Escaping the shallows
The other day, I walked across my neighborhood cemetery, admiring the tombstones from the past two centuries. It’s a beautiful place with carefully planted flowers, trees, and benches to rest on. Needless to say, there’s also a plethora of graves. Reading the inscriptions on the tombstones is like going on a journey down time with some graves I spotted dating back to the 18th century.
Interestingly, various didn’t just have the usual names and dates on them but included job titles such as School Head, carpenter, or bookseller. It made me think, what would I want to see on my tombstone?
Suppose you consider that a macabre line of thought; remember that the investment gurus Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger also advise you to write your own obituary and live up to it. Same idea different execution.
Funny enough, I realized I’d definitely not want my current job title written on it. In a sense, I even felt envy for the bookseller and carpenter. At least their jobs seem clearly defined and, even more importantly, real.
Is my job real?
Do you know that meme about bullshit jobs? I think of it sometimes as I type email copy or social media tweets for web3 companies.
Bookseller = Sells books | Carpenter = Builds Furniture | School Master = Runs a school
Crypto Marketing Manager = someone trying to convince people that they need crypto in their life
Just because an internet meme suggests that the maximum word count to describe a real job is three doesn’t mean this is why I sometimes feel my job is not real. It goes a little deeper than that.
Working fully remote
I love working from home. It allows me to do laundry during meetings or squeeze in breaks to play guitar. When I feel the need for peer pressure, I go sit in the library among diligently typing students.
Yet, there is something about sitting the entire day in front of a screen; typing is the maximum manual labor you do. I close the laptop in the evening and wonder, what did I even do? There is no output to be seen in the real world except for the laundry that’s now clean and hanging out to dry.
It turns out this feeling isn’t unique to me; something is lost when we are not using our hands to work.
The influence of technology on how we experience work
In the 20th century, the German philosopher Heidegger warned about the potential loss of hand labor when the typewriter was introduced. For him, the hands were what connected us with the world and a significant part of our being.
Man himself acts [handelt] through the hand [Hand]; for the hand is, together with the word, the essential distinction of man. Only a being which, like man, “has” the word, can and must “have” “the hand.” Through the hand occur both prayer and murder, greeting and thanks, oath and signal, and also the “work” of the hand, the “hand-work,” and the tool.
He was concerned about how technology would change our understanding of the world by changing how we perceive language.
Anything you do with your hands is work for him. Yet he also acknowledges that using one’s brain is work.
‘Perhaps thinking, too, is just something like building a cabinet [Schrein]. At any rate, it is handwork.
This already explains part of my misery. My work takes place through typing on a keyboard and talking into microphones. My hands have little to do with it. Unfortunately, there also isn’t much deep thinking involved in my current roles.
Another finding that supports the thesis is that I feel more accomplished at the end of the day when I master a difficult passage of a piece on the guitar. Similarly, when I’ve studied language and written things down on paper. In fact, most of my notes for this post are written on pieces of paper and spread across notebooks.
Yet, I don’t think this is the only reason I feel alienated. It goes further than the lack of haptic feedback. It is related to the field I am working in, Marketing.
Marketing or oiling the wheels of capitalism?
What does being in Marketing even mean?
In the most noble interpretation, it’s about getting information to people who otherwise would never know about a product that can improve their lives. It’s educating and enlightening them.
But is that accurate?
I have doubts, and now that I’m in my philosophy arc, even more so. The line between manipulation and marketing is thin. Where does educating end and evangelizing start?
In a worse interpretation, Marketing is what capitalism needs to flourish. How else can an economy maintain evergrowing consumption?
Marketing in Crypto
In crypto, even more than elsewhere, attention is all you need. That’s why marketing becomes so important. There is a lot of noise and inflationary use of words like revolutionary, cutting-edge, and future of finance, but in the end, it’s all about getting as many people as possible to set up a wallet and buy your token.
As the price becomes a goal in itself, lofty visions often are cast aside. Having principles in crypto gets in the way of making life-changing money.
The most-used blockchains by accounts and transactions seem to be Tron, the USDT settlement layer, and BNB, the shitcoin casino layer. Both aren’t necessarily associated with role model behavior.
Marketing often makes the difference in who gets funded and who does not, yet with the speculative lens on, it’s questionable if this fosters the best outcomes. As recently mentioned, people are losing their idealism for the space. And there is no amount of marketing that can fix that.
At the end of the day, when I look into the world, we seem to have a whole lot of problems worth addressing, from the rise in populism to the crisis in literacy. Yet, we never talk about them in this industry.
Is then getting people to sign up for our networks and spend time on them really such a good endeavor? Call it opportunity cost if you want.
And then there is the other thing.
Crypto is still ridiculously small in the grand scheme of things.
Any moderately successful web2 app, if they moved their backend on a blockchain, would instantly become the most used web3 app.
Yet this isn’t the entire reason why I’m dissatisfied. It’s also the role marketing plays more broadly and the shift it facilitates in modern-day consumer culture.
Modern-Day Consumer Culture and the Spectacle
In his book Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord highlights the tension that’s inherent in every new product. While each product says it’s groundbreaking and you become special once you purchase it, as soon as it’s mass-produced, that appeal is lost. Enter the next product, that now really is the thing. Rinse and repeat.
The shift to increased consumption was facilitated by making people feel that they needed these things even though who really needs a new iphone every few months?
If a product really fulfills deeper desires, why do we need new ones all the time?
Debord’s book is, first and foremost, a criticism of the new consumer culture and the shift it has created from having to appearing. The Spectacle applies a new field of vision to everything, which values things not by their true utility but by what they signify and their symbolic value. For him, the spectacle isn’t just advertising but reality, the alienation needed for the system to thrive.
“The spectacle is a permanent opium war which aims to make people identify goods with commodities and satisfaction with survival that increases according to its own law. Consumable survival must constantly expand because it never ceases to include privation.”
The fascinating part about reading Debord in the 21st century is that he wrote all of this before Social Media came around. If anything, it has simply exacerbated the need for people to appear a certain way and seek approval from internet strangers.
For Marketing, Social Media was a God-sent, allowing more intricate targeting of consumers and tapping into influencers who’d help market the “lifestyle” associated with one’s product.
The more critical I become of social media, neoliberalism, and technology’s role in people’s lives, the harder I grapple with my place in marketing.
Escaping the shallows
One way would to get out of all of this would be to fully embrace the loss of meaning and perceived reality. That isn't for me.
At least I figured out that the reason for my feeling that my job isn’t real has to do with not seeing a difference in the world through it, a lack of physical feedback. It extends to the industry as a whole, where I’m yet to see crypto tackle bigger issues.
It’s not to say they won’t happen. I’d love to see crypto applied in a way that frees up people’s time and doesn’t consume their every waking minute.
It’d be awesome if it could contribute to democracy-strengthening endeavors such as running citizens’ assemblies or allowing us to break out of the hold of the algorithms governing social media while still allowing people to connect.
IRL
Getting out of the cycle of attention and data exploitation that the current media landscape has become might even lead people to seek experiences that the digital world can’t provide.
Debord didn’t just criticize the Spectacle; he also had suggestions on how to break out of it by letting spontaneity reign and having authentic experiences. It can be as simple as going for a walk in a new part of town, leaving your phone at home.
To end where I started, that’s what I was doing in that cemetery. While walking aimlessly around, I searched for the grave of Caspar David Friedrich, the famous romantic artist buried there.
I didn’t find it. All I found was chestnuts and beautiful autumn leaves.
Yet I learned something new about his most famous work from a paper hanging on the notice board. The Wanderer over the Sea of Fog is rather atypical for Friedrich, who rarely even included humans in his paintings. It’s one of his few works painted in portrait orientation and invites the viewer to take the same perspective as the Wanderer.
It leaves us wondering what’s below the fog.
Isn’t it beautiful that a painting from a hundred years ago still evokes those feelings?
Life is so full of depth.
If only we take time to experience it with our own eyes and hands.
Writing this has been good handwork, as Heidegger would say. While I did type it in the end, I spent a lot of time thinking about it and all the connections that suddenly appeared between things I had read in different places.
If you, too, feel that, at times, modern life has become very shallow, leave the technology behind for a bit and read a good book (I am always happy to give recommendations), go out in nature, meet real people, smile at passing strangers, admire art in a gallery, spend time lost in thought, watch the clouds fly by, learn something new with your hands, or experience music flowing all through you at a life performance.
Many things are better experienced without a screen in between.
