#92 - Decision Fatigue

Nostalgia has overtaken culture.

It’s always been there. History is rarely new, every generation has thought the one that came after them was worse and more addicted to whatever the new technology of the day was.

Part of what’s happening now is the harnessing of one of the most effective marketing tactics.

Don’t you want to feel like you did when you watched this for the first time?

But I think the addiction to reminiscing makes a lot of sense if we consider that things…really did use to be better. And we know it. We can feel it. But we can’t seem to escape the crushing desires of the richest men in America who have decided that their time spent on this earth should be occupied by sucking the corpse of capitalism dry so they can die on their mega-yacht, surrounded by staff because no one wants to be around them for free.

Nihilism is easier now. More than ever.

The world revolves around marketing revenue. (The promise of “free” social media is fading faster than I would have predicted.)

One billionaire caused a bank run in his group chat. He and his friends have been bankrolling Venture Capitalism in order to use Start-Ups as their own low-interest piggy banks since 2008 and now the feds raising interest rates and they’re panicking, and all of these fake bullshit companies that exist only in fake bullshit ~co-working spaces~ are failing because they were never sound businesses to begin with.

But we started talking about a company’s value as equivalent to their evaluations. (But the billionaires backing them were pumping more money than the tech companies had ever even considered asking for because they had nothing to lose and all the cash out to gain from a growth → public option venture.) And gross abuses of power were happening, and the way we’re obsessed with wealth kept terrible founders insulated from criticism or consequences. Like, I’m all for Elizabeth Holmes being charged for her actual crimes. She messed with real people’s health. But she was charged with defrauding investors and I gotta be honest, I don’t really have any sympathy for the millionaires that got hornswoggled because, by their own admission, they basically gave her money because she was young and blonde.

I’m sorry Safeway didn’t want to do the bare minimum of follow-up before giving her millions of dollars but that seems like a them problem.

None of the regular degulars that she actively defrauded, none of the Walgreens customers who got negligent at best and disastrous at worst results from her blood testing got money. Just the dudes who weren’t missing their millions. They were the only ones who had enough money to use the court system effectively!

Did the public downfall of Theranos create regulations though? No. None.

Did any of the major publications that had fawned over her and made her do the umpteenth photoshoot where she looked at a teeny-tiny vial of blood do any sort of reevaluations of their standards? Develop protocols for how they’d run future features? No? Oh, they just kinda-sorta mea culpa-d in the one documentary that came out? Got it.

(Yes, it’s bad to lie to investors. But people do it every day—especially in Silicon Valley—and they never get taken to court over it. I’m sure part of their decision to prosecute was the sheer amount of failure that occurred in public, but I would imagine that a substantial amount of the shame they felt came from being duped by a woman and needing to punish her was their only form of retribution.)

Growth was the goal for so many of these companies for so long. But there are only so many people to feasibly sell a product to. And the products we’re getting sold by social media companies have become actively worse.

I went on Instagram for the first time in months and couldn’t scroll for more than two minutes because my entire feed was ads. Facebook has been unusable for years, but remember when Facebook Events existed and were, in fact, one of the best tools we’ve ever had as far as social planning goes? Twitter is in the shitter, Tumblr is now attempting to pivot to live, and we can no longer have any nuance in conversation so the discourse around TikTok is too exhausting to touch.

And look, it’s fine if tech fails in some ways, right? My life would only have things to gain from no longer being able to access the Outrage Factory through my phone. But these companies are just shells for the wealth hoarders, and those dragons have no plans to let their gold go without burning a lot of us in the process.

But the way this money gets talked about is wild.

The middle class has disappeared and we know where it went.

We used to have access to quality goods that were built to last by companies that traded in their reputation. Now everything is subscription-based because they figured out another way to drain their consumers and make it so that no one owns anything. Everything can be taken off the table at any time. Consumers are constantly in light-hostage situations when it comes to accessing goods they paid for.

The Consumer Protection Bureau is a great and nice idea but they seem way more interested in protecting the companies than the consumers. Our only recourse as consumers in this country is through lawsuits—which are expensive to fund if you’re just one person, and basically useless if they become Class Action (the lawyers want the latter because they take a % of the overall payout while the thousands harmed get pennies), and even if you do manage to get Exxon on the hook for their oil spills caused by sheer negligence, the Supreme Court may decide you’re being big meanies to poor little oil companies and strike down the damages. Sure, $500 million sounds like a lot to get, but not when it was supposed to be $5 billion. Not when entire towns lost their livelihoods. Not when families were destroyed by the aftermath—suicide rates, domestic violence, and alcoholism skyrocketed along that coastline in Alaska. Not when the water is still polluted to this day. It took the victims over 20 years in extensive court battles to pick up their $180,000 reward. And Exxon would have happily kept appealing the decision, they didn’t care about the cost of lawyers, they wanted to set precedents so that the next time there was a spill, legal avenues were already closed to future victims.

By the way, Exxon makes about $6 billion in profits per quarter.

And this was pre-Citizens United. Now companies have had about a decade of getting to spend more money to elect politicians that bend to their wills and guess what?? Things are demonstrably worse because of it!

The train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio was not random. It was a predictable cost of Norfolk Southern refusing to hire employees or even give their current employees…sick days.

Norfolk Southern is owned by Warren Buffet who pays the least amount of taxes in American History. He could have afforded these changes out of his own personal wealth without putting a dent in his bank account. But he doesn’t want to, that’s his money that he earned by exploiting other people’s labor.

(Profit is the result of the worker’s efforts and should therefore always be returned directly to the workers #abolishwages. Fuck your boardroom, fuck investors, fuck oligarchy forever! Stock buybacks should be illegal!!!)

And when the President told the workers to quit their whining and get back to work, they did, and the company has decided to invest their profits into the pockets of the five dudes in the boardroom rather than maintenance and repairs of the literal tracks the trains run on and now the water is polluted and families that are too financially disadvantaged to simply move elsewhere will suffer health consequences for the rest of their lives.

And when our Secretary of Transportation finally visited, he begged lobbyists to…stop lobbying so that congress could pass regulations. Hey, Pete? Former McKinsey consultant Mr. Buttigeig, sir? Are you aware that grown adults who have been elected to create the best opportunities for their constituents can pass laws—regardless of what other adults who have been paid to convince them not to tell them?

Lobbyists have as much power as we allow them to have. Yeah, their promises come with cash, but hey, campaign finance reform is always an option available for the fucks on the hill who loooove to whinge about how much of their job is fundraising. Babes!! YOU MAKE THE LAWS!!!!!! You can just…cap campaign finances. They do it everywhere else in the world we have like millions of models of how to get it done!!

But no, instead one party is dedicated to eroding Voters’ Rights so now in Ohio you have to have an in-state ID in order to vote so the third largest college in America is now strongly advising 67,000 students not to vote in the state they live in because acquiring a new Ohio ID could interrupt their financial aid packages. Cool cool cool. Definitely not a targeted law to encourage this exact form of disenfranchisement.

Anti-trust laws got ignored long enough for the airlines to consolidate, and the movie studios followed suit. So now we have to pay for checked bags (which may have happened anyway because the aeronautics industry is a monopoly and they’ve all had yearly meetings in Jackson Hole for decades to decide the next money-making scheme that they embark on at the same exact time so consumers have to accept it because there’s no reasonable alternative to flying in this massive country) and we get like 6 movies a year and they’re all filmed in front of blue screens in warehouses by actors who are legally forbidden from reading the entire scripts. I, personally, think that people acting out stories should have at least a modicum of awareness about the overarching narrative their character is going on throughout but hey, what do I know?

I feel trapped in a world where I cannot be harmless.

All of my decisions have been domino-effected by greed. I have to have a mobile phone to operate in society, but I have no control over how the companies that manufacture them treat their workers. There is no recourse for them ripping off patents and intimidating developers. I just have to get over it and buy the expensive cordless headphones now because they took away the jack too.

I have to buy clothing, nudity is not an option. And I do thrift! I try my best! But the thrift stores often don’t have pants in my size, so I’m forced into unethical consumption.

And the whole “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” thing is true, and our collective efforts to Do Our Best and try to make the most ethical choices is exhausting.

Decision fatigue is so apparent. The overwhelming nature of how much we know about how bad everything is made daily life extra draining.

I want to make potatoes as a side dish, but my grocery store no longer sells organic potatoes, and I refuse to eat non-organic tubers because of the toxins in Round-Up and other pesticides that are sprayed unregulated over most vegetables. And that’s before I start factoring in exploitative labor practices and the lack of protections for the migrant workers who are doing extremely dangerous high-skill level work and then demonized for it—because if there’s one thing Americans are going to do with ire, it’s misplace it! Questions about the treatment of cows who made the milk for the butter, the warehouse workers who picked the pan I’m going to cook it in’s back health, if gas stove I’m cooking it on is low-level poisoning me.

And not thinking about it isn’t really an option. I mean it is, we can always stick our heads in the sand, but that’s feigned ignorance. Which isn’t nearly as relieving of guilt as real ignorance!

Even with things that I want to deem inconsequential, the truth is, everything is so magnified.

Some weeks I do just want to write about my silly little indulgences without this overhanging guilt that there’s something more important I could be talking about, a deeper truth I should be revealing.

I want to care. Without causing myself tremendous pain.

I want to stop feeling shame around decisions I am being forced to make. I want to trust that there are people with good intentions who want to hold public office to make things better for everyone again because it really did use to be better.

And I’m very thankful to all of the politicians who do show up in those ways, and it’s so important to vote on local issues (if you’re in NYC you can vote on budget propositions by district online right now!) and if you live in/know someone in Florida it’s a great time to attend local school board meetings and talk with friends and neighbors about what standing up to fascism entails in modern America.

The point isn’t to give up, the point is to fight back. Companies don’t matter more than the people who work there, they don’t matter more than the consumers who are affected by their decisions. Money is such a stupid thing for them to hoard because they literally can’t take it with them.

Wealth corrupts. It isolates.

Billionaires are tragic. They’re so lonely that they don’t want to live on land anymore because land means neighbors they can’t drive their mega-yacht away from. They don’t live in reality. They’re surrounded by sycophants and staff.

I don’t want endless growth and capital. I want social safety nets and UBI and child tax breaks and well-funded public schools and a complete repeal of the second amendment and decimation of the military budget.

I want there to be less cultishness around acquiring wealth so that we can examine other forms of joy beyond optimizing for survival. I want people in public office to have term limits and make the minimum wage of their state for salary. I want regulations of tech companies to skyrocket (but not in the way the TikTok bill is proposing—which is actually just an obliteration of our right to privacy online and is genuinely terrifying so they’re trying to soften it in the public sphere by focusing the information we see to be about an app that’s easily dismissable because it’s “for teens” even though that’s not true, Ellen).

I want community to be at the heart of people’s lives because we’re not selfish creatures we’ve just been forced into it by circumstance.

And really, at the end of it all, I just want there to be less suffering. The cruelty is to keep us exhausted and therefore complacent.

I want the United States to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child, I want kids in schools instead of factories, and I want robust gun control so that those schools are safe.

I want every single workplace unionized.

And, to be completely honest, I also kind of want an almond croissant.