I narrate key points in my post “The Joyless Pantomime of Optimizing Ennui”
The cornucopian fantasy of AI generating super-abundance is the joyless pantomime taken to the highest level of civilizational psychosis. The more we strive to optimize ourselves and everything around us, the more we rely on metrics as guides to "living our best lives," the more we strive to work harder and work smarter in the hopes that more stuff and more transactions will finally become fulfilling, the farther we drift from ourselves and our own experience.
The joyless pantomime of optimizing our alienation is not a substitute for authentic fulfillment. The pantomime--going through the motions of finding fake fulfillment in ultra-processed products, experiences and optimizations--is not just joyless, it drains our life force, leaving us in a depleted state of ennui, burned out and wondering why we don't feel the fulfillment we're supposed to be feeling in our hyper-optimized existence.
We don't need therapy and supplements, we need out.
The Joyless Pantomime of Optimizing Ennui
We all know that geopolitics, the stock market, AI, the unemployment rate and all the rest of what’s presented as “explaining” everything is “important,” but all these analytic abstractions ignore what we actually experience. This divide between what we’re told we should be experiencing and what we are actually experiencing is what I call
