How to Be Human in an Anti-Human World

Exploring the struggle for purpose in a world of artificiality and meaningless work

It’s casual Friday. You pass one dentist-white fluorescent tube light after another, hanging from the drop ceiling, as you walk to your workstation. You fire up your monitor, slide into to your desk, and adjust the black plastic pen cup you’ve never used. It sits there holding space, but utterly bereft of purpose. Your boss is wearing jeans and nods his head as he swigs down his second cup of Maxwell House coffee. You glance up at the clock. It reads 9:03 am. And so begins another day.

From the video ‘Happiness’ on YouTube

It seems to me that, despite our rapid advancements and industrialization as a society over the past century, our lives have become increasingly less human. Everything in our lives is coated in artificiality. We convince ourselves that what we do really matters, that every spreadsheet, every meeting, every administrative action matters — and to some extent it does. I don’t mean to discredit the value of office or white collar jobs and the role they play in our day-to-day; however, these jobs suck the humanity out of our society. Most of these amoral conglomerates expect each employee to fulfill their repetitive, menial tasks, enjoy their two days off, and return to do it all again ad infinitum. Want to leave? Good luck finding another well paying job with insurance benefits and security. So you keep showing up, over and over again, letting life slowly drain out of you until one day, at 67 — assuming they don’t keep raising the retirement age — you can finally turn off your PC for the last time. The trick to overcome this absurd existence? Be unborable.

Author David Foster Wallace explored the emergence of this all-too-common banal existence in his unfinished novel The Pale King, in which he depicts the lives of a few workers within the world’s most boring, bureaucratic corporation — the Internal Revenue Service. In this work he suggests that in order to survive these inhuman environments, the key is “the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air.”

This truth is the crux of the existential crisis that plagues much of society: how to find meaning in a life full of repetitive, picayune, and ultimately meaningless days. It’s the dread of this realization that leads to further cynicism and hedonism in our society — a desperate scramble to actually feel something. In his commencement speech This is Water Wallace claimed that, “if you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough,” and no matter how timeless that advice is, many continue to live in ignorance of this maxim.

This feeling of emptiness and lack of purpose is only exacerbated by the artificiality we experience through technology. Distractions and artificial simulations dominate our lives, whether through watching others live extravagantly on social media, the rapid advancement of virtual reality, or pornography. Instead of addressing the lack of humanity in our lives, we’d rather divert our attention with a steady stream of dopamine-inducing, highly-stimulating content. As a result, our daily lives become filled with eight hours of monotony spliced with intermittent moments of artificial excitement.

Attempting to construct an answer to such a multi-faceted, obscure issue is not so easy. As it’s been said, it’s not the job of the writer to answer questions, but to ask questions for which there are no answers (or at least no easy answers). Wallace seemed to conclude that the answer lies in consciousness, or being aware of our freedom and attitude towards people and things. Choosing to find value in the meaningless and consider the lives of those around us — a Camus-like response to the misery of Sisyphus. He thought the alternative left us in a rat race with a “constant, gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.” One thing we know for sure is that if we stay on this path, the future isn’t bright.

The solution doesn’t lie in quitting your job, starting a Substack, and convincing yourself you love what you do. I’m not arrogant enough to proclaim to you that I know the universal answer to dispersing meaning into everyone’s lives. I think the problem is systemic. A culture that prioritizes productivity and continually increasing profit over personal happiness and freedom is not one rooted in humanity. It’s a machine. One that churns and churns, consuming everyone and everything it's fed. We must remain conscious of our lives and humanity outside of work and materialism. We must regain a sense of self and rekindle our passions. The fight for meaning, if it is to occur, doesn’t take place in a cubicle but within your mind.