Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the ‘Experience’ post — some reflections on various modes of quitting, detachment, etc, and on the ideas underpinning them. I’d like to spotlight also Mary Tabor’s post at
on reasons to make art.Best,
Sam
ON LIEDOWNS AND THE ‘MERITOCRACY’
I try to not take media-ready pop phenomena too seriously, but there was something about the Chinese/Korean trend of ‘the liedown’ that really got to me, that seemed like a perfect encapsulation of our era.
The idea — simply enough — was that people were too stressed, driven too hard, working ridiculous hours for no good reason, and the antidote was to just not do it, opt out, lean out, lie down. East Asian social media turned out to be very creative in discussing the underpinnings of what’s called the ‘tang ping’ (lying flat) lifestyle. The enemy was clear enough. It was the ‘996 culture,’ as advocated by somebody like Jack Ma, the Alibaba CEO, which assumed work hours of 9am to 9pm six days a week; and it was the attendant sacrifices made to work that hard, Korea’s ‘sampo’ (give up three) culture, which surrendered dating, marriage, and kids for the sake of relentless, unrewarding hard work, and was supplanted a few year later by ‘opo’ (give up five), which added friendships and home ownership to the pile.
And the tang ping movement indebted itself to some very old examples. Its founder Luo Huazhong, whose Baidu post went viral before being eventually deleted by the Chinese government, claimed that he was repeating the example of Diogenes the Cynic, “sleeping in my barrel enjoying a sunbath,” and of Heraclitus “living in a cave and meditating on logos.” He continued that, “since there has never been a train of thought that exalts human subjectivity in this land,” he would create it for himself.
That last statement is a very surprising verdict on Chinese intellectual history, but plenty of other examples of similar renunciatory movements come to mind — Thoreau at Walden Pond, Timothy Leary’s ‘tune in tune out,’ the entirety of the Beat and hippie movements, in addition to monastic and hermetic impulses from just about every culture in the world, China included. Probably the best way to understand each of these movements — at least as sociological phenomenon — is to perceive clearly what they are reacting to. And what’s interesting in comparing tang ping to its most obvious counterpart, the hippie movement, is that it’s actually protesting something fairly different and accordingly assuming a distinct shape. The hippie movement was basically about opposition to the security state — a society designed according to a violent model and assuming a citizenry placidly willing to support violent objectives. The hippie gestures — long hair, loose clothing, non-uniform styles of dress and speech, as well as burning draft cards and flags — were all about subverting a militaristic establishment. The United States government discovered, ultimately, a very simple method for defanging the hippie counterculture — eliminating the draft. ‘No draft no hippies’ might be a reasonable summation of the concluding compromise of that era — and, although the hippies were right about all kinds of things, once the United States moved away, at least overtly, from the model of an all-encompassing security state, then the hippie movement lost its political centrality. Meanwhile, the time-honored renunciatory movements — monks and hermits — tend to have bigger game in mind, to renounce ‘the world,’ or ‘materiality,’ in total. But tang ping is a bit different — it’s very clearly about capitalism and the ‘undulatory rhythm,’ the unending work, associated with the state of capitalism that we all find ourselves in.
What I also find very interesting about tang ping is that it hasn’t really translated itself to or arrived in the West. To some extent, the media has been pushing a narrative that it has. Late 2020 was supposed to be ‘The Great Resignation.’ Millennials are the ‘first burnout generation.’ The New York Times ran this op-ed contending that tang ping had very much embedded itself in the culture — in the form of moving back in with one’s parents and discovering the ‘joys of sitting on the porch.’
And I guess I recognize aspects of all of those stories but without quite buying the media narrative. ‘The Great Resignation’ struck me very oddly at the time I was reading about it in late 2020 — since most people I knew were desperately worried about an economic meltdown and clinging to any job they had. And calling millennials a ‘burnout generation’ never felt right — there were just too many people working very long hours, just like their forefathers before them, and maybe complaining about it more vocally, but I didn’t feel like they were being unusually proactive about it. And ‘the joys of sitting on the porch’ seemed like a viable narrative just long enough to cash the check from The Times. There was nothing anybody could argue with, really, about sitting on a porch except that, eventually, the monthly payment for the house would come due, and The Times piece left unanswered how, exactly, that would get covered.
The feeling I had was that I had a great deal of sympathy for tang ping in East Asia — it really did seem like ‘work ethic’ had gotten totally out of control and, at least in China, that was combined with conformity to a political system; and ‘lying down’ seemed like the perfect, symmetrical protest. But the Western counterparts — the Great Resignation (which seemed mostly to mean leaving a corporate job for the sake of a startup offering pretty much exactly the same service) or ‘quiet quitting’ (which meant staying in your corporate-esque job but doing it less well) — struck me as less than inspiring. It just felt like the alleged Western protests — and I was never fully convinced that the ‘protests’ weren’t a cooked-up media narrative — weren’t exactly proportionate to whatever the problem was supposed to be. People didn’t really object to capitalism itself. A full-fledged ‘996’ culture hadn’t taken root except in a limited number of ultra-high-performing industries. So The Great Resignation and Quiet Quitting never felt like more than just the usual complaining-about-work given hashtagable names.
But around the same time there was a phenomenon that I genuinely did find shocking — of top athletes, literally people who were the undisputed best in the world at what they did, deciding that they simply didn’t want to do it anymore. I’m thinking of Naomi Osaka in tennis, Simone Biles in gymnastics, Andrew Luck in football, Magnus Carlsen in chess. Osaka framed it in terms of mental health. “I thought it was better to exercise self-care and skip the press conferences,” she said. Biles said that she was inspired by Osaka, but in a single breath, shifted the conversation from mental health to a broader question about life purpose. "I say put mental health first. Because if you don't, then you're not going to enjoy your sport and you're not going to succeed as much as you want to,” she said. “So it's ok sometimes to even sit out the big competitions to focus on yourself, because it shows how strong of a competitor and person that you really are — rather than just battle through it." And Luck posited a dichotomy between the football-that-he-loved and the football-that-the-professionals-play. “I’ve been stuck in this process. I haven't been able to live the life I want to live,” he said. “It's taken the joy out of this game.” And Carlsen gave up the world championship by saying, simply, “I’m not motivated to play another match.”
As protests go, these weren’t as dramatic, as all-repudiating, as tang ping, but they really sent shock waves through the culture. A great deal of the reaction, of course, had to do with the fact that all of these people were ridiculously privileged and lucky and with a sense that they were spoiled and ungrateful for not doing what was expected of them, but it was exactly that that made their peculiar protests so meaningful. The culture I grew up in — in the ‘90s and ‘00s — was proudly and sort of reflexively meritocratic. The assumption was that, as per Fukuyama, the great questions of civilization had already been worked out, and the highest objective for an individual human being was simply to be the best at whatever activity they selected for themselves. The ads I grew up with all declared, with startling unanimity, that ‘second was nothing.’ And the most thoughtful writing of that era explored the particular psyche of excellence-at-any-price. I’m thinking of things like the movie version of Moneyball and of David Foster Wallace’s essay on the tennis player Michael Joyce — and the understanding, shared by subject and writer alike, is that the state of compulsive competitiveness is completely understandable, that it may, from some higher perspective, be crazy, but that people like Billy Beane and Michael Joyce were in perfect consonance with the psychic truth of contemporary life. So the protests of Osaka, Biles, Luck, Carlsen, really startled me. And startled me in a way that Colin Kaepernick’s protest, for instance, didn’t. The protests weren’t political or social — they were different from tang ping in that none of the protestors had any problem, really, with capitalism and, for that matter, none of them had any problem with their chosen path in life. They all loved the activity that they had chosen, but they disliked the implicit social contract of success — that, if you are good at something, and are financially rewarded for it, then you must give back, be grateful, attend your press conferences, take your concussions, and so on. For critics, all of those athletes suddenly became attuned to mental health, to the problem of the ‘twisties’ and of concussions, exactly at a moment when they had non-refundable multi-million-dollar contracts. But from the perspective of the athletes, there was an activity that they had been doing since they were children, that they had a particular talent for and that had rewarded them greatly, and then they were being asked to do increasingly dangerous or just unpleasant things for the sake of the activity, and at some point, like a super-elite Bartleby the Scrivener, they just didn’t see the point.
In other words, what these athletes were objecting to — and their protest was almost perfectly symmetrical to what they dealing with — wasn’t capitalism or ‘work ethic’ but the meritocracy. The principle of the meritocracy held that you should subject yourself to certain arbitrary rules as a means of proving yourself; and then once you prove yourself you are free. But the society hadn’t held itself to its end of the contract — had insisted that Osaka attend press conferences that she just didn’t want to; had insisted that Luck head into the latter stage of his career in which the almost-inevitable concussions would be even more permanently debilitating — and the athletes, in the face of a great deal of external pressure, had insisted, as per the original contract that they had signed up for, that they be allowed to be free once they had reached a certain level of demonstrable excellence.
In terms of the great renunciatory movements of the last few years, I have more interest in and sympathy for what the top athletes are teasing at than I do for anything else. Tang ping is intriguing to me but is a bit more radical than anything that I feel up to — I don’t actually disagree with capitalism as a system and ‘work ethic’ in my professional life hasn’t been so overwhelming that lying down is the only cogent response. ‘The Great Resignation’ seems just to mean startups and isn’t really a challenge to anything. And ‘quiet quitting’ and ‘enjoying the porch’ are a bit hard to distinguish from laziness. But, for me, there is a great deal to be said for respecting the inherent value of whatever activity you choose to be engaged in — Osaka, Biles, Luck, Carlsen all really love what they do, and a tremendous amount of what they love about their activity is the power and the internal freedom that it gives them. At their moment of crisis they are dealing with a deep clash of values systems — of the activity that has brought them to a peak of excellence, as compared with the ‘meritocracy’ which ostensibly rewards their excellence but in fact imposes ever-greater, unending obligations on them — and their decisions speak to some really tremendous paradigmatic shift in how capitalistic Western countries conceive of themselves, that values are internally constituted and not really at all about what the system, however apparently benevolent or rationally constituted, asks of us.
One person as far as i know says the demands of the state are incontovertible. That is karl Jaspers. Can we talk about this? I read him for a month every year and i just get his cogent argument for a well lived life within the apparatus of state security. But security is a nothing. An absurdity. So his obedience which did so much for him should be valued cheaply?
Inc ontrovertible.