Anger at how other people waste their time as misplaced angst at not having personal claims on other peoples' time
"Stop liking what I don't like" explained.
Started working on eigenrobot’s syllabus and already found some juicy thoughtbait from What Is Ritual? by Sarah Perry.
I commented recently, inspired by other recent thoughts I’ve had on Twitter et al.:
I’m definitely on the outside looking in here but I frequently wonder if people worrying about play are just looking for validation for their own childhood. Video games are more ubiquitous than ever and the argument never seems to be “get more children playing video games”, it always seems to be some narrow nostalgia for locking kids out in the yard to look after themselves and while yeah I definitely survived the tail end of that era I wouldn’t be in a rush to say that’s the thing that made me a well-rounded person. I mostly don’t buy the hype/freakout around phone use either, prefer the default assumption be that whatever you’re forcing them to do off their phone needs to compete better with what’s on it.
The idea for this post: cognitive midwits get very upset at other people (having free time at all but specifically,) using their free time for themself—and will find any justification they need for being mad for literally any kind of leisure activity—because it means a person isn’t using their time in some sort of abstract service to them particularly, or (in a marginally less selfish sense) to society generally vis a vis sacrificing one’s time to public ritual.
The surface point has two obvious facets:
People not being productive for every possible second of their lives is net harmful (cynically: to me, in a selfish, extremely abstract sense, but I’ll find some way to frame this as to society)
In a literal sense, if you’re taking time off you’re not working
In a farther abstract sense, if you’re not using your leisure time in the right way it’s somehow making you a worse person (who is thus less valuable to me I mean society)
There’s a most-charitable interpretation of this impulse, that people are genuinely disturbed by other people not being their best selves, but I think empirically we can mostly dismiss this one out of hand. “But SCPantera,” you argue, “You can’t just dismiss that, perhaps people actually do want the best for others, but this desire is filtered through their unique biases in a way that enables the cynical interpretation!” No, I really do think it’s the other way around, I think the average person only wants to extract from others what benefits either them or their ingroup and then filters that through their biases to find the right interpretation that they can use to bludgeon their outgroup. I think there’s definitely a lot of leeway to misinterpret the latter case—wanting others to behave in ways that favor their favored group as opposed to merely themselves personally—as being more broadly prosocial in a universal sense, but I think moreso that you should be very sensitive to the idea that, for most people, their ingroup is not all of (or even most of) humanity (nor, for the record, do I think it should be necessarily), regardless of how loudly they profess otherwise.
Returning to the Sarah Perry post that springboarded this, here’s the paragraph that set me on this path:
While there is probably no domain of human activity that ritual does not invade, watching television must score very low on the ritual spectrum. It involves the sacrifice of time, in a sense: perhaps some people watch television in order to participate in social gossip with other people, a sacrifice of time for community. But there is another perspective that probably accounts for more viewer hours: perhaps television absorbs time that the community has no other use for, ritual or economic. Advanced industrialization has left us with cognitive surplus – spare time that our groups have no demands on. Spare time that is of little value to our groups may also be of little, or even negative, value to us; television offers a way to get through time. It does not offer us much in terms of opportunities to be valuable to each other.
My reaction to this is that I don’t think it’s completely true that this spare time is automatically time that society doesn’t value (or perhaps society has figured out over time that it has the option of expropriating the cognitive surplus using [online media] avenues that didn’t exist previously). My thesis is the title of this post: when people are expressing negativity towards others’ leisure activity, there frequently seems to be some sense of personal grievance—that it’s an implied threat or harm to them that people are frivolously wasting their time in the wrong way. And conveniently, ritual gives us some of the framework for examining why this might be beyond just Old Man Yelling At Cloud.
Some of this could just be dumb “my generation is better than your generation”-type flag-waving done by people that don’t understand how others can have varying preferences, in the flavor of what I described broadly in All the nerds are undead. However, to me, attacking a broader type of leisure time activity is more sinister than nerds arguing over which is better between Marvel and DC; the latter is goofy petty posturing over status whereas the former is more about appropriating others’ resources (time, especially) in a systematic way. I mean, that’s also arguably about status but the Marvel fan is less likely to be playing a zero sum game, being mad some kid is on his phone is an implicit argument that the kid isn’t adhering to a particular ingroup ritual—isn’t making the right sacrifices to the right sacred object.1
I will say I’m not so cynical that I believe the mad-at-people-having-fun-wrong people are doing it consciously but I’m plenty cynical for other reasons. Certainly, it’s in service of The Ritual, which occurs/can occur without conscious input. What’s important is that they’re upset that someone is doing the wrong ritual without an examined, principled look at their ritual’s comparative worth and, again, charitably this is because most people aren’t meta smart enough to realize they should think about these kinds of things. But again again, I don’t think this excuses the behavior.
So there’s an implication is that there is more value in locking phone kid out in the backyard to dig holes in the mud versus watching Minecraft let’s plays. “It’s for his own good”—the penultimate Boomer mantra. Of course it’s not for phone kid’s benefit, it’s for the previous generations’ egos; it’s all ritual but how dare they do the wrong ritual, how dare they cheapen the sacrifices -I- made. Play is important but not the wrong kind of play, phone kid boots up Fortnite instead of melting ants on the sidewalk with a magnifying glass and now it’s time to bring out the pitchforks again.
I will be far from the first person who has observed that this same genre of person also seems to be responsible for it being now basically illegal to let children be out on their own, and also seem to be same kind of people who are also unusually glued to their phones. At least the conspicuous “my house doesn’t have a TV” people have some level of consistency here but it’s still signaling and we’re still free to look down on them for over-sacrificing to a ritual nobody outside the weirdo trads care about.
I’m getting slightly speculative again here but it seems to me that there is a certain type of parent who’s joy really seems to be derived less from raising the next generation and more from having complete domineering control over their children. I mean, I’ve mentioned before this person exists in management also.
I remain extremely doubtful that people get upset at children choosing their leisure time because they have a clear empiric plan for future model citizenship versus because they really need their children (or, especially, others’ children) to be sacrificed to a certain social ritual. I would agree that children shouldn’t strictly be allowed to do just whatever they want at all times but I’m naturally skeptical of any kind of blanket proscribed social treatment plans, especially ones being yelled with a suspicious amount of impotent rage.
As mentioned at the top I grew up in the mid-90s at the tapering off of the kick-the-kids-out-of-the-house era. My parents didn’t literally do that, but I had friends growing up who did and they always seemed pretty miserable. However, I also grew up in the early days of the mid-90s wild west internet, and was on it more or less continuously (at least as much as was allowed with having to share dialup with the phone line and my brother), more or less completely unsupervised, and it didn’t exactly kill me. You’ll notice the theme here is freedom, and that’s what I remember most as positives about both the run-around-the-block-doing-whatever and the free-range-internet aspects of my childhood.
This isn’t exactly something I’ve spent a ton of time thinking about but gun to my head I would suggest it’s less important what one requires kids to do and more important how one requires kids to behave. If bad behaviors aren’t corrected in any environment you create worse people, all of the kicking kids into the yard won’t help if they’re spending all their time beating up the other kid next door. Online environments are unabashedly harsher in this regard; kids by and large have figured out how to be little shits far more efficiently than we did in the 90s but the same rules apply. If you don’t stop them from being assholes online then yeah you end up with dumbass toxic assholes offline too.
I suspect people will have trouble being told there isn’t a single solution to every problem in this regard. I also don’t have faith that people want a solution versus want to have their biases flattered and the locally approved rituals sacrificed to.
Maybe an aside, but I also think it’s toxic to one as an individual to have their identity consumed by meme complexes that direct them to see other humans purely as transactional inputs. Though to be fair this is basically every meme complex I guess, and the appropriate response is to try really hard to just avoid meme complexes. That’s a different post (come to think of it, I guess it’s the ultimate conclusion of the one I’m already referencing here).
> I remain extremely doubtful that people get upset at children choosing their leisure time because they have a clear empiric plan for future model citizenship
They have one model known to work: themselves, who managed just fine without the newfangled (de)vices.
> versus because they really need their children (or, especially, others’ children) to be sacrificed to a certain social ritual.
More importantly, they have a right to sacrifice them so for as long as they’re not fully independent adults, and noöne is going to seriously stop them.
> I would agree that children shouldn’t strictly be allowed to do just whatever they want at all times
See? They’re erring on the safe side.
> but I’m naturally skeptical of any kind of blanket proscribed social treatment plans, especially ones being yelled with a suspicious amount of impotent rage.
No need then to be skeptical of strong parents who do with their children as they see fit and neither are impotent nor rage.
By the way, your post seems to be somewhat at odds with the apparently growing trend of parents who work as programmers—many of whom probably started learning to program quite young—who unabashedly play video games after putting their children to sleep, and still raise them with “no technology” (whatever that means, but it definitely excludes smartphones and other computers), telling them the computer is only a boring tool for the parent’s job. They seem humbler than “My generation is better than yours”; it’s more like “I’m deliberately nipping in the bud your ability to follow in my footsteps, as my generation is already too rotten; we need to look for models farther in the past”.
> Some of this could just be dumb “my generation is better than your generation”-type flag-waving
Does that need to be flag-waved? Isn’t the timeless consensus that every generation has always been strictly worse than the previous one, and that this will always be the case?
> So there’s an implication is that there is more value in locking phone kid out in the backyard to dig holes in the mud versus watching Minecraft let’s plays.
There definitely is—for the parents: it’s clearly more satisfying to them. And, since they have all the power to impose their wills, and basically everyone agrees they should have it, this is the only kind of value that matters.
> “It’s for his own good”—the penultimate Boomer mantra. Of course it’s not for phone kid’s benefit, it’s for the previous generations’ egos; it’s all ritual but how dare they do the wrong ritual, _how dare they cheapen the sacrifices -I- made_. Play is important but not the wrong kind of play, phone kid boots up Fortnite instead of melting ants on the sidewalk with a magnifying glass and now it’s time to bring out the pitchforks again.
They have a point: thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother. Parents have every right 1) to restrict as they please their children’s play; 2) to claim this is for the children’s own good without making any good-faith effort to test whether this is actually true, and 3) to take offence if you question that it is, as you’re failing to coöperate in the social game where the truth or falsehood of their statement is orthogonal to the reason they say it.
I don’t see any impotent rage here; on the contrary, impotent is whoever would like the parents to change their ways, since they won’t.