We used to post a picture of our cappuccino online because we thought it was delicious. Now, we erect endless monuments to ourselves.
I finally watched Fight Club for the first time. It was one of the best films I’ve ever seen, and it’s kind of ridiculous why it took me so long to get here. Up until now, I made peace with the fact that I’d go an entire lifetime without understanding what the first rule of Fight Club was. My introduction to the film was technically in middle school, a whole decade before this conversation. There was a loud, sniffling, annoying kid in my class who asked me once if I knew what the first rule of Fight Club was. He did so while gulping down every word as if he were one syllable away from bursting into laughter, his face branded in a state of perpetual amusement. There was absolutely nothing serious about this kid, and for some reason, I loathed him for that. Since that day, I decided to lose all interest in the film, simply because I didn’t want to like the same thing as him. The maths I did in my head was that if someone like him enjoyed this film, then surely there was no way I would. The equation didn’t end there, quite the contrary, it found its way into becoming my hallmark quality control mechanism for the better part of a decade, insidiously governing what I was allowed to enjoy, who I could enjoy it with, and how enjoyment should look. What taught me that the things I may enjoy were socially predetermined remained shrouded in mystery for the longest time, but I think I’m starting to understand how I got here.
The inception of social mega-platforms like Facebook, or alt-culture depots like Tumblr, found me during my highly impressionable character-building ages, just as it did a whole generation of children. In some sense, social media is the digitised quality control mechanism of what I practised in the analogue sense in middle school. An instruction manual on what garners attention. Fast forward to the present, and the cultural zeitgeist we inhabit has silently metamorphosed into an entirely commercial endeavour, followed only after by matters of the soul. We navigate a phygital world in which our value as a human is in wedlock with capital, and I’m pretty sure those two don't plan to divorce anytime soon.
Am I opening my phone or visiting the mall? I don’t even know anymore. The food court gossip, lazy strolls past storefronts, the cathedral of advertisements. It’s all in my pocket now, and scrolling is just window shopping with fewer steps. The ever-unsatisfied gaze is starving, and manufactured goods just don’t seem to taste as good anymore. There’s a certain metaphysical placebo we’re after. One that emulates the satisfaction that comes with responsibility without us needing to be responsible for it. The feel of community without having to renounce your self-obsession. In the pursuit of this unique circumstance, we’ve relinquished something of our own that we’re duly paying for. We’ve abandoned all prospects of metaphysical wellness and instead opted to become a repository of trends.
We’ll gua sha, oil pull, and exfoliate like a religion. We’ll switch polyester for cotton and brush our teeth with bamboo bristles because that’s what being a good person is, apparently. Fifteen-step skincare routines and an Instagram archive full of biohacking tutorials. Journaling and content creation during the day, doom scrolling and content consumption during the night. A Pinterest full of people we wish we could dress like. Celebrity crushes and a three-step guide to making tallow.
Guilty pleasures are only guilty because the character you’ve manufactured would never, but you do, and you love it. There’s an asymmetrical bias towards the self, and there’s no shortage of avenues by which we could emulate self-care without having to care.
We’ll do anything we can, but get over ourselves.
The sole ruler of an empty palace.
We browse the digital aisles of our platforms, nitpicking the ingredients we need to cook up the perfect marketable persona. A commercially viable alter ego that increasingly becomes indistinguishable from your essence, or rather, helps better tolerate the person you see in the mirror. In this quest, I think one of the most interesting developments that rattles my brain is how we’ve opted to self-commodify without anyone forcing us to. When did this start to happen? I’m not quite sure, but it seems that we’ve ended up rendering hobbies as meaningless pursuits unless they can be packaged as occupations.
I enjoy fashion? Nope, I’m a stylist. You can tell by the fact that the local branch of a megacorp we all know sent me a free pair of shoes that I posted about with a snide “thank you for the love!” on my story. I go to the cinema every week? Scratch that, I’m a cinephile, and I’m monetising my reviews through Patreon. I got my heart broken and read Alan Watts? Wrong again, I’m a Taoist, and you can be too with my online breathing course. Just comment BREATHE under my video, and I’ll send you the guide.
I recently met someone I admired, and I wanted to impress them. They asked me the ever-elusive yet patronising question you can’t escape in this urban environment. What do you do? It’s a funny question, because I do a lot of things and I’m never quite sure how to compress the vastness of human complexity into a single phrase. I wake up, eat and sleep. In between I dream and fear, question and pursue, win and lose. I unlearn and relearn. I encode and decode. I paused for just a moment and did something very interesting with my answer. I think it said a lot about me. With a subconscious calculation of lightning speed, I arranged all of my timely occupations into a descending list of what makes me the most money. I ran through my assortment, ending half-heartedly with my actual passion, brushing past it with no fanfare as it seemed unimportant to the question I was being asked. It was jarring to realise what I had just done there. It seems that I didn’t hear What do you do?, but rather, Why should I care?
What makes you valuable in a world where value itself is the commodity?
It's no one's fault that it got like this. We’re all trying our best to navigate a world in which everything we could ever know is at our fingertips. Social media is a treasure trove of inspiration, but I’m way too inspired. I’d go as far as saying I often experience inspiration paralysis. Every time I open Instagram, I’m left wanting to follow fifteen new career tracks whilst resenting the path I worked so hard to build. We play God every day and wonder why we’re exhausted. It’s because we’re not God. What you think you are is rarely your own choice, and that’s okay. Take a deep breath, you’re not special, and that’s probably the most freeing thing there ever could be in this world.
So yeah, Fight Club was actually a fantastic movie. Maybe one of the best I’ve ever seen. I should probably watch more movies, and I should probably care less about whether they’re mainstream or not. I sometimes wonder what that kid from middle school is doing these days. I don’t really, but let's pretend for the marketable persona’s sake that I do.
A beautiful, dazzling, devastating dissection of the commodified self. You’ve articulated something I’ve long felt, that “What do you do?” is no longer an inquiry but an audit. A veiled demand for ROI. It’s not a question of vocation but of justification. And the moment we answer, we unconsciously reach for our most monetisable attribute, as if the soul’s worth must pass through a payment gateway before it can be witnessed.
You describe, with unnerving precision, the peculiar psychosis of self-commodification, voluntary, enthusiastic, even gleeful. We’ve become our own brand managers, marketing interns, publicists, and product lines. We don’t have identities, we curate them. And increasingly, we only engage in activities that can be uploaded, monetised, or turned into content. We do not journal, we post journaling aesthetics. We don’t rest, we “honour rest as résistance”. The politics of leisure have been swallowed whole by the algorithms of attention.
But here’s the unsettling addition I’d offer, if you allow me… this is more than performance, it’s about prophylaxis. We are doing more than selling ourselves, we are hiding behind the sale, by presenting a clean, clickable version of ourselves, we immunise against intimacy. It’s easier to be perceived than to be known. Vulnerability is too risky when everyone’s watching…. and rating. We ghost authenticity because we are both cynical and terrified.
We post the cappuccino, ahhh the ere is something more important than the visible foam, we need proof of personhood. We live as if we were going to one long audition, every gesture becomes a résumé, every meal a mission statement. The self is no longer lived, it’s pitched, right?!
The crazy irony is that our résistance to this culture now is packaged as content, disillusionment is another niche now. You can monetise your exit from the matrix, you can rebrand burnout as a spiritual awakening and sell it as a course on “Intentional Invisibility.” I’m waiting for the first influencer to sell “How to Stop Being an Influencer” for $499 in six digestible modules.
What a world to live in…..
P.S. As a side note (but maybe the truest note), I wrote an essay in January that revolved entirely around this question — What do you do? Spoiler: it’s not a question. It’s a currency check.
What you describe is hedonism. Pleasure seekers need the constant fix of more pleasure. Indulging in too much pleasure-seeking will make One miserable.
The soul ruler of an empty palace? Cheers!