The Inspiration Economy: Brief sketches of American Existentialism.

Happy Fourth of July,

I have witnessed the rise & passage of a number of labor markets since graduating from college in 2014 with a degree in Philosophy. I opted to do an Americorps year with Disaster Services of the American Red Cross as I planned to forge a path forward into adulthood. In my free time I became interested in “The Artisan Economy”, an entrepreneurial movement defined by community locality, brand authenticity, & environmentally-conscious business practice. I was drawn by the allure of not only a community of practitioners, but whole ways of life preparation that informed it. I was drawn to entrepreneurs like carpenter Nathie Katzoff, restauranteur Michael Chernow, & cosmopolitan barber Miguel Gutierrez (aka “The Nomad Barber”). As a person on the autism-spectrum, I also liked the idea of living a life of routine, ritual, & work-life integration towards the higher purpose of bringing something of value into the world through a well-defined skillset. 

I also kept returning to a philosophy documentary titled “Being in the World” by Tao Ruspoli. It discusses the philosophical work of Hubert Dreyfus. He introduced the notion of skillful coping to Human Ontology; that at our essence we are not “passive thinking things” in the traditions of Descartes or Kant, but reveal ourselves through authentic, embodied, affordance-responsive, immersed & non-reflective engagement within a delimited task requiring skillful know-how. This conception is particularly evident by expert performers within various professions such as sailing, chess, cooking, or professional sports. 

After receiving a very abstract & cerebral college degree this new conception of the human person took root in me until it grew into a desire to make such a way of life for myself. In the end I decided upon going to trade school to find a world of skillful know-how to call my own. After a plethora of resort & event planning experience during college I took a chance on Therapeutic Massage, in the hopes that spa culture would become a familiar place to call my professional home.

While in trade school for massage therapy, the “Gig Economy” came into focus. This labor market is characterized by short-term contracts, free-lance work, & temporary positions as opposed to traditional, permanent employment. It involved workers offering their services or goods on-demand, often facilitated by digital platforms. Examples include ride-sharing, food delivery, tech freelancing, and home services. Here I began to see a new norm of having a full-time job as well as a “side hustle” emerge among my fellow millennials. Friends began speaking of “growing their brand” to increase their job prospects.

Once social media technology grew in sophistication, with it came the “Creator Economy”, transforming average citizens into viral reality stars whose main product was their social media platform & follower base. In the aforementioned documentary, Albert Borgmann (a philosopher of technology from Montana University) discusses his notion of a “Device Paradigm” that is relevant here. During the industrial revolution the role of Nature in human consciousness changed from a living ecosystem interdependent on human activity to a mere storehouse of resources waiting to be exploited for human desires & societal trends of progress. 

A key aspect of the Device Paradigm includes a focus on the commodity, emphasizing the availability & convenience of the end product or service, often overshadowing the mechanisms & processes involved in its creation. 

Another is concealed mechanisms, where technology is designed to be user-friendly on the surface but consists of highly complex, copyrighted, hidden underlying processes that require specialist repair replacing traditional practices like home repair and recycling. 

A third is availability as a defining characteristic. Devices offer instantaneous, ubiquitous, safe, & easy access to commodities. Borgmann uses the example of a central heating system versus the effort required for a wood-burning stove. He contends that what we gain in convenience we lose in opportunity for shared experience with others. He imagines a family huddled around the wood-burning stove together while exchanging stories, in contrast to today’s common household where each family member is locked away in their own private heated rooms using technology. 

A final aspect is a shift from engagement to consumption. By simplifying processes & making things readily available, devices can lead to a more passive and consumptive relationship to the world in general as opposed to active engagement, such as in the skillful coping described by Hubert Dreyfus that is at the heart of the human being in the world.

Similarly, the Human Dialogue itself has gone from a potentially sacred, transformative encounter between two people, authentically sharing their unique inner worlds, to a mere transactional opportunity for content production, branding, or mindless documentation. 

Paradoxically, through the concept of a “Social Media Influencer”, there has also occurred a rise in social lifestyle brand philosophies, wellness methods & products, & general anecdotal life advice aimed at showing followers curated snapshots of “the good life” through their own ways of being in the world & the life possibilities it affords them. At some point it occurred to me that a digital society being driven by online content like this would be a fertile ground for philosophical investigation where the base unit of investigation isn’t a general topic or subject but the social media event, opening it up to all of the resources of process philosophy. 

Posts to social media can be treated as products of popular philosophy to excavate for arguments, heuristics, & examples of situational virtuosity through phenomenology. In relation to experimental philosophy, such pop philosophy content is more readily quantifiable for expanded study given the basic assumption that more followers equal more valuable content capable of capturing the maximal attention from the general public for advertisers. Therefore, what is popular philosophically online soon becomes what is normalized in daily social interaction. This makes popular philosophy crucial to well-being in a digital culture.

Speaking of attention, what we have now devolved into is an “Attention Economy” that is challenging human social relationships like never before. It treats human attention itself as a finite, scarce, & valuable resource for businesses to compete to capture & maintain user attention, often online. The Philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes our current digital economy as a “Burnout Society” fueled by Neoliberal Psychopolitics. Its central feature is an excessive emphasis on achievement, productivity, and positivity which ultimately leads to widespread psychological disorders like depression, burnout, & existential loneliness. 

This Burnout Society has some key characteristics easily identifiable in contemporary experience. First is a shift from disciplinary society to achievement society. A disciplinary society, describes French philosopher Michel Foucault, is identified by external constraints & prohibitions. In our current psychopolitical environment, individuals are driven by an internal compulsion to achieve, optimize, & perform as we become “entrepreneurs of the self” called to justify existence in society daily.

Second is the excess of positivity & self-exploitation. Our Burnout Society is marked by an excess of “cans”, “shoulds” & personal affirmations rather than “don’ts”, “shouldn’ts”, & self-limitation in the name of long-term preservation. This ultimately leads to a form of self-exploitation, where individuals willingly exert themselves beyond healthy limits in the pursuit of success or self-actualization. This self-imposed pressure, which is slavery disguised as freedom, is even more efficient than the blatant exploitation of eras past by motivating an individual to participate in their own exploitation. 

Last is hyper-attention and the loss of deep focus. By way of constant bombardment with information & novel stimuli in an achievement society leads to a state of “hyperattention”, characterized by fragmented & shallow focus. Over time this hinders the capacity for deep contemplation & creative thinking, which Han considers essential for cultural & philosophical development.

Most would agree that this way of being in the world as far from ideal, so it can be helpful to look to historical examples of general ways of being. The word “Bios” is a greek term for “a specific concept of Way of Life”. It signifies a particular mode of life, implying a life that is lived with certain characteristics, rights, or social standing, particularly in the context of a politico-economic community. Throughout history, paradigm shifts occur that bring a certain Bios to the top of the social prestige ladder. If we indeed currently live in Han’s conception of a Burnout Society, then where is it heading next? Let us consider a brief intellectual history of different conceptions of “The Ideal Bios” from prior eras up to our own:

a. Middle Ages: The Contemplative Saint

Were individuals who sought deep union with God through prayer, reflection, & mystical experiences, often withdrawing from the world to dedicate themselves to a life of contemplation. A key figure is the hermit St. Anthony of Egypt.

b. Renaissance: The Free Individual

A period of societal shift towards emphasis of the individual, moving away from the heavily religion-focused medieval period. Human potential was placed at the center of the Universe, encouraging agency, self-reliance, & civic virtue. In tandem arose increased interest in secular topics such as human experiences, emotions, & the natural world.

c. 17th Century: The Christian Stoic

Neostoicism sought to reconcile ancient Stoic philosophy with Christian beliefs. This era emphasized virtue, inner-resilience, & acceptance of life circumstances beyond one’s control. 

d. 18th Century: The Enlightened Individual

Key thinkers like Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, & Mary Wollstonecraft produced works containing themes of reason & empiricism, progress & liberty, separation of Church & State, Constitutional Government, & general skepticism of authority. Prone to metanarrative, it also carries with it a stronger sense of dogmatic certainty about the relevant subject matter carried over from prior eras.

e. 19th Century: The Modernist

Denotes a broad shift in thought in the late 19th century characterized by a rejection of traditional notions of truth, reality, & morality. It questioned the idea of a single, objective, absolute truth arguing that truth is subjective, relative, & context-dependent. This informed a focus on subjectivity & individual experience, alternative methods of knowledge-acquisition, rejection of tradition in favor of progress, & increased secularization of society.

f. 20th Century: The Postmodernist

Arising in the latter half of the 20th Century, this movement of ironic cynicism championed skepticism towards grand meta-narratives, objective truth, & universal values. It contains a notable focus on how language & discourse shapes our understanding of reality & its power structures. It’s most notable school of thought is Deconstruction pioneered by French-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida. Generally it favors an overall social constructionism, the idea that social phenomena like race, gender, as well as knowledge itself is constructed by social processes rather than being inherent or natural to a human person.

g. 21st Century: The Metamodernist

This is where we currently find the cultural tides moving. Metamodernism is an emerging cultural philosophy that attempts to move beyond the limitations of both modernism & post-modernism while acknowledging the lessons learned from each. It embraces dynamic oscillation between seemingly contradictory concepts like hope & despair, or existentially finding a renewed sense of purpose following moments of recognizing life’s complexity & uncertainty. Take sincerity & irony, where metamodernism acknowledges the value of sincerity & authenticity but recognizes the potential dangers of naive idealism. Or hope & despair, where one acknowledges the challenges of contemporary life while maintaining a level of pragmatic optimism that allows for a desire to improve things with a knowledge of the complexities involved. 

It also calls one to acquaint themselves with multiple subjectivities. By recognizing the existence & validity of multiple perspectives & identities nested within the unique life stories of others, it allows one to move beyond rigid categories often associated with modernism & postmodernism while keeping one from abandoning the search for meaning or purpose. This also requires a focus on process rather than particulars, where change & transformation take precedent over fixed outcomes or static structures. A core principle of metamodernism is “recursive self-transcendence through iterative self-reflection” which is a long way of saying that overcoming the self is a life-long process requiring intentional effort to remain self-aware about what you’re putting out into the world.

I contend that what this looks like in practice as it develops as a movement his requires a more well-defined discussion of Metamodernism’s relationship to the field of Metaphilosophy, which will be provided in my next post. I’ve also given a lot of thought about the general form that a new American Existentialism would require. At the current time I believe it must include 6 key factors that will also be included in the next post. These are: Love (of shared ways of living), Truth (through faith & doubt), Heroism (for common good), Self-sustainability, Pragmatic Optimism, & some notion of Transcendence.

In summation, the aims of this blog are as follows:

1. To philosophically examine the concepts of creativity & human inspiration through Hubert Dreyfus’ “skillful coping” conception of human intelligence.
2. To explore the intersection of popular culture & philosophy, through the field of digital sociology, by compiling case studies of American subcultures that I feel portray valuable strategies for achieving human flourishing. Think of it like wikipedia, for creatives.
3. To gather the insights drawn from the above two aims to design instructional resources for others to explore articulating & composing a life philosophy of their own to share with others in collaborative dialogue.

Additionally, here is a short list of some subcultures I have already chosen to profile:

1. Spa Culture & Massage Therapy
2. Lifting & Bodybuilding
3. Running & Cycling
4. Hiking & Camping
5. Movement Culture & Interpetive Dance
6. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu
7. Rock Climbing
8. Disc Golf & Ultimate Frisbee
9. Kitchen Culture
10. Cruiselines
11. Punk Rock 
12. Skateboarding
13. Street Art
14. Hacking & Programming
15. Haiku Poetry
16. Barbershops
17. Greek Orthodox Christianity
18. Ice Hockey
19. Professional Arm Wrestling
20. Knitting, Quilting, & Crocheting
21. Storm-Chasing
22. Book Clubs
23. Fashion Houses
24. Dinner Etiquette & Traditional Tea Ceremonies

Attention tires the soul until rest is needed at day’s end. Inspiration awakens the soul as a call to rise towards something beyond the day past. I hope something on this blog gives you a spark to rise towards something beyond the day past too.

Most assuredly, the Universe is unfolding as it should.

-Tyler John Schortgen