Economic historians have analyzed the causes and results of bubbles and their subsequent “popping” in our economy since the advent of our fiat system. The tech bubble, the real estate bubble, currency inflation and devaluation, it follows the same basic pattern: an action proves profitable, it is exploited to the point of saturation, and the greed of man pushes it further still until the system breaks and makes victims of the players.
This pattern has repeated enough that we should’ve learned our lesson by now, but the allure of getting in on the action before the ship goes down is too great to resist, and the hope that folks will stop of their own volition and let the balloon deflate on its own is one that overestimates good human nature tremendously. What is karmically most unsettling is that those who have gotten their piece of the pie—that is, those who’ve contributed to the inflation and pulled their assets and asses out of there before the breaking point—remain largely unaffected by the meltdown. The ones who feel the brunt of the crash are those who never got anything out of it.
This was as true in 2008 as it was in any lesser bubble prior. It all begins with a vacuum or loophole in an established system. Continuing with the 2008 example, this vacuum was the untapped market of subprime potential homebuyers. It proved profitable to lend them mortgages and then sell those overrated loans to larger funds. So some enterprising (read: conniving) folk took the ball and ran with it. Then others saw the opportunity for easy money and did the same, and so on. The snowball grew. The result was a market that was saturated with something whose value was null, and dropping fast. A mansion built upon hollow pillars. Even if they saw the cracks forming, they’d still try to get their piece before the whole thing came down. And down it came.
* * *
I believe we’re in the midst of a new kind of bubble: a psychological one. The untapped market in this case is the fragile psyches of We The People. We are fragile things, us humans. There’s a lot we need to survive, and a hell of lot more we need to remain “comfortable”—that tricky state of being we invented so that we have an excuse to bitch and moan, and feel unsatisfied enough so that when we buy our way back to “comfort” we can enjoy another hit of those sweet, sweet endorphins.
It was a long time coming, this impetus for our most recent bubble. In fact it is necessarily as long as human evolution. Early homo sapiens were content having a fire, tools to build shelter and hunt their food, and a cozy cave to copulate with a mate out of the rain. Pretty low maintenance. After the Industrial Revolution we got a bit needy. Now we wanted clean water, woven clothes, a chamber pot to piss in, and holy shit, is that electricity? Once indoor plumbing hit, we were spoiled. There was no going back.
After that it just became a game of who can make the coolest shit: Writing letters sucks, let’s invent the telegraph. Then it was, damn it’s cold in here, how about a radiator? Pretty soon the beeping of the telegraph got annoying, so Bell made the telephone. We got sick of moving slow and Ford flooded the streets of America with Model-T’s. We even got sick of getting sick, so Salk gave the middle finger to Polio with his vaccine. The ball was rolling and wouldn’t stop, even after we were launching dogs into space and powering cars with corn. And through all these miraculous advances of science one thing remained constant: we were never goddamned satisfied.
* * *
This is where the villain of our story slithers its way in. The human race was witnessing the greatest and fastest technological revolution in its entire existence, and our only response was an unenthused, “What else ya got?” So along came the enterprising (read: conniving) industry of advertising.
“We’ll tell you what ya need!” They said. And, oh boy were we excited! It was Christmas morning and there were a bunch of new toys under the tree: microwaves, color TVs, weird mechanized belts that jiggled the fat right off our bones. “Smoke these menthol cigarettes,” they said, “It’ll clear your sinuses. It’s good for you!” Or “Eat this Wonderbread, it’s got vitamins!” There were magic tonics that reversed aging, pills that gave you the erection of a horse, colognes that made women swoon and fall into your arms and what’s more, The Man On TV told us exactly what to buy—we didn’t even need to think! What a time to be alive! It was a system of exploitation and homogenization of the American family. And it was profitable.
Clearly this cash cow wasn’t going anywhere, so another player entered the game: pharmaceuticals. Dependent consumers were reliable buyers. So why wouldn’t drug-dependent addicts be? So Big Pharma deployed their salesmen across the country, going hospital to hospital, to convince doctors to convince patients that they needed their magic pills if they ever wanted a chance to live “normal” lives. As it turned out, when the cure is so euphoric, it’s easy to convince someone they’re diseased.
Gaze upon the American family: Mommy on Valium, little Billy on Ritalin, Sally on Adderall, and Daddy, swimming in a river of bourbon. But they have a car in the driveway, a brand-new microwave, and Mommy’s got her dilated eyes set on that fancy new mattress The Man On TV said they need. Life was grand.
The drugged and hypnotized masses sat glued to their TV sets, instructed on what to buy next, so manufacturers could make more money to build more stuff to sell. All the while, the population was equating those purchases with self-fulfillment. But it was a fleeting one. One that needed to be reset regularly. The cash register was the alter, and praying at it had become ritual. Capitalism was making the dangerous shift to materialism.
* * *
This is where we might expect the bubble to pop. We see the telltale cyclic repetition, the saturation, and it’s not sustainable. But no bust. There are leaks in the balloon, sure: suicide rates rose, addiction increased, and that picture-perfect American family started to unravel. A change was needed.
So the counter-culture emerged. Hippies, protest music, and cultural dissatisfaction with a bland life fed to us from a television set. But The System was smart, and it had become sentient. Protest bands needed managers, hippies needed lab-created LSD, San Francisco needed landlords, and soon even the pure and noble social revolution was being rung-out for cash.
The wave broke, as the Good Doctor Gonzo put it, but the machine raged on. White picket fences were replaced with apartment complexes, and the faceless suits in ambiguous office jobs were being pushed out to make room for young tech geeks. Gates and Jobs saw the next “cool shit” to make, and fuck-all if it wasn’t just the next drug we were waiting for.
* * *
It was a bubble within a bubble—the kind your friend might be able to do with two pieces of Double Bubble™ bubble gum and a strong set of masseters. The consumerist momentum carried over into the 21st century with fucking gusto.
The biggest draw to technology and the digital space as a whole was the escape it offered. It all seemed so futuristic that, while we used it, it was as if we were leaving our own world behind; you know, that unsatisfying one that we’re so increasingly unimpressed by? And with a screen in our pocket that can take us to any part of world and connect us to anyone in it, why wouldn’t we abuse that? Who wouldn’t rather look at a beautiful picture of The Great Barrier Reef than acknowledge the horrendous pollution occurring in our own hometown? Or read a feel-good story about some blind kid in Syria who started a network of volunteers to help extract refugees, rather than witness the violent crimes that oppress our own lower class in America? Plug-in and tune-out. That was the mantra.
So we did. We found the soothing salve to take our minds off the crushing depression that is the state of the world. But our villain was close on our heels. Ads began flooding our escape-screens and now we had to subscribe to a service to read that feel-good story. But a merciful concession: if we let these invaders track our escapes, we can enjoy this privilege for free. So we let them.
And that was the death rattle of privacy. We went about our lives, utilizing the continued miracles of technology, ordering drone-dropped clothes to our doors, commanding pizza at the press of an emoji button, surrendering all possession of knowledge to the Great God Google, while somewhere in Bumfuck, Indiana, a database accumulated our human profile. An entire human life, summarized by our purchase behavior. And then one day as you’re taking your morning dump and checking your Instagram feed, you see an advertisement for toilet paper before you even realize the roll is empty. And it’s over.
* * *
The same drug that let us escape all the sadness of the world had taken us over. The Man On TV telling us what to buy was now in our pockets. And now he knew what we wanted.
Social media offered a brief respite. It was a comfortable place to connect with friends and share thoughts, but then The Man On TV appeared to tell us what we were missing in our lives. And slowly that microcosm became its own drug: our sole source of self-validation. We desperately posted portions of our lives, hoping for a notification saying someone liked what we were doing. Is this good enough? Am I good enough? Eventually we saw what got those dopamine-boosting thumbs, and altered our lives to do that thing more. And suddenly we were living a contrived life to appease The Great Thumb.
And it felt good. We felt as though whatever we were doing was right. The human race’s self-worth had never been more easily raised. Unfortunately, it’d never been so quick to fall either.
* * *
We’ve forgotten how to live naturally. We no longer enjoy things. Everything we do has become a sort of badge to show off. We watch concerts through a camera lens. We see the world’s beauty through a computer monitor. We watch our own kids grow up through the camera of a fucking iPhone.
A part of us realizes how trapped we are, but it’s so hard to break free. Like knowing your addiction, but not possessing the strength to conquer it. So we live in constant frustration with our own faults, but we can’t admit that, so we aim our anger outwards. At one another.
The result is this generation of the easily offended. All of us itch so badly for something—anything—to aim our anger at, so when the slightest action arises that raises our mercurial ire, it becomes our lightning rod. Maybe it’s a joke, or a Tweet, a politician, a misquote, that way the waitress said, “Thanks for coming in,” or some other excuse to relieve our internal tension, but we’ve wandered far off-track from what matters.
* * *
We’re going through a crisis and it seems for now at least, that we’re losing. All day long we play the game, falling into the same pattern: feel like shit, buy more shit for the high of the drug, then spiral back down to worthlessness, all the while doing our best to make sure other people feel as shitty as we do, so we won’t be so alone at the bottom. But you can’t fix hate with more hate.
We need to find a way to derive meaning in our lives from within ourselves. Or within loved ones. Or from the planet’s own beauty. Or from a song. Or from your dog. Or from anything that doesn’t have a fucking logo on it. I’m not suggesting you throw your phone into the river, but turn off your notifications for God’s sake—for your own sake. Watch a concert with your own eyes. Do something nice without bragging about it. Don’t hinge your whole existence on the acceptance of others, and certainly not for The Man On TV. I know it feels good to be validated so easily, but if we can find happiness naturally and spread it to one another, maybe we can deflate this bubble before it busts.