The Mindless Dissonance of Modernity

Part 3: Being Happy as the Worker Ant

M. D. Kwak

While the cricket idles, the ants work hard. Winter comes, and the ants enjoy the warmth of survival while the cricket freezes outside and begs for help. 

Capitalism points us to those ants and says: “that is happiness, that is success” and makes us work as hard as those ants so we too may enjoy the warmth of a house, or the safety net of a retirement fund. That is the lie of capitalism and happiness. Surely the human condition transcends maximising efficiency or the 70-hour-week corporate grindset? Surely, happiness and fulfillment is something more?

The ideology of capitalism is not merely economic – it is also a personal and psychological framework. According to capitalism, the metrics for happiness (among others) are freedom and economic success – all heavily focussed around the singular individual. 

Yet, the fact modernised capitalist countries a) still have high levels of inequality and b) suffer from unhappiness and mental health problems, suggests the underlying narrative of capitalism is a lie. Obviously, a large group suffer from inequality but even those who have succeeded within the ideology – the wealthy and privileged – struggle with personal relationships and suffer from stress and anxiety. These two phenomena aren’t separate – they’re caustic. Several psychology papers have posited that capitalist values have directly contributed to a decline in social well-being and an increase in psychopathology throughout the western world. 

Clearly, the projected version of capitalism is different from reality. The lie of capitalism and happiness is twofold. Firstly, it is that in our developed society, anyone can succeed through capitalism. The second is that once the capitalist conception of ‘success’ is attained (i.e. being able to fulfill most material wants), one will be happy and fulfilled. 

The first lie arose because the politicians who championed capitalism and the media moguls who disseminated their messaging, were and continue to be in positions of privilege and ignorance. Capitalism had clearly worked for them and in a classic ‘egocentric bias’ moment, they assumed it would for everyone else. 

Similarly, the unrealistic expectations put onto current youth, may have been far more achievable for their grandparents. Old narratives were for an older generation: a car by 20, owning a house by 25, nuclear family by 30 and retirement by 60. However, these norms haven’t stood the test of time and changing economic and cultural landscapes have shifted the goalposts. Amidst supply chain issues and recessionary concerns as well as failing democratic representation and global warming, the capitalist dream has become outdated, stagnant and profoundly false. The increasing difficulty of meeting these arbitrary milestones and achieving societal constructs of ‘success’ and ‘happiness’ are another cause of youth mental health struggle.

The second lie assumes that the criteria for happiness which capitalism offers is not only legitimate but universally encompassing. Arguably, it is neither. 

Firstly, any metric that attempts to standardise happiness and make its attainment procedural is profoundly silly. This is because everyone finds happiness through different avenues and although some may find it in the corporate world and earning 6 figures in reward, others find it constraining, stressful and deeply unfulfilling.

The consequences are devastating. When an individual feels unhappy, and the world insists they should be feeling the opposite (perhaps because they are affluent), society is denying and delegitimising their unhappiness rather than giving them support to combat it. Not only is it ignoring their problems – it alienates these individuals and makes them feel guilty and embarrassed for being unhappy whilst in a position of privilege (in the capitalist definition). 

According to Gilbert (2006), this has a very real impact on mental health, with low social support, intense individual competitiveness and increased social failure increasing one’s susceptibility to depression.  

Secondly, wealth isn’t a perfect metric for happiness and pretending it is, has harmful impacts. A 2010 study by Princeton researchers found that happiness leveled off when annual incomes reached $90,000. Another study (Killingsworth 2021) found that differences in income account for a small percentage of overall variation in happiness – consistent with the law of diminishing marginal utility of wealth. Further research by the University of Sydney (2021) reveals that health, religion and familial social connections are important contributors to happiness that are unrelated to material wealth. 

The banality and vapidity of consumerism is not groundbreaking. Films like Fight Club and Parasite are cultural and filmic masterpieces for the reason they speak to the inadequacy of consumerism and critique the ultra-competitive, capitalist hierarchy that fails those most in need. 

Although most people understand the flaws of capitalism, many don’t see the inherent trade-off it presents as it exists in tension with other social and collective considerations. In order to chase the dollar or shop for the next fashion item, the capitalist narrative neglects our emotional needs and incurs the opportunity cost of our attention being spent away from things like family and community. It is a zero-sum game – corporations lure us into social media addictions or mindless consumerism and make it so that many of us would rather scroll through reels rather than converse at the dinner table. 

Twenge wrote: “A rise in psychopathology among young adults has been attributed to a shifting cultural emphasis away from intrinsic goals, e.g. social relationships, community, and competence, to extrinsic goals, like money, status, and appearance” (2010).

These extrinsic goals are the hallmarks of capitalist ideology – they’re positively embraced and promised as part of the ‘American Dream’. Not only are these extrinsic goals definitionally hierarchical and exclusionary (the concept of being rich necessitates poor people to exist as a point of comparison) but there’s an inherent shallowness and inadequacy to them. 

Furthermore, success and happiness under capitalism are often framed as individual endeavors – a competition to beat others, working late nights to get a promotion, working hard to earn money for oneself to buy the new iPhone. The individualistic and zero-sum nature of capitalism remains at odds with social and collective responsibilities to our fellow citizens, to cultural communities or to family. 

When there’s a correlation between student anxiety and low social connectedness (Twenge 2000), collective institutions that bring people together may be the missing piece in current Western social environments. For many, these institutions have provided their lives with purpose, offered stability and insulated them against the worst of mental illness. 

However, the disenfranchised may detect the deceptiveness of two-faced educational and social institutions that espouse tone-deaf platitudes. Collective structures can be coercive and destroy the individual psyche by ignoring and homogenising it, with broad sweeps of its uncaring agenda.

However, in ‘Catcher in the Rye’, Holden’s rejection of society doesn’t bring him cathartic relief. Rather, he’s in a Catch-22, whereby institutions fail to provide his ‘raison d’être’ but without them he struggles to create and find meaning himself. Above his existential crisis, readers get a sense of his profound loneliness; his attempts to connect with strangers and old acquaintances are either foiled by self-sabotage or tainted by perverted betrayals and the vapidity of post-War New York.

The positive feedback loop of loneliness and social despair in the absence or corruption of communal structures is exacerbated by technology. Paradoxically, our world is the most connected it has ever been, yet internet use has been correlated with greater feelings of loneliness and depressive symptoms due to less family communication, smaller social circles, and lower self-esteem according to Kraut (1998).

Schwartz (2000) also offers an un-intuitive analysis of the freedom capitalistic societies afford the individual. The high degree of self-determination may be a double-edged sword – freedom is certainly laudable but excessive choice may affect depression rates by causing paralytic indecision, greater expectations, stress, and eventual dissatisfaction, blame, and regret.

However, the greatest tragedy is that the lie of equality and the lie of capitalism contradict each other – it’s impossible for both to simultaneously exist as truths. When society defines success as being the best, there’s an inevitable group of people who – by definition – cannot be the best and are condemned to unhappiness and angst. Capitalism necessarily exists within a hierarchy of wealth and sorts people based on their productive economic value. It encourages and relies on people using their arbitrary leverage to outcompete others. 

In one breath, society tells us we are all equal but in the next, it says true happiness is found by rising up the hierarchy and being richer than the person next to you. In the face of these two incredibly coercive but incongruent narratives, people would have no alternative but to feel confused, powerless and mentally fatigued.