meaningful. This system helps prevent people from falling into a state of emptiness. The main tasks established by human societies provide a convenient way for individuals to cope with true emptiness, and many choose this convenience to avoid dealing with the emptiness of life. Some others choose to confront their pain head-on, allowing them to move forward despite the emptiness in their lives.
This makes a lot of sense. Your emphasis has been on the societal dimensions of this. My ponderings of late have focused on the individual aspects of it and the attempt to live a happy, satisfying, and fulfilling life, so I will focus on that side at first, and then at the end discuss the more sociological aspects that you bring up.
I think the irony is that I’m coming from the opposite direction. You’re bored and listless. This weekend, I exploded in exhaustion and burnout because I had been trying to do too much and putting a pause on everything I’ve been doing to recuperate and take time to figure out how to do it more sustainably. Despite being opposite states, they come from the same fundamental problem, which you reflect on. I think they are opposing manifestations of the same underlying ennui.
Here goes:
I was talking with someone living in Shanghai who told me that her family made enough through their real estate ventures that she did not have to work in order to sustain herself. I asked her what she was doing with her life then, and she said, this has been one of her biggest struggles right now in life. She is not happy or fulfilled. She told me this is because of her inner insecurities, which leave her too anxious to do the cool things she is passionate about like architecture. Instead she plays video games all day, which gives her a sense of escape and immediate gratification but leaves her feeling uneasy that she is wasting her life.
The first lesson this conversation taught me is that having everything you need financially/materially does not lead to fulfillment if one does not also confront one’s psychological inner demons. Wealthy people can be miserable too. As another example, I was just talking with another friend who told me she grew up poor in a rural Chinese area, but was able to go to an elite school and even study abroad for her master’s degree, so now she works as a consultant at a prestigious firm where she said she works with Beijing’s elite. Her biggest fear is that she will slowly become one of these elites, because she looks at them and sees how miserable (and overworked) they actually are. The second lesson is how meaningless life can seem when one is able to stop working to get by. Many people’s goal in life is to have enough to not have to work again, but actually attaining that can make one realize how empty existence can be. one has the opportunity to pause from it all.
Many others are stuck in constant work, unable to rise out of to receive higher satisfaction. For example, I was talking with a Chinese person a few minutes ago who told me she lives in a small city that she finds boring, working a job that she also finds boring, but because of how competitive the job market is in China and because work has left her too exhausted to be able to look for a job, she has been unable to get out of this. She says she feels miserable and trapped, often depressed without knowing what to do.
Similarly, I was speaking with a waitress in Beijing who told me she works 10-12 hours a day six days a week and her pay is enough to get by. By the time she gets home, she’s too exhausted to have a life. She also feels trapped. I asked her to what extent she feels happy and satisfied in her life, and she replied that she feels too exhausted to have any feelings about life but can only focus on her daily grind, which makes her feel depleted and sad. I have seen many in different parts of the world trapped in this cycle. They are never able to move beyond the immediate stress of meeting their material needs in their daily lives to really figure out how to find meaning or satisfaction.
I decided to travel the world. That’s the main why I have sought to find meaning in life, to learn about new cultures and places, experience the beauty that the world has to offer, and most importantly to meet new people and learn about how different people (and cultures) live their lives and think about these different big questions about life, the universe, and whatever other stuff people ponder these days.
This has been fantastic, but traveling long-term can also make you notice how consumptive, consumerist, and ultimately vacuous traveling can be, especially the tourist industry. Much of tourism and travel is about having experiences: climbing a beautiful mountain, eating some local food in a new culture, seeing the exhibits of a museum, etc. Experiences can be great, but if every day for years is a new fantastic experience, the “magic” of new experiences starts to fade. This is a nihilism that is inherent in the consumerism of travel.
In general, I have tried to pursue two approaches to solve this nihilism:
- Developing relationships in the places I go (hence why I talk to a lot of people and try to learn about their stories)
- Creating my own works of art
For the second, I think I subconsciously sought to find meaning by creating different works that I find engaging and maybe in some way can help others. This includes three podcasts, four YouTube channels, one and a half blogs, and a book of poetry I am in the process of publishing. These have been my main creative projects, but I have had even a few smaller projects here and there on top of them. Working in these can divert my energy and become difficult to juggle, and yet they don’t really create a satisfying meaning either. Instead, every day, I would go on adventures where I am, work on these projects, or try to combine both, and overtime that drained me, leaving me burnout and exhausted.
Instead, I have learned that humans tend to find the most fulfillment, satisfaction, happiness (or whatever other word one wants to use) by feeling connected to a community/system of relationships where one can both contribute to help build and affirm the life of others, and one can, in turn, receive life-giving support and affirmation from others. As I talk to people while traveling, this is the most important single thing that seems to determine whether one feels ultimately satisfied in life. This reciprocal relationship of giving and receiving life alongside others seems crucial: those who give without receiving or receive without giving seem to ultimately feel miserable.
For example, I think one major reason my personal creative projects have not helped me feel fulfilled is that they are not plugged into such a system or community of reciprocal relationships. Thus, I do not feel like I am giving to others or receiving when I do it. The fact that it is a lot of work doesn’t help either, but I think it is not the main problem. I have seen people work really hard and still love it when that work is a part of reciprocal relationships.
That is also why meeting people in the places I travel to and talking with them about their lives is more fulfilling for me. Meeting people as I travel and learning about their lives for me has become a type of itinerant system of reciprocal relationships. Some form reciprocal relationships with a huge degree of depth: for example, someone who lives in a small, rural community their whole life may form decades long-relationships with the others in that community. My form focuses more on breadth, meeting people across a large number of different places. Unlike a small village where everyone knows everyone else, the people I know well don’t generally know each other. Hence, I have tons of relationships with different individuals, many of whom I am very close with, but these friendships do not form part of an interlocking tight web of people who all know each other. This is a fine way for a system of reciprocal relationships to be.
One con of travel is that it can dislocate you from the normal system of meanings that people develop in one society to provide meaning and structure to their lives. For example, religion to put it mildly is one major way individuals and communities ground who they are, who/what other people and things around them are (including animals), what the cosmos is, and where as individuals fit into it. That’s all well and good, but traveling the world, I more or less encounter a new religion every few weeks. Maybe I am in one area that is mostly Muslim for a few weeks, and then go to a place that is mostly Buddhist, and then maybe even go to another place that is mostly still Buddhist but adheres to a drastically different form of Buddhism. For many in each of the places I visit, their religion is just the way things are, how they are used to things being, but going between so many makes me look at them differently.
Other aspects of life are similar, especially the major frameworks people use to orient their lives and make decisions. When I talk to people in China, I tend to see the following most common motivating factors for people’s life decisions, and they often feel rather arbitrary to me: respect for family or familial elders, the idea that a person should constantly work, the desire to make more money and maybe buy a bigger and better house or other nice things for themselves, the supposed need to get married, and career advancement and the desire to have the “top job.” Most of these are also pretty typical motivations for the people I talk to in many of the other cultures I have been to (although some cultures and individuals tend to emphasize some of them instead of others).
But after talking to a lot of people in many parts of the world, they can start to feel like arbitrary barriers people construct around their lives that can sometimes help them and sometimes confine them. These grand purposes for existing can certainly provide a kind of guiding structure for some that helps them continue on in life, but they also have tremendous cons.
In a podcast I listened to a few weeks ago, the guy talked about a YouTube video where someone put an ant on a piece of paper (original podcast episode here – https://youtu.be/RSyX_665sEw?is=3O7dMotdeIXNJyl7). As the ant scurried around, the Youtuber drew a black line with a pen directly in front of where the ant was going. The ant would always stop in front of the line and try to figure a way to run around it, treating the pen’ ink like a wall. It could have walked right over it. He then did the same thing with a spider who at first also would not cross the lines, but somehow, the spider hopped one of the lines once (possibly panicked by the man’s hand, which it thought was a predator). After crossing it that one time, the spider never avoided the lines again, walking right over them as if they were nothing. Likewise, sometimes I view these things as these frameworks as arbitrary barriers humans lay around ourselves, treating them like walls when they could just walk right through them and become more satisfied. I feel a little like that spider: I have walked over too many of these lines (at first accidentally or forced across but now I am more likely to do so intentionally) to treat them like barriers anymore.
That was my take on an individual perspective. Now for more of a sociological perspective like your original text:
To some extent living a happy, satisfying, and fulfilling life has been something that every human has had to figure out, throughout all of history. For some thinkers (like Albert Camus), part of the problem is the universe itself. For him, we are creatures who inherently crave meaning and satisfaction living in a universe unconcerned about such things and unable to do so.
How the entire universe is structured aside, how society is structured can create its own problems with meaninglessness. I think modern societies, in particular, have done an especially bad job at enabling and facilitating life-giving, reciprocal communities for its inhabitants. For example, having work, jobs, and careers itself be the main activity humans spend their time on seems to inherently prevent and remove us from these life-giving, reciprocal communities and to create an inequality in opportunities.
Work tends to force many people into drudging tasks in order to make money. People generally spend the majority of the time working because doing so is necessary to make money and meet their needs. Workplaces across the world are generally set up to make as much profit as possible instead of to build reciprocal communities/relationships.
For many people this separates them from actually finding such communities, leading to them feeling unfulfilled in life. Like the waitress I discussed above, they spend the majority of the time in their life doing a task that they hate just to meet their material needs, making it more difficult for them to form or join such reciprocal communities.
For others, work conflicts with their community. For example, for many I have spoken with, family is the main life-giving, reciprocal community they have formed, but in order to support their family, they must work a job they hate. What this means is that they spend the majority of their day doing drudging work (usually about 50-70% of their waking hours of the week, although in China it seems even higher since so many I talk to work six days a week and/or unpaid overtime most days of the week) in order to spend only a few hours in the evening with their family before becoming too tired and falling asleep. Their community becomes a very small portion of their actual day-to-day existence.
Now, some people do find reciprocal communities at their jobs itself, and good for them. The world is complicated, and many people live many types of lives. But most people I talk to around the world do not find any satisfaction with their jobs, and if they had the financial means to no longer work that job, would choose not to. For most people, I have found needing to work to meet our material needs in life to be one of the biggest inhibitions to either being able to spend time in their life-giving communities or to form such a community for themselves in the first place.
Instead they get trapped in a drudging job. My basic definition of what is “drudgery” is any activity that if we did not need to do it, we would not choose to do it. In current jobs-based societies a good way to think about it would be: if you had enough money that you did not need to do that job, would you still do it? If someone’s answer is no that they would quit, then they are working a drudging job. This is most people I have spoken with in the world. I think most people alive do not realize how horrific it is that the majority of humanity must basically give up their lives and well-being to perform drudgery.
For example, the woman I just spoke with that I discussed above, when she said she’s looking for a different job, I asked her in an ideal world, what kind of job she’d like to do. She answered that in an ideal world, she wouldn’t have to work at all (at least she’s honest, lol). She said she’s looking for other types of lab technician work, especially in other cities, because her background is in it, but she would prefer to never do this type of work again. For her, her entire career is drudgery.
(To be clear, by my definition, drudgery is intentionally subjective. What is ideal work for one person could be drudgery for someone else. Different people have different preferences. Also, we have some forms of drudgery that are not related to work at all. For example, I would prefer never to clean a toilet or file taxes again. I do not enjoy these activities, but I still have to as part of living my life, but these are not my job. In English, we tend to call these “chores.” A chore does not make up the majority of our lives, like a job does though.)
Some people love their jobs and would still continue to do that work if they did not need to sustain them financially/materially. There are professors, artists, and many others out there who get a benefit from their work and would choose to continue doing it even if they never got paid for it and/or did not ever need anymore money for the rest of their lives. There is also a spectrum for how much drudgery a job has. For example, someone might still overall find their work meaningful but dislike that task they have to do from time to time. That is partly why I choose the criteria of whether they would continue to do that work if they did not ever need more money for themselves or their family to sustain themselves or do whatever they wanted in life.
What I am really concerned about is how unequally we distribute drudgery. In any given society, some do not have to do drudgery to have their needs met (unless they choose to), and for others, they must work a drudgery job in order to be able to continue to survive. Then, further, this also gets poorly distributed between societies. Traveling I have seen how some societies or specific communities are much more affluent with less need for drudgery; while in other societies, a far greater proportion of people are forced into drudgery. Often these first societies and communities outsource their drudgery jobs to the second, forcing them to basically do their drudgery tasks on their behalf.
Some, like the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, argue that hunter-gatherer societies tended to be the ones with the most amount of time for recreation and community-building since the act of finding food and meeting other basic needs did not take up much time. They also tend to be some of the most egalitarian of human societies. For him, as societies started to organize into bigger, structured states (not only modern societies but all organized since the ancient Sumerians), people had to work much more, and both drudgery and recreation became much more unequally distributed, as the masses of people had to work all the day with little to no time for recreation and some elites enjoying a life primarily of recreation. Many other anthropologists disagree with him about this theory, viewing his descriptions of both societies as far too oversimplified, and as a fellow anthropologist, I don’t fully agree with him, but I mention his theory since it forces people to rethink their assumptions about modern life making people happier. There are grains of truth to what he is saying, and his ideas force us to confront our assumptions about how society should be and whether some of the fundamental aspects of society like work jobs are actually any good in the first place.
Then to make this even worse, we often individually and societally force ourselves into positions of doing drudgery tasks. Many individuals who are so affluent they never need to work again still work so hard that they harm themselves, their health, and sometimes others in the process.
Another anthropologist David Graeber in a book called “Bullshit Jobs” (check it out if you have a chance, an interesting book) argues that contemporary societies create bullshit jobs in order to have everyone work even as work no longer becomes necessary or helpful for society. Specifically looking at affluent Western societies, he looks at how these societies no longer need as many people to work as much to do useful socially beneficial things (partly because we have outsourced factory work and other processes to other countries like China starting in the middle of the 1900s).
Instead of simply having people work less and/or less people work, he argues that Western societies create bullshit jobs that feel pointless to those who do them to ensure that everyone has work to do. Instead of scaling back work as a society becomes more affluent, people become locked into pointless, soul-sucking drudgery jobs, because everyone must work to be able to live. This actually has increased the need for work, not decreased it, as more bullshit jobs become necessary to fix the problems created by the other bullshit jobs. To me, China seems one to two generations behind on this: as things like mass factory production stagnates and the economy shifts to other sectors, it seems on the cusp of creating bullshit jobs for its people to have to do. We may need to fundamentally rethink work and other aspects of contemporary societies to fix any of this.
I know that was a lot. I’d love to hear your thoughts and what you have been wrestling with lately.
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