In capitalism, you are never “enough” as you are. To put it bluntly, capitalism supports the belief is that you constantly need to become something else to be acceptable. This week's lesson is about how *never enough* is tied to the performance and display of identity.
In his book The Four, about Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple, NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway writes:
"The consumer spends more because the act of spending itself communicates taste, wealth and privilege, and desire. The company naturally is dedicated to the same proposition but in reverse, by providing customers with the tools of that communication. - The consumer and the provider are in a symbiotic relationship."
Our jobs do the same: communicate taste, class, wealth, and privilege. In other words, both consumption and production are displays of identity and status. After we’ve met our basic needs, almost all our work and consumption are ways we perform and display status. the way we want to be seen and understood by others is underlying anxiety beneath the majority of our financial and behavioral decisions. In America, however, we have an additional privilege and burden: individualism.
Individualism is the ability to choose which status group we’re trying to fit into [which, if you think about it, is paradoxically not about "individualism" at all (for fun you can look at Sheeple in the Human Matrix]. The field of identity economics explores the intersection between how individuals define themselves, what groups they see themselves in, and their personal finances:
“People’s notions of what is proper, and what is forbidden, and for whom, are fundamental to how hard they work, and how they learn, spend, and save. Thus people’s identity–their conception of who they are, and of who they choose to be–may be the most important factor affecting their economic lives.”
In other words, the jobs you think are possible to you, the car you think about buying, whether you live in a city or in the country, what you do for leisure, and basically every economic decision you make, is based on your perception of your identity, including class and gender. Once you see your constant need to perform and achieve that identity, it becomes impossible not to see. If you think you are immune to status and identity, how many of you married to someone or are looking to partner with someone within your social and economic class? American society's caste system reaches into our most intimate desires.
EXTRA (i.e. only if you are interested): Jia Tolentino is the smartest writer I know about the tyranny of the "ideal woman" identity. The performance and display of feminine identity is a 24-hour job, which leads to exhaustion and burnout, but the system punishes people who don't, won't or can't conform to the standards of beauty, so women internalize the values and reify it for others. Articles here and here.
Our ego identities are the sum of our desires. But now with capitalism we can create, and endlessly fulfill, unlimited desires. The ego project and the capitalism project are one and the same. The core wound of Western society is, as we constantly perform our sense of individual "identity" (our "egos"), the less we feel like we belong, to ourselves and to others.
And we have been taught to believe that it makes us happy.
Any status display we want, whether it's more travel, more new experiences, more adventures, a nicer house, more or "better" clients, a TED talk, more Instagram followers, more “impact” or, if we're being honest, a dream partner and children, so much of our desire is performance of an identity we think we should have. It's our ego's fantasy that if we “achieve” this identity (i.e. if we are a “success”), it will “solve" our problems. It’s thinking that a secondary satisfaction can replace a primary one. And so much of achieving this identity is the showing others we have achieved it:
“We seem to have settled instead for the enviable life. Out with the good life, in with the life others can wish they had—painfully wish they had. When we incite envy, we at least show that our life has some meaning, meaning that comes from our ability to evoke the jealousy of others: I wish I had that! I wish I were going there! I wish I had achieved such heights!” - Professor Mark Edmundson, University of Virginia.
Finally, a short story about our real spiritual identities. How hard would it be to truly accept this? What would happen to capitalism if we did? (2 min, required)
Assignment: Find a walk and talk partner to discuss this week’s reading. Here are some possible prompts. Afterwards post your reflections on the message board.
1) How are your decisions about work and spending filtered though your sense of identity (or more abstractly, and more accurately, your identification with an identity)? Who are you trying to impress?
2) The ego project and the capitalism project are one and the same: individualism. Reflections on identity economics, that your conception of who you are is "the most important factor affecting your economic life?" How much do your financial decisions communicate taste, class, wealth, and privilege?
3) If you experience burnout in your life, how much of it is about constantly feeling the need to perform and display status?
4) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who discovered the state of "flow," once wrote: “The self is a fragile construction of the mind.” Flow is the dissolution of self into a task. Connect to the Doll of Salt.
DEEPER: So much of our spending and working is to signal that we belong. And belong to the right group. Deeper yet, we have not made those decisions by ourselves, we have been conditioned to want to belong to certain groups. Examining what you have been conditioned to want to belong to and by whom (your parents, your education, your media) is deep work.