• Overpriced mouth pleasures, once they start making money the mouth pleasures need to be more and more exclusive. Yet nothing ever satisfies, because life’s essence isn’t in taste bud treats.
  • Holidays in instammagrable locations where they are actually bored. Croatia, Dubai, Canary islands, Malta, Mallorca, Sardinia, Greek islands, etc…
  • Chasing promotions and pay raises at work to feel like they matter, to feel they are ‘on track’. On track to where? More cocooning, less engagement with the world, entrenching deeper into comforts and safe routines
  • If they have kids they start grooming them as soon as they are born to be obedient little workers who will repeat the same mindless dopamine chasing cycles as mummy and daddy
  • Summer festivals, barely for the music, but out of FOMO, to feel trendy, to feel like they are living by the ‘carpe diem’ motto
  • All kinds of learning apps to get the feeling they are learning, but they never reach mastery, instead of learning they practice something called ‘method fetishism, instead of actually doing the hard work of learning they lose time and energy looking for the best method to learn. They never find it, because no method can avoid the truth: learning something is damn hard work. They could have sat down and read a whole book, but no, it feels good to look for such the right app that meets their learning needs. Their real goal? Avoid pain and discomfort at all times.
  • Paying for therapy that doesn’t transform them, but either medicates them (chemical sedation, if not chemical lobotomy) or allows them to play the victim and be soothed for years, because the therapist benefits financially and is using his or her own trauma to be in a safe, financially rewarding position
  • clothes
  • fancier phones than they had before
  • beauty treatments, like nails, hair coloring, facials, massages, etc, they can pay for, which is much easier than to do the hard work of slimming down, which doesn’t cost money, only effort and discipline
  • Instragram and other app doom scrolling which avoids the pain of confronting their own thoughts, but long term completely undermines their self-image, self-worth, builds up anxiety and, bizarrelly, keeps them scroll more, to escape more and undermine themselves more
  • The result is that something always needs buying to give them the momentary illusion that they are improving themselves
  • video games, porn, sugar, alcohol, movies, series, getting lost in reddit threads, hanging out with ‘friends’ who will never ever challenge them
  • never ending home improvement, there is always one extra plant needed, a new gadget for the dog or cat, the walls need to be repainted, the furniture rearranged, a new chair is needed, it’s always something, the interior redesigning never ends, because the real inner work they should be doing is avoided at any price
  • the world gets shut out, the world is reduced to a small zone that becomes a tame hunting zone for small pleasures
  • family gatherings are a drain, but keep them busy, and they are used for validation, smalls wins need to be shown to parents, and parents show how they have bled for their kids and passive aggressively demand worship and obedience. It’s folks showing up to extract validation from each other. A recipe for conflict, tension, trauma repetition
  • because of the setup anything that requires deep analysis is impossible, the world becomes a vague haze of notifications, short term pleasure (with long term costs), they unplug from the world and, though born with plenty of intelligence, they become idiots in the original meaning of the world: people who are not virtuous citizens, not standard bearers of strong, admirable values, but cogs in the machine, cattle browsing in a meadow, while their money and attenton spans are being milked by much better organized, ruthlessly self-serving people who control their lives and they let them, they let companies mine their data and influence their shopping behaviour and leisure behaviour, though they will all claim marketing never affects them
  • a coherent belief system or at least a coherent understanding of human needs and the world we live in is replaced by ‘spirituality’, which is really just branding. Tattoos, a certain clothing style, wallpapers in their phones, carefully selected ring tones, everything that doesn’t matter is as individualized as possible, while never realizing that all these little aesthetic nudges are what makes them exactly like everyone else
  • and one huge victim is eros, their erotic lives die. While couples often have a lot of sex at the start of their relationship (this is nature’s way of neurochemically glueing people together who should never have been together in our modern trauma ridden societies where people hook up before they have learned to love themselves), their sex lives become nostalgia, they are no longer vibrant, they haven’t flirted in years and don’t even know that there is no more flirtation in their lives, usually one partner starts seeing sex as some kind of service which must occassionaly be done to keep the other partner from leaving, because they are together for one big secret reason: they are in an unspoken pact never to confront themselves and never to see their own real potentials, if the partner is stimulated to grow, it’s only to become a more useful gadget with a heartbeat to fight off loneliness and insecurities. The more time couples spend together the bigger the red flag is.

    There is a way out of this, yes, there is, but here I merely wanted to list what I see in a job that consists of listening to people 8 to 10 hours a day.

PS

If you win the game of the rat race you are… still a rat

PPS

It’s unfair to compare modern people to rats, because rats are quite happy if humans don’t mess with them. Humans in the systems we’ve designed are not here to be happy, they are wired to prioritize how they think they look in the eyes of others over true happiness