No cap, I'm Just Filling Time, For Real

A Theory of Inanimate Activities

• U.S. teens report spending 4.8 hours per day on popular social media apps.

• YouTube and Tiktok are the most popular

• Entertainment and boredom relief are the most popular stated reasons

• Social media use dominates time spent on homework, TV, video games, hobbies, & chores

  [link] [link]

There’s a lot of talk about meaning, about purpose, about a reason to do things. Most people are beyond this. We do stuff ‘cus we gotta get money that pays for our lives that we mostly don’t enjoy so we can have kids who will repeat this process. Most people are beyond the beyond, beyond the overcoming, they’ve already got to the end. The depressing (yet overlooked) fact about being - in a Zapffean sense - intellectually ‘well-endowed’ (see The Last Messiah), is that human beings have a distinct ability to jump to conclusions, to jump to the end of the matter before the end arrives. Perhaps this wasn’t always the case, I imagine it wasn’t. When you have to get up in the morning and do certain things to survive, to live, then those actions in themselves are the meaning and purpose itself. The very notion/idea of creating meaning negates the meaning that’s created by the fact of its self-referential origin. We’re beyond meaning. meaning is cheap. We’re Buddhists without Nirvana, living in a present that is genuinely dull and grey.

I opened this little piece with those statistics because they directly inspired it. They got me thinking about why, in our supposed world of abundance and riches and fun and excitement and holidays and hedonism and progress we’re bored for but a single minute. How can we be bored, there’s so much to do, and we can freely pick from anything and everything at any moment. Well, I think the young generation is - in quite a darkly Heideggarian manner - jumping to the conclusion of the progressive West before they actually arrive at it in reality via ‘hard work’.

So, what exactly is the conclusion of modernity for the average Joe or Jane? Well, materially it’s a family home filled with furniture and gadgets, it’s a car, a pet, two kids, a hot tub, a few vacations, and a retirement around 65-75. In terms of work and effort, this is 50-70 years of 40-60 hour work weeks, leaving one less and less free time as responsibilities mount. This is retiring a disheveled wreck who no longer has the energy to engage in all those projects you promised yourself you would undertake in your later years. In terms of outlook and mental acuity, the conclusion is one of exhausted homogenized thought, banal platitudes, and complete alienation from anything one might call authentic.

I think, for young people, the reality is this: The people who promised (and are promising) them a future are on average just as poor and lost as they were when they started, the material conclusion of some cheap new build house in the ever-decaying suburbs isn’t worth the soul-destroying toil of 50 years of 40 hour weeks. In short, the future they are being promised is no longer desired. Like some dull Netflix series, they are skipping to the end and realizing that viewing 6 seasons of shit wouldn’t have been worth the payoff.

Modernity, which has played a large part in destroying anything qualitatively authentic such as religion, the sacred, nationality, family, or honor (as rather obvious examples), has little else to offer but ever-accelerating materiality. Except, with resources dwindling, the cost of living rising, and the entire edifice of progress crumbling, the only thing that was up for offer is being traded for basic security. You no longer care for the comforts promised because you know they won’t be provided, you understand that if you just keep your head down and work away perhaps enough security will be found for you to not become homeless. You’ve jumped to the conclusion and it isn’t - and never was - worth the wait or the work. So, what’s left? To kill time, of course.

I’ve written before about Kaczynski’s idea of ‘surrogate activities:

“A surrogate activity is an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that the individual pursues for the sake of the “fulfillment” that he gets from pursuing the goal, not because he needs to attain the goal itself. For instance, there is no practical motive for building enormous muscles, hitting a little ball into a hole or acquiring a complete series of postage stamps. Yet many people in our society devote themselves with passion to bodybuilding, golf or stamp-collecting. Some people are more “other-directed” than others, and therefore will more readily attach importance to a surrogate activity simply because the people around them treat it as important or because society tells them it is important. That is why some people get very serious about essentially trivial activities such as sports, or bridge, or chess, or arcane scholarly pursuits, whereas others who are more clear-sighted never see these things as anything but the surrogate activities that they are, and consequently never attach enough importance to them to satisfy their need for the power process in that way.” - (Industrial Society and Its Future)

But what is the very notion of a surrogate activity after one has jumped to the conclusion of said surrogate activity? The acceleration of such activities only begets the acknowledgment of their pointlessness, ergo, why partake in them at all? And yet, one can’t just sit and stare at a wall, so what is to be done? What is to be done when one knows they have to keep on living (as per Darwinian programming), the only way to do so is empty modern grunt work, and the conclusion of that work isn’t even desired. The result is simply to kill time. Put on a TV series on one screen and a video game stream on the other whilst simultaneously scrolling on your phone and shoveling down sweets. This, my friends, is the definition of modern bliss. A boredom that brings into question one’s very existence.

The thing is, this is kind of unavoidable. Near the end of each civilizational cycle, Spengler makes it clear that as resources and ‘capital’ run out, so too do ideas (inclusive of entertainment). It’s not so much then that we’re out of ideas in the sense of singular unique notions, but that the primary idea and myth of our civilizational cycle, namely ‘Progress’, has itself run dry. Progress as an idea, as a myth, and as a practice is reliant on the ever-increasing, on acceleration in kind. It doesn’t matter what domain we’re talking about, progress appears as if it can infect it. But eventually, a faster car becomes useless because it’s stuck on the same crap roads. An extra camera on your phone does little more than reveal blackheads you never knew you had. A faster computer processor means little if all you’re doing is watching YouTube. Progress has run out of steam, and is now merely progressing the same cycle on repeat, the very same cycle that the young of today have cut to the chase with and are, quite frankly, bored of.

As such, I propose an extension or, if you like, a progression of Kaczynski’s idea of surrogate activities that I call ‘Inanimate Activities’. The name has a relation to the idea of the surrogate by way of the work of Harry Harlow, the man who famously studied monkeys who had been taken away from their biological mothers and given inanimate surrogate mothers as a replacement. A surrogate, then, is the substitute, the replacement. In terms of Kaczynski’s theory, it’s an activity that fills (or substitutes) the void where we once would have had a genuinely, inherently meaningful experience such as gathering wood or hunting, etc. with an artificially fulfilling activity such as stamp-collecting of gaming. My progression is as follows:

As per Harlow’s naming of the mothers as inanimate surrogate mothers, an Inanimate Activity is a surrogate activity that the person partaking in accepts as ultimately artificial and pointless, yet they partake in it anyway because they understand they need to fill their time somehow. As an example, one might genuinely be interested in completing some or other TV series due to its content or narrative, this would be a surrogate activity. However, in another case, one might simply put a TV show on in the background after work because they have nothing else to kill/fill the time, this would be an inanimate activity.

Inanimate activities, leading to inanimate lives, are the result of perceiving the end of the cycle before it’s had a chance to complete. For the youth of today, their parents and elders are the results of the life promised to them and such results are extremely unappealing. As such, one is left in a paradox where they have to move forward (time waits for no man), and yet equally have little if any appeal regarding the lifestyle offered to them. You will have fun, even if you’re not really there at all.

There is the boredom found between excitement and activities, waiting in the doctor’s office, for instance. There is the boredom of a long workday when one awaits a cool beer and a hot bath. But what of a boredom that is itself surrounded by boredom? What of disinterest coddled by nonchalance? What if you were bored, and quite literally nothing in the foreseeable future appears to be able to quench that boredom, what then? Well, you’d have no choice, but to do stuff, well, just because…