Insatiability Blues
Men aren’t happy. But it does not logically follow that the cause of men’s collective unhappiness is that men as a collective aren’t getting enough of what they want. I have to stress this because this is the causal explanation that many smart people tacitly invoke when they blame men’s unhappiness on the economy being shit.
Blaming something as abstract as generalized unhappiness on another thing as equally as abstract as the “bad” economy would explain nothing at all. It’s not wrong, exactly, it’s just bad theory. Its overdetermined explanation leaves a lot of other potential causes out of its theoretical framing of the problem.
Because what do we make of the proposed countering theory that perhaps the reason why men aren’t happy is because they’re in fact getting too much of what they want now? What if the reason men are so unhappy or seemingly stalled in their development is that they are actually getting so much of what they want that they can't tear themselves away from getting it long enough to realize that getting it is not really what they need?
What’s the grand social theory then?
Actual science would of course allow for that theoretical possibility. After all, if you give a mouse a bunch of cocaine, it will just die. If you isolate a mouse for too long, it will wildly attack the first mouse with whom it comes into contact. Based on everything I understand from having read at least two mouse studies, if you fuck around too much to a mouse, eventually bad things will start happening to it. Cause and effect.
For most of the last century, the prime directive of American infrastructure has clearly been consumer convenience. You can’t deny that it is so much easier now than it’s ever been for Americans to consume way too much cheap shit that they don’t need. But if you look at any other metrics for measuring a civilization’s progress, like public health or even individual wellbeing, we’re living way worse than we have in even lived memory. My generation is definitely doing worse off than our parents. Half the country appears to be on fire at any given time. Our oceans are pharmaceutically polluted by so many people pissing their antidepressants down the drain and into the sea. Nothing about these indicators seems to suggest to me that we’re ok.
This drive towards convenience for the sake of itself has been a mistake. This easy time we’re all kind of taking for granted has not only been hugely counter-revolutionary, it’s been counter-evolutionary. The smartphone serves for hours a day as a handheld self-pleasuring device, causing parents to ignore their children and children to miss their own emotional and intellectual development. This torrent of cheap self-indulgence is fed into us by armies of venture-backed entrepreneurs because it’s so obviously rewarding to monetize on the unquenchable desire of a people who never feel truly satisfied by anything and so feel entitled to everything.
It’s the neoliberal Ponzi dream to have your cake and eat it too, provided that you can always rely on there being an underclass army of automated wage slaves imported from wherever to keep dashing fresh cake to your door.
To take all as rightfully deserved while also removing one’s self from any of the consequences of taking it—is that not the telos of imperialism? Of patriarchy? Of capitalism? That unquestioned entitlement to entrap other people into your service while claiming as your own their resources, reproductive energy, and even their future is the underlying evil we find apologized for in every one of those ideologies. In my head, these aren’t separate, distinct ideologies but rather different expressions of the same violent entitlement.
Insatiability blues I think of as the psychic cost of unchecked entitlement. It’s that weird tinge of righteous sadness that people mistake for poetic depth in every Kerouac novel, in every antihero who keeps finding reasons to cheat on his wife. But if either Kerouac or these dudes were ever to confront themselves honestly about why they do the shit they keep doing, deep down, the answer they would likely find is that they’re selfish, self-loathing bastards and very plainly prioritizing their desires over the needs of other people. That’s entitlement. And to be sad about not getting more of your own way when your way is pretty much all you’ve ever gotten is what I would call insatiability blues.
But if desire is a universal phenomenon, then why do I think that insatiability blues is a problem that chiefly affects men? Because it’s awful to be a teenage boy. It’s gross. And smelly. And sad. And angry. It’s a lot. Mostly smelly. But it’s a lot.
But the WORST part of being a boy is how much you want stuff all the time and how powerfully you want it even if nothing you want makes any sense.
When you think about it, the teenage boy is the personification of unbridled appetite. The teenage boy knows an insatiable hunger and he feels it all the time. He is learning for the first time what it means to be lustful and now this new desire plagues him day and night. To be a boy is to exist entirely in this confusing but powerful state of unquenchable, unnameable need.
The problem with our culture, in my and I’m guessing many others’ opinions, is that we don’t in any way model for young boys how to discipline their own appetites. We offer them very little guidance on how to really live in their bodies and identify the difference between a want and need.
Plenty of other cultures throughout human history have made a virtue of cultivating satiability, most often out of communal necessity. Entitlement to take more than one needs is regarded as wicked in nearly every wisdom tradition there is. Any sufficiently enlightened being will tell you those who indulge their every passing whim without cultivating gratitude for what they have and compassion for those who have less tend to live painful, unsatisfactory lives. They seek outside of themselves for fulfillment and so will never actually find it. Without a major change of heart, these people never find peace. They will only ever keep wanting more.
Insatiability is itself considered a hell realm in Buddhism. The Buddha taught that to be in a constate state of desire is to know only constant suffering. In order to be liberated from suffering, to know the peace of zen, then we have to know desirelessness. That’s what nirvana means: the extinction of desire.
But obviously, extinguishing want would kill capitalism.
The entertainment industry has for decades embroidered upon the fantasies of young, white boys whose parents have the means to indulge them not because doing so creates fine art but because marketing cheap, meaningless junk at their collective black hole of appetite is so stupidly lucrative that it’s basically printing money. Wrap whatever superhero franchise you want around a giant Coke advertisement because if it reminds teenage boys that Coke and cool go together, then what does Coke care?
Everything is about sex. Except sex. Which is Coca-Cola.
Saved By the Bell was the perfect example of such gender fan fiction for my generation. It was a show wherein every episode a teenage white boy gets away with doing whatever the hell he wants all day. And in between the show’s three acts of him manipulating everyone around him to get whatever he wants, the broadcaster can air commercials reminding the kids watching at home that there is a brand new kind of nacho extreme cheese pocket product to manipulate their moms into buying for them later.
The highest irony in all of this for me is that the verb “husband” is literally defined as “to conserve resources.” To become a husband is to become someone who curbs his impulses and uses resources wisely and economically. Today, a husband is defined more simply as a guy who acquires for himself a wife and the word has seemingly dropped all its other connotations.
It’s almost as though the only right we really have anymore as citizens in a market economy is to consume as much as we are able and to have one’s unstopping consumption be delivered to us as efficiently and conveniently as possible. Anything that might impinge upon that right is deemed abominable, a violation of the free market principles upon which this nation stands.
Teaching kids how to consciously interrogate their desires in a disciplined fashion would mean dispelling an intentional darkness.
Oh, modeling husbandry for boys would be so bad for the economy.
It’d never happen.
Insatiability, after all, is the jetfuel of empire.
You’ll just have to keep on being sad with having it all, guys.
Empire go vrrrrrrrr.