#17

the question of enough

Culturally speaking, everything right now feels especially excessive, oozing with drunkness, petulant, and about to get real sloppy before passing out face first in its own mess of decadence. I’d rather not comment on It (I thought about linking, but then I remembered that some of you may have no idea what’s going on, and I want you to keep it that way), but I will say this: this isn’t a new thing. By that, I mean that NY has always attracted edgelords, and edgelord is the only position a bourgeois can take if he intends to be written about. It’s an ugly little collaboration, to be sure, but nothing new. Worse, maybe, louder, but not new.

Thinking about all this, though, or actively trying not to think about this, brought me back to an essay I had left unfinished a few months back; one about excess, satisfaction & the concept of enough in our bottomless pit of a world. You’ll excuse me if this one’s all over the place; my heart is still broken, and so is my brain. I do intend to write about this more thoroughly and thoughtfully for the book, but for now, please accept this humble offering, these scattered thoughts.

One of the most individualized facets of our lives is our perceptions of wealth and security. This is intentional: capitalism functions on disconnection, an impossibility to unite under splintered realities. I’m always tempted to ask people what they think is enough, and the times I have, I’ve observed someone caught off guard and confronted with a question, with a thought, that capitalism simply does not invite. Once all your basic needs are met and secured, how much more private wealth should you be able to acquire, should you desire?

We’ve sort of begun to discuss this question, though clumsily and ultimately uselessly, through the reductive, or at least too narrow, twitterized framework of billionaires bad! they COULD FIX the world !!! but CHOOSE NOT TO??? In this limited realization that chooses to infantilize itself, we’ve developed tunnel vision, an idealistic belief in a false binary, that it is us vs them, them puppeteers of all evil in the world, us one class united. But what about those quietly but surely accruing wealth and bypassing critique for it? Why should we assume they will put a cap on it, not grow into billionaires themselves? Why should we assume anyone is capable of knowing when or where to stop?

We seem able to identify frenzied gluttony en masse (ie: black Friday violence, panic hoarding) but not within ourselves, or without some sort of moral compass. We show the link to the bourgeois idea of gaucheness in association with individual wealth is still alive and well. It is still a taboo, perhaps even The Taboo in the western world.

A woman sits at a restaurant table. A waiter stands next to her, grinding pepper and instructing her to say “when”. Instead, she chooses never, sitting there gleeful and grinning, horny with the knowledge and certainty that she has gone far beyond the when, the limit, feeling some perverted enjoyment over the waste, the senselessness of it. The very sick comedy of the bourgeois is, once again, nothing new, a forever expanding void, a natural impulse and response to the diseased environment. She thinks this is agency, freedom, as she pulls out her Mastercard to pay for her ruined meal.

Living within such blurry boundaries, a world composed primarily of addictions, of voids to be filled, we become perfect specimens for compulsive hoarding, the consequences of which are displayed by the bourgeois, in the form of new horrors of excess. There is no collectivity on when, just spalls and shards of realities clashing together, resulting in scarcity psychosis with the middle class further entrenching itself in individualism. Meanwhile, those with More Than Enough, tortured and alienated by their status, continue to perform public retchings, the need to be applauded for both acquiring their status and resenting it.

On the topic of edgelords, I leave you with this, in which I’ve often found solace and serves as an important reminder. Last week, I saw Jordan Peele’s new film, Nope, about the spectacle and what we do with it. The key there, too, is in looking away. On the topic of Enough, of satisfaction under capitalism, the only conclusion is that it does not exist. It cannot exist. The bourgeois proves this. We believe, again, in our unique ability to overcome systematic truths, like we’re going to hack happiness, and that you only need this much more to get there. The finish line is a myth. It only gets uglier.

A few months ago, someone told me that they don’t feel secure making eleven thousand dollars a month. That’s a hundred and thirty-two thousand dollars a year. Just for comparison, I make about ten thousand dollars a year. The most I’ve ever made is thirty thousand dollars a year. Who are these people (in this case, a so-called communist) who seem desperate to cling to the idea that they are not there yet, whose voids keep aggrandizing themselves with little to no challenge? How is it truly possible for this kind of wealth not to Be Enough? And if there is an acknowledgment, a desire for more, then how much more?

Our idea of security is profoundly corrupted by the sustained barrage of anxious capitalist messaging about some vague idea of a Good Life, as well as a continual reminder of people with more, thus creating the insecurity that drives western life into the bottomless pit of Want, desire and repulsion, material limbo.

---