The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification

253 Pages·2014·1.64 MB·English

by  Paul Roberts

To Lynn, Molly, Mathew, and Annie—my old neighborhood.
Contents
Introduction

Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4

Part Two
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8

Part Three
Chapter 9

Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Notes
Footnotes
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
Introduction
A half hour east of Seattle, not far from the headquarters of Microsoft, Amazon,
and other pillars of the digital age, a winding country road brings a visitor to
reSTART, the nation’s first rehab for technology addicts and a window onto the
wider world to come. Most of the patients here are trying to quit Internet
gaming, which they once played so obsessively that careers, relationships, and
prospects for happiness were in shambles. For the outsider, the addiction can be
incomprehensible. But as you hear the patients’ stories, the appeal comes into
focus. In a living room overlooking a sward of lawn, twenty-nine-year-old Brett
Walker talks about his time in World of Warcraft, a popular online role-playing
game where participants become warriors in a steampunk medieval world. For
four years, even as his real life collapsed, Walker enjoyed a near-perfect online
existence, with virtually unlimited power and status akin to that of a Mafia boss
crossed with a rock star. “I could do whatever I wanted, go where I wanted,”
Walker tells me with a mixture of pride and self-mockery. “The world was my
oyster.”
Walker appreciates the irony here. His endless hours as an online superhero
left him physically weak, financially destitute, and so socially isolated he could
barely hold a face-to-face conversation. There may also have been deeper
effects. Studies suggest that heavy online gaming actually alters brain structures
involved in decision making and self-control, much as drug and alcohol use
does. Emotional development can be delayed or derailed, leaving the player with
a sense of self that is incomplete, fragile, and socially disengaged—more id than
superego. Or as Hilarie Cash, reSTART cofounder and an expert in online
addiction, told me, “We end up being controlled by our impulses.”
Which, for gaming addicts, means being even more susceptible to the
complex charms of the online world. Gaming companies want to keep players
playing as long as possible—the more you play, the more likely you’ll upgrade
to the next version. To this end, game designers have created sophisticated data
feedback systems that tie players to an upgrade treadmill. As players move
through these virtual worlds, the data they generate is captured and used to make
subsequent game iterations even more “immersive.” (World of Warcraft, for
instance, releases periodic upgrades, or “patches,” with new weapons and skills
that players must have to retain their godlike status.) As a result, players play
more, and generate still more data, which leads to even more immersive
iterations, and so on. The result is a perpetual-motion machine, driven by
companies’ hunger for revenues, but also by players’ insatiable appetite for self-
expression. Until the day he quit, Walker never once declined the chance to
“level up,” but instead consumed each new increment of power as soon as it was
offered—even as it sapped his power in real life.
On the surface, the tale of someone like Brett Walker may not seem relevant
to those of us who don’t spend our days waging virtual war. But the truth is that
these digital narratives center on a dilemma that every citizen in postindustrial
society will eventually confront: namely, how to cope with a socioeconomic
system that is almost too good at giving us what we want. I don’t just mean the
way smartphones and search engines and Netflix and Amazon now anticipate
our preferences. I mean how the entire edifice of the consumer economy has
reoriented itself around our personal agendas, self-images, and inner fantasies. In
North America and the United Kingdom, and to lesser degrees in Europe and
Japan, it is now completely normal to demand a personally customized life. We
fine-tune our moods with pharmaceuticals and classic rock. Craft our meals
around our allergies and ideologies. Customize our bodies with cross training,
with ink and metal, with surgery and wearable technologies. We can choose a
vehicle to express our hipness or hostility. We can move to a neighborhood that
matches our social values, find a news outlet that mirrors our politics, create a
social network that “likes” everything we say or post. With each transaction and
upgrade, each choice and click, life moves closer to us, and the world becomes
our world.
And yet . . . one needn’t be a gaming addict to recognize that the world we’re
so busily refashioning in our own image has some serious problems. Certainly,
our march from one level of gratification to the next has cost us—most recently
in a real estate-and-credit binge that nearly sunk the global economy. But the
problem here isn’t simply one of overindulgence. Even as the economy slowly
recovers, many of us still feel out of balance and unsteady—as if our quest for
constant, seamless self-expression has become so advanced and pervasive that it
is undermining the essential structures of everyday life. In everything from
eating and socializing to marriage and parenting to politics, the norms and
expectations of our self-centered culture are making it steadily harder to behave
in civic, social ways. We struggle to make, or keep, long-term commitments. We
find it harder to engage with, or even tolerate, people or ideas that don’t relate
directly and immediately to us. Empathy weakens, and with it, our faith in the
idea, essential to a working democracy, that we have anything in common.
Our unease isn’t new, exactly. Some forty years ago, social critics such as
Daniel Bell, Christopher Lasch, and Tom Wolfe warned that our growing self-
absorption was steamrollering the idealism and aspirations of the postwar era.
The “logic of individualism,” argued Lasch in his 1978 polemic, The Culture of
Narcissism, had transformed daily life into a brutal social competition, a
Hobbesian “war of all against all,” that was sapping our days of meaning or joy.
Today, one could argue that the pessimists weren’t pessimistic enough. They
couldn’t have imagined how self-absorption and full-blown narcissism would
become so inseparable from mainstream culture. Nor would they have guessed
the degree to which the selfish reflexes of the individual would become the
reflexes of an entire society. Government, the media, academia, and especially
business—the very institutions that once helped to temper the individual pursuit
of quick, self-serving rewards are themselves increasingly engaged in the same
pursuit. In sector after sector, at scales small and large, we are becoming a
society that wants it now, regardless of the consequences. We are becoming an
Impulse Society.
What we’re describing here goes beyond a wayward consumer culture.
Under our escalating drive for quick “returns,” our whole socioeconomic system
is turning on itself. Our traditions of collective action and personal commitment
are fraying. Our economy struggles to generate the kind of long-term, broadly
based prosperity it once provided—and worse, now seems locked in an
intensifying cycle of overshoot and collapse. Most alarmingly, our political
institutions, which not so long ago could mobilize resources and people to make
real progress, now shy away from complex, long-term challenges such as
education reform or resource depletion—or the financial reforms needed to
prevent the next meltdown. Consider this one fact: the worst recession in three-
quarters of a century should have served as a society-wide reset, a chance to
rethink a socioeconomic model based on automatic upgrades and short-term
gains. Instead, we’ve continued to focus our economic energies, entrepreneurial
talents, and innovation on getting the biggest returns in the shortest time
possible. Worse, we’ve done so despite the fact that, thanks to our failing
economic model, more and more of us can no longer afford to keep up with the
treadmill of ever-faster gratification—a frustration not unconnected to the strains
of angry populism now paralyzing our politics.
How did we get to this point? How did entire societies that once celebrated
their prudence, unity, and concern for the future become so impulsive, self-
centered, and shortsighted? And how will these changes play out for us, as
people and as a people, in the years and decades ahead? These questions are at
the heart of The Impulse Society.

On one level, this is a deeply personal story. Like many first-worlders, I’ve spent
much of my life in a not-always-successful effort to cope with an economic
system that routinely mistakes want for need. For that reason, a lot of my initial
research focused on the almost comic mismatch between an individual adapted
for scarcity and an economic system wired for abundance. But the real story here
wasn’t merely about mischievous marketers or gullible consumers; it was about
a much larger historic shift in the essential and complicated relationship between
the individual and our entire socioeconomic system. It’s clear, for example, that
the selfishness of today’s culture wasn’t nearly so apparent in the postwar period
—and it’s fair to argue that our rising self-centeredness stems, at least in part,
from the weakening of institutions, such as religion and family, that once
tempered self-absorption. But there is a more strictly economic narrative here as
well. It’s hardly coincidental that the famous selflessness of the postwar era
began to crumble with the economic upheavals of the 1970s. I mean the
recessions, which made us more self-preserving and insecure—but also the
successes: the explosion of new economic ideas and technologies that enabled
the economy to, in effect, satisfy our desires more rapidly and efficiently and
personally—so much so that we often have difficulty knowing where we stop
and the market begins. In other words, what we’re experiencing now isn’t simply
the normal retrenchment that follows an economic downturn; rather, we are in
the midst of an invasion—the end stages in an accelerating drive by the
marketplace to break down all barriers between itself and us. Simply put, the
marketplace and the self, our economy and our psychology, are merging in ways
we’ve never before experienced.
If we could step back a century, before the rise of the consumer economy, we
would be struck not only by the lack of affluence and technology, but also by the
distance between ourselves and our economy, the separation of our economic
and emotional lives. It isn’t that people were any less wrapped up in economic
activities. The difference, rather, lay in where, psychically speaking, the majority
of that activity took place. A century ago, most economic activity occurred in
our outer lives—that is, in the physical world of production. We made things:
we farmed, crafted, cobbled, nailed, baked, brined, brewed. We created tangible
goods and services whose value was reasonably objective and quantifiable,
determined not only by the marketplace but by the measurable needs and
requirements of our physical, outer lives. Today the situation is almost reversed.
Although our economy is vastly larger, most economic activity (70 percent in
the United States) centers on consumption. Much of that consumption is
discretionary and is thus driven not by need, but by the intangible criteria of our
inner worlds: our aspirations and hopes, our identities and secret cravings, our
anxieties and our boredom. And as these inner worlds have come to play a larger
role in the economy—and more particularly, as company profits have come to
depend on our ephemeral (but conveniently endless) appetites—the entire
marketplace has become more attuned to the mechanics of the self. Bit by bit,
product by product, the marketplace has drawn closer to the self. Some would
even argue that, since the computer revolution of the 1970s, the consumer
marketplace has effectively moved inside the self, and is now inseparable from
not only our desires and decisions, but also our very identities.
In the usual telling, this merger of market and self was a hostile takeover—as
if we’d all still be in the idyll of a producer economy were it not for decades of
marketing and Mad Men manipulation. But the merger of market and self was
always on the horizon. Once the consumer became the center of economic
activity and corporate profitability, the die was cast. The market would,
inexorably and naturally, reorient its vast structures and processes around the
self, because only the bottomless appetites of the self could contain all the output
of a maturing industrial capitalist economy, which can never stop growing. And
just as inevitably, the self would welcome the market’s advances, because
without that relentless output, our inner lives wouldn’t have access to all these
fantastic, endlessly shifting and diverting powers of self-expression. It was the
original win-win.
We can argue about the ultimate desirability of this merger—about the
morality and sustainability of it, and whether another sort of relationship
between the market and the self might be preferable or even possible. But the
merger itself was destiny. Today the self-centeredness of our socioeconomic
system is so complete and normalized that it has redefined the meaning of
progress. It shapes our expectations, controls how we measure success and
failure. It guides the allocation of resources and talent and, especially,
determines how we exploit our massive capacity for innovation: it is surely
telling that the company with the most market value and brand recognition,
Apple, has achieved that success by positioning itself at the very center of the
me-centered economy. And none of these trends shows any signs of slowing. To
the contrary, without a serious course correction, the entire merger will only
accelerate as new technologies let the market gratify ever-more esoteric appetites
on a nearly continuous basis. Market and self are becoming one.

But is this such a bad thing? Surely, if we were to bring someone from the
1890s, or even the 1970s, to the present moment, he would struggle to see the
crisis in a socioeconomic system that wants nothing more than to please. In fact,
there is no shortage of experts today who suggest that the proper response to all
this efficient gratification is to relax and enjoy it. Not only is a society shaped by
our impulses the very manifestation of freedom; but an economy shaped by our
desires is the best possible economy precisely because it is desire-shaped. As
Adam Smith argued more than two centuries ago, when individuals freely pursue
their own self-interests—presumably, even their most trivial desires—the
aggregate effect is an economy that most efficiently and naturally delivers the
most benefits to the greatest majority. (In Smith’s famous phrasing, by pursuing
our own self-interests, it’s as if we “are led by an invisible hand to promote an
end that was no part of [our] intention.”) And the truth is our self-centered
economy delivers a lot of benefits. It generates a lot of wealth, a lot of
innovation, and, perhaps most important, a lot of individual adaptability, which
you and I can use to shape our lives, our feelings, and our very identities. For
these unprecedented powers of self-creation, shouldn’t we be willing to tolerate
periodic meltdowns, partisan politics, and a selfish, narcissistic culture?
Perhaps not. An economy reoriented to give us what we want, it turns out,
isn’t the best for delivering what we need. The more efficient we have gotten at
gratifying immediate individual desire, the worse we have become at meeting
other, longer-term social necessities. Yes, our economy generates scads of
wealth, but it is no longer the steady, broadly distributed wealth that once lifted
all social classes. Yes, our economy cranks out a parade of astonishing personal
goods (from smartphones to financial “instruments” to miraculous medical
treatments), but it no longer produces enough of the public goods (roads and