Dissatisfaction is a feature, not a bug (part 1)

Over the last 50 years, incomes doubled and the savings rate halved. Why?

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man made a huge impact on me as a teenager. In the eviscerating first chapter, “Battle Royal,” the unnamed protagonist, a Black teen, is invited to give his graduation speech to a crowd of Southern white businessmen. What follows is the epitome of Black horror: sexual humiliation, public degradation, and visceral terror, somehow culminating with him receiving a calf-skin briefcase, and in it, a scholarship to the local Black state college. That night he has a dream of his grandfather:

 That night I dreamed I was at a circus with him and that he refused to laugh at the clowns no matter what they did. Then later he told me to open my brief case and read what was inside and I did, finding an official envelope stamped with the state seal; and inside the envelope I found another and another, endlessly, and I thought I would fall of weariness. "Them's years," he said. "Now open that one." And I did and in it I found an engraved document containing a short message in letters of gold. "Read it," my grandfather said. "Out loud."

      "To Whom It May Concern," I intoned. "Keep This _____ Boy
Running." (source)

I was thinking about Battle Royal this week when I read that over the last 50 years, median inflation-adjusted incomes doubled and the savings rate halved. I was shocked enough to recheck with a different source. The Federal Reserve has slightly different numbers, but the point is the same: the median family in America is twice is wealthy as it was 50-65 years ago, but it saves half as much.

I’m nearing 50 myself now, so I have some memories of this. When I was a kid, we simply had less things. Fewer clothes, no mobile phones, no computer (not pre-internet, but pre-computer!), fewer TV channels. We rarely went out to eat. Rarely traveled. People worked fewer hours. Less knowledge, fewer experiences, but more time.

Today, we have more of everything. But that means we have many more temptations, and in our efforts to consume everything, we live busier, less contented lives.

[Geopolitical side thought on Ukraine: How was Putin able to build a 1 million soldier army? We buy oil from places like Russia (and Saudi Arabia, which just mass executed 81 prisoners). Our oil consumption funded Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.]

What I was realized this week was, in capitalism, dissatisfaction is a feature, not a bug. Anyone who has taken Financial Freedom or Emotional Consequences of Capitalism with me has taken a deeper dive into this but, like with our protagonist in Invisible Man, it’s designed to keep you running. Job and income insecurity keeps you producing on one end, and then validation, group status, and display keeping you consuming on the other end. You keep on opening envelopes, only to find envelopes within the envelopes. In other words, the hedonic treadmill. It’s a hamster wheel of anxiety.

Over the last 50 years, our incomes doubled, but our savings have halved. We have more money, but we spend a greater percentage of it. In other words the faster you go on the wheel, the faster the wheel goes. But how do you break the wheel?

I’ll return to this theme next week in part 2: we’re exhausted and burnt out because spend more of our lives producing and consuming. But dissatisfaction is not only a fact of capitalism; it’s a fact of life. The First Noble Truth of Buddhism is dukkha. Dukkha is usually translated as “suffering” but actually has the more subtle meaning of “pervasive unsatisfactoriness.” Our lives are perpetually dissatisfying. Capitalism is 250 years old; Buddhism started 2500 years ago. Capitalism is not the cause of dissatisfaction, but it uses this fact of human condition to keep us running. And it’s designed so the faster you run, the faster it goes.

[In FF1 I show a chart of people’s life satisfaction on a scale of 1-5, categorized by income. At every income level, the average is slightly below 3, in other words, slightly dissatisfied.]

The hardest thing is to be simple. In life, we’re always looking for a solution for our dissatisfaction. And capitalism will always promise you an external solution; in fact, that’s how the wheel keeps spinning, from our own running on it. There is always some validation, accomplishment, or status marker that will temporarily relieve your pain. But the pain comes back. You can’t outrun it.

The hardest thing is to be simple.

Our fantasy is that we can get something or achieve something that permanently solves our dissatisfaction. And capitalism thrives on that belief. The only way out is to see it with clear eyes. The only way to stop the wheel is to step off it.

Next week: credit card debt, meritocracy, and the nature of desire.

When you look back at your life, did you have moments in your life where you were satisfied? What were they, how long did they last, and what role did capitalism play? Would love your thoughts below!