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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Impulse Society: How Our Growing Desperation for Instant Connection Is Ruining Us
http://www.alternet.org/books/impulse-society-how-our-growing-desperation-instant-connection-ruining-usThe metaphor of the expanding fragile modern self is quite apt. To personalize is, in effect, to reject the world as is, and instead to insist on bending it to our preferences, as if mastery and dominance were our only mode. But humans arent meant only for mastery. Were also meant to adapt to something larger. Our large brains are specialized for cooperation and compromise and negotiationwith other individuals, but also with the broader world, which, for most of history, did not cater to our preferences or likes. For all our ancestors tremendous skills at modifying and improving their environment, daily survival depended as much on their capacity to conform themselves and their expectations to the world as they found it. Indeed, it was only by enduring adversity and disappointment that we humans gained the strength and knowledge and perspective that are essential to sustainable mastery.
Virtually every traditional culture understood this and regarded adversity as inseparable from, and essential to, the formation of strong, self-sufficient individuals. Yet the modern conception of character now leaves little space for discomfort or real adversity. To the contrary, under the Impulse Society, consumer culture does everything in its considerable power to persuade us that adversity and difficulty and even awkwardness have no place in our lives (or belong only in discrete, self-enhancing moments, such as ropes courses or really hard ab workouts). Discomfort, difficulty, anxiety, suffering, depression, rejection, uncertainty, or ambiguityin the Impulse Society, these arent opportunities to mature and toughen or become. Rather, they represent errors and inefficiencies, and thus opportunities to correctnearly always with more consumption and self-expression.
So rather than having to wait a few days for a package, we have it overnighted. Or we pay for same-day service. Or we pine for the moment when Amazon launches drone delivery and can get us our package in thirty minutes.* And as the system gets faster at gratifying our desires, the possibility that we might actually be more satisfied by waiting and enduring a delay never arises. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, the efficient consumer market abhors delay and adversity, and by extension, it cannot abide the strength of character that delay and adversity and inefficiency generally might produce. To the efficient market, character and virtue are themselves inefficienciesimpediments to the volume-based, share-price-maximizing economy. Once some new increment of self-expressive, self-gratifying, self-promoting capability is made available, the unstated but overriding assumption of contemporary consumer culture is that this capability can and should be put to use. Which means we now allow the efficient market and the treadmills and the relentless cycles of capital and innovation to determine how, and how far, we will take our self-expression and, by extension, our selves even when doing so leaves us in a weaker state.
Consider the way our social relationships, and the larger processes of community, are changing under the relentless pressure of our new efficiencies. We know how important community is for individual development. Its in the context of community that we absorb the social rules and prerequisites for interaction and success. Its here that we come to understand and, ideally, to internalize, the need for limits and self-control, for patience and persistence and long-term commitments; the pressure of community is one way society persuades us to control our myopia and selfishness. (Or as economists Sam Bowles and Herbert Gintis have put it, community is the vehicle through which societys oughts become its members wants. ) But communitys function isnt simply to say no. Its in the context of our social relationships where we discover our capacities and strengths. Its here that we gain our sense of worth as individuals, as citizens and as social producersactive participants who dont merely consume social goods, but contribute something the community needs.
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