My computer mouse sucks. It's less than a year old and it skips constantly. When the problems with it first began, I ordered a replacement mouse. For the last six months, I've been using the malfunctioning mouse while a brand new mouse sits on a nearby shelf. Once I switch to the new mouse, I'll order another new mouse on Amazon and repeat the cycle.
Too many things feel similarly disposable these days. Tools. Furniture. Houses. Not cars, strangely enough. But almost everything else. I recently got a new pair of nice socks and the heels ripped out on the first wear. Our economy is saturated with deals like that.
This situation didn't come out of nowhere. Incentive structures in society produced it. Corporate and governmental policies made it happen. And yet, no central authority is responsible for it. There's no one to complain to and no one to fight with over it.
The problem of disposable consumer items is minor when compared with the mountain of nonsense that we've all been increasingly forced to deal with. The botched pandemic response. Civil unrest and spiking crime in cities like mine. Geopolitical instability. The list goes on and on.
Under constant pressure from these problems, set against each other by a divisive media establishment, people are losing it, and are acting out in increasingly inexplicable ways. Hence the Slap. And articles like this one in The Atlantic asking why people are acting so weird.
This article attributes the increasing weirdness to a variety of factors. The uptick in drug and alcohol use. Disagreements over masks and other cornerstones of our failed pandemic policy. Generalized anomie, or a gross mismatch between individual desires and social norms. The proliferation of high-stress, low-reward situations. These and other things may indeed be the cause of so much weirdness. But I think the underlying cause is that we've allowed society to become a dystopia and no one seems willing or able to take us in a better direction.
The people at the top are only making things weirder. The other day, Rep. Matt Gaetz grilled an FBI official about Hunter Biden's laptop. What's weird about that is that we're on the brink of cyberwar and someone from FBI cyber went to the government to talk about that and instead of doing so, he had to field question after irrelevant question about Hunter Biden's laptop. Assuming the material that's come to light from the laptop is genuine -- and it seems to be -- the particulars of this material's release looked exactly like a Russian psy op to 50 top intelligence officials. Which makes it all the more weird that Gaetz would waste time on the matter with this FBI official.
The Slap and the Laptop both strike me as bizarre distractions from our tilt into dystopia. Popular obsession with these distractions reflects profoundly distorted societal priorities. With all that's happened in recent years, maybe people are just too overwhelmed to differentiate between matters of substance and celebrity gossip. Or maybe society is simply cracking up, and things will only get weirder from here.
(Feature image from Pixabay.)
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