Waiting for the anti-Christ, pt. 2
Humans have become obsolete.
From a Buddhist perspective, the human form remains the best and most desirable tool for finding an exit from samsara, but from a modern techno-social standpoint, the form has outlived its usefulness in the minds of not only the powerful, but the weak. People with a chronic disease that leaves them weak, in pain and with less freedom than those around them will see their forms as a great limitation, one they might want to shed as soon as possible. Many healthy moderns on the other hand have sensed that the body could be so much more if science could just advance faster. This leads to a dissatisfaction with the form as well.
For all of the improvements in economic productivity, science and health, the situation for a person today is very precarious. The techno benefits have been outweighed by a secular uncertainty regarding the purpose of humans. For the West, the question has surfaced in social media chats on what benefit has accrued to the average person in light of the modern PC. It has brought us distractions, limitless porn, addiction to chatter and so on. It claims to have made work more efficient and life easier, but has it?
The average office worker can easily spend up to four hours a day staring at a screen in a cubicle performing repetitive tasks that are not very interesting, not very engaging. Punching numbers into spreadsheet or reading emails isn't engaging at a certain point and after a few decades of it, becomes kind of hellish. The work week itself hasn't changed despite the alleged improvements in efficiency and productivity. Consider how many hours it would take to compile, collate and prepare thousands of documents to do any sophisticated enterprise-level reporting before computers. Today, that kind of task has been greatly simplified, yet it has not led to fewer work hours or expanded benefits. With greater productivity being achieved with fewer inputs, we would expect a general increase in wealth. Instead, we see only debt.
Technology has made it possible for us to replace pricey Western workers with offshore counterparts in India, the Philippines and other remote places, even as the remote office in the West has gone into full retreat. This week, thousands of federal workers in the United States were ordered back to a physical office every day. One estimate I read lowballed the added cost for a worker as being from 400-2800 per year in clothing fees, gas, etc. This is of course bullshit. The real figure is much higher when one really calculates wear and tear on vehicles (which are super expensive now), increased daycare costs, higher insurance premiums, two or three hours per day sitting in traffic and so on.
The return to office (RTO) movement began in corporate America a couple of years ago, when oligarchs saw that their commercial real estate investments in large urban areas were going to take a nose-dive without the foot traffic brought by daily commuters. A captive audience still spends money. Covid showed the world that white collar workers could easily transition to remote work and still function fine, nay, even better. Fewer distractions, work life balance, less stress getting to and from a distant office showed that the old ways would never return. At least until Mr. Big Money saw his investments in peachy real estate spots taking a hit. Urban politicians likewise saw a massive hit to their revenues as sales and commercial property taxes plunged. At the end of the day, the worker is an exploitable beast of burden whose function is to feed and sustain animals better than him. An Ohio lawmaker went so far as to draft a bill banning work from home. It never made it into session, but you can bet other pols were watching it closely for inspiration and ideas.
What about climate change? We've been told that all life on the planet will end shortly unless we lower the carbon footprint of humans. So what could be better than forcing millions of white collar workers back into their shiny metal boxes (The Police again) for two or three hours per day? Biden in one of his SOTU speeches even said words to the effect, "I WANT TO SEE PEOPLE BACK TO BUSTLING AROUND DOWNTOWN!" No doubt he continued to speak about climate change, imminent heat/freezing deaths (take your pick) for people all over the world, but as a politician, he was getting pounded by public and private sector potentates with a vested interest in seeing the pre-Covid ways restored. That included millions of people sitting in traffic in cities with crumbling roads, rickety bridges and failing services.
From the ordinary person's point of view, all the advances in web cams, high speed internet, collaborative software and so on doesn't mean anything transformatively positive. It's especially cruel given that many office workers sit alone in a cube all day, barely speaking to anyone while using the very same collaborative software to meet with people that they did when working from home. They just have to pay a lot of money and time to do it and the business has the added expense of leases, repairs, office furniture, cleaning staff and insurance.
The nature of white collar work itself has changed. The automation, the efficiency and so on in large corporations has produced a feudal system in which middle managers vie with one another for improved titles. With newer, better titles come an increase in the number of peasants to work the land (so to speak). Often however, the workers don't really do that much and their jobs become shovel ready programs whose only purpose is to bloat the corporate bureaucracy. Like factory work on an assembly line, office jobs have a tedious kind of grind that has nothing to do with making a better product or service – and everything with satisfying pro-forma rituals which ratify a dominance hierarchy. Musk quickly figured out that Twitter didn't need 7,500 employees drinking lattes and working out in the gym at HQ. He slashed 6,000 jobs and lo, Twitter continued to run just fine. No one asked about the abuse of shareholder trust and wealth under Dorsey that led to such a massive workforce of useless eaters. Outrage evaporated quickly when people saw that the Twitter site was doing just fine, replaced instead with a dread that the same downsizing could be done elsewhere.
The improvements in software and computing more generally means there is less and less need for people to fill the ranks of corporate America if we are objective. When the lower tier employees go, the middle and higher levels of the hierarchy rapidly shrink and this is a possibility we face with the advent of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) in business today.
Work hours have not changed, but even more worrisome is that years in the labor force have only increased. Retirement age for Westerners continues to be pushed further back, so now our techno-societies which are super advanced require in exchange that people work long hours for decades because, despite all the innovations, democracies are ruled by, depend on and breathe debt. Lots and lots of debt. You can't retire at 50, you can't work from home and you can never pay off your debts because our democracy is just so awesome that the whole world is conspiring against it!
Those debts and the system of payments to oligarchs in the form of kickbacks, favorable laws and contracts means that wealth is constantly being siphoned from millions and millions of workers and into the pockets of a very tiny few. Covid saw the largest wealth transfer, from the public to the insanely wealthy, in human history. They in turn use their new wealth to purchase more politicians and expand their influence into new ventures, often buying up media outlets to shape public discourse in a way which favors their interests. It's the circle of life, one in which more little animals die than are born in each go around, and which sees the predators become larger and more domineering.
Workers are increasingly seen as a problem because they carry IOU cards stapled to their foreheads. They've paid into systems that were (seemingly) designed to go bankrupt. Retirement insurance, private pensions and healthcare for the elderly are all insolvent throughout the West and the many billions paid into them by overworked citizens will never be seen once the Boomers are mostly dead and gone.
The pointlessness of most work now has led to "quiet quitting," of mentally checking out and doing the bare minimum to get by. Excellence is seldom rewarded, pay long ago stopped keeping pace with rising costs and social media has given people the ability to see that their predicament as one shared all over the globe. Of course, quiet quitting is not confined to one's cubicle, but becomes the default setting towards life in general. You cannot check out for one third of your day, sleep another third and then be go-go-go in the remainder. The rest will include two hours of just sitting in traffic. You're down to six hours and you still have a list of chores to complete!
The cruelty in working people until they are seventy is that they will be empty husks by the time they reach the promised land. Corporate America has it in for older workers, seeing them as a net drain on the company, too old to learn and of no use to anyone and too expensive to boot. Tradesman of course have it even harder, for their bodies wear out quickly from decades of demanding work. Those of them who are skilled have to think quickly and improvise, but their bodies will struggle to keep up. For both groups, the white and blue collar folks, the long haul to 70 is very difficult to reach and if you are a politician, early deaths mean a reduced cost on the healthcare system (benefits still have to be paid to survivors of course).
When technologists speak in glowing terms of the longer lifespans, they leave out that dying at thirty or forty in earlier times had its own charms. Longer lifespans have created an insoluble problem for both individuals and societies. You can plan and save your entire life for retirement only to find that most of your peers did not – could not. We are rapidly approaching a point where hyperinflation will be used to prop up the failing system and this will destroy whatever wealth is backed by a fiat dollar. That includes bonds and equities.
The foregoing is to say our systems were poorly conceived by humans filled with greed, anxiety, lust and so on and they are in no way adequate to the task of keeping a very complex society going. Younger workers see the trend by twenty, know how it goes and end up bailing on the project at the outset. That's the problem with information and devices like smartphones – they show the path. For older workers, it took a long time for them to figure out that wages were not keeping up with costs because the changes creeped in at first. The younger ones feel it deeply when they try to even get started. They know all the stats and will pull up the charts and show you the last year when a man could afford to raise a family and have a stay-at-home wife, all on a single salary. The 1970s era young adult saw his purchasing power weaken much more gradually and the credit card offers only began showing up in the mail box on a weekly basis in the 1980s. With each decade though, the decline in the middle class living standard has only increased its pace.
RedNote (Xiaohungshu) erupted in the past couple of weeks, giving Westerners a view into the lives of Chinese people. The reactions have been predictable, with young white girls crying because their peers in a distant land are buying groceries and getting quality healthcare for a little while they can barely afford to keep themselves fed. Much like the young Russians who saw what the West was really like when the censors were removed in the late 1980s, Western youth are seeing the fraud of their own societies. When they saw the genocide of Palestinians in footage released on TikTok, the oligarchy in the U.S. quickly had it shut down. The Soviet Union would not have reacted any differently and indeed, America, land of the free and home of the brave, has had a gulag feel to it since at least 2020 if not earlier.
One of the consequences for Russian youth was despair, a sense of abject shame at their country that led to a decade of debauchery. My ex-wife explained to me that she remembered a Russian pop musician who was allowed to travel the world as part of glasnost. When he returned, he told Russian media that he was deeply ashamed because, while the Russians had very little food, people in the West had large, abundant grocery stores and nice restaurants. Western youth are going through something like this right now, seeing that their countries – whether it's the U.K., the U.S. or Germany – are but pale sad imitations of the Far East in terms of quality of life.
As they talk more with Chinese peers via RedNote, they become even more despondent over the long life of grueling, mindless toil which lies before them.
The elderly, the youth and the middle aged are all liabilities for the Western system now. Probably for the Eastern as well since the problem is one caused by technology regardless of cultural setting. In short, humans have become a problem. There are too many of us still, despite the death of sex, marriage, family and community. We are living too long.
Hence, the climate change religion has been tenaciously sold to Western audiences for decades as a way of psychologically undermining any hope or positive sense about the future. Happy people get married, produce children and make big plans to start a business, or invest in property because they have a certain buoyancy about the future. People constantly pushed down with negative messages about humans being a blight on the planet become numb, dead and compliant, filled with hesitation and doubt about the future. The Covid era pushed the cessation of critical reasoning and servile obeisance deeper into the psyche of Westerners.
Do you think people in China or India listen to this day in and day out about climate change? If I were a betting man, I'd say definitely not. The average person in China probably doesn't worry about it at all and doesn't give a toss about the factories there and the amount of CO2 that they emit. They see well-stocked grocery stores in massive futuristic looking cities linked by efficient high speed rail.
This is not to say that China is a promised land free of dukkha. Like the West, marriage and reproduction appear to be less than desirable to younger people there and this creates additional problems for the state as it wrestles with how to take care of the elderly, fund its activities, staff a military and so on.
I heard a Thai Forest ajahn speak briefly in a YouTube talk about the challenges of there being too few young people in Thailand, and how care for the elderly was becoming a concern for the sangha. Older monks who could once count on younger bhikkhus to take care of them in old age find themselves left more and more to their own devices. This to say that the Far East has its own version of the obsolete human. Fewer people want to make more of themselves because the future in a techno-society is uncertain, brittle, even frightening. You could end up a parent still taking care of your children when they are thirtysomethings.
What of sex? As a modern, great emphasis is placed on keeping men constantly aroused through advertising, women's fashion, movie and song ("you shook me all night long!"). Men who are under the pressure of a triggered libido are more compliant, more open to the suggestions of capitalism's thought leaders. Since the 1970s, the decade of the sexual revolution, sex has become so commoditized and disconnected from its natural end as to become passé.
Red pilled men are those who've looked closely at male relatives and friends and seen that the enslavement of men to women – caused by the agitated burning fire in the loins and the need for masculine social standing – is a high price to pay for occasional access to a vagina. In the early days of the revolution, no one really understood the ramifications of allowing women to become sluts and men to become whoremongers. Today in 2025, we can see the effects. The genders no longer trust one another and, despite or perhaps because of the prevalence of porn, men no longer even approach women. Thousands of women whore themselves on Internet sites for peanuts, hoping against reason that their bodies will get them into the elusive top tier of multi-million dollar prostitutes. One article I read said that 1 in 100 Japanese women has been in a porno.
A man who has eaten at home will have no appetite, will not ask for a menu and order from it. The thought of producing another mouth to feed when he can barely take care of himself makes masturbation a much better alternative.
Reproductive sex was a big deal in the pre-modern period because it was an economic boon at its best or a matter of survival at worst. Children were a blessing because they could work the farm or help out with a trade or business. If your kids are workers, they are the most loyal because they share a genetic bond with you and they work cheap. Parents invest in other ways, so there's a mutual exchange which benefits both parties. You care for them not as a good employer would his workers, but as a parent cares for its young. They still have to work and help out with the family business, but they are a valuable asset who end up enriched.
In the past, one's well-being and future prosperity directly depended on the presence of offspring. They allow for the creation of alliances, business ventures and community-building via marriage. They are mentored to assume competent leadership over prosperous enterprises. Men would judge the worth of another man by the quality of his sons and daughters. Having no children was a giant red flag, suggesting that the man, if single, was of low character, unstable or directionless, geniuses like Tesla notwithstanding.
Take the Trump family. Whatever you make think of them, it's worth reflecting on the power that has accumulated over generations by their keeping the business in the family. Fred Trump taught his son Donald about the world of real estate investment and gave him a start with a $1 million dollar loan. As important, he provided guidance and good counsel to a young Trump who in turn ran with it. Now there are even more generations of them all running a financial empire which started in the early 20th century as something small but very prosperous and has only grown bigger. A family business formed among even modestly talented individuals is an incredible force for wealth, stability and happiness.
Obviously, not all families have this kind of Trumpian success, but they do have success if the parents are willing to work and keep sober. They certainly have more success than the incel shlub camped in front of an XBox for six hours a day. For generations, this formula worked and even families of modest talent could build up generational wealth in the species of land, houses, factories, businesses and so on. But to have this, you need men and women to have sex and to raise the resulting children in a very long term committed relationship. Children are stakes in the present and future.
Before the triumph of the screen, kids had a way of bringing people together into common cause in matters of education, safety and hygiene. Your kids playing with other kids meant you eventually developed a broader network of friends and acquaintances. Especially watchful parents could use these relationships to advance family economic well being through strategic marriages and business partnerships. Parents knew who to look out for, who were the "good people" as they say.
Today's childless urbanites living in an apartment or condo, eating their dinner while standing over the kitchen sink, have had a huge chunk of the script removed from their life story. There are fewer social bonds and as the community network weakens, cultural and social capital never accrues. Loneliness and the pointlessness of existence become topics of rumination when there is no family or community around. They are now constant companions for many secular people who live alone. Some estimates say as many as half of all adults in the U.S. are heads of household. Does this mean they live alone? Not necessarily but we have to think that the number is shockingly high.
In the past, children had a vital economic and socializing role for everyone involved. We hear now from conservatives and religious types in the West that moderns are very selfish because they don't want children. They simply want to have more money for themselves and to spend it on luxurious vacations instead of sharing it with new little people. Maybe so, but look closely at the claim and you will see that it omits the profoundly self-interested nature of parenthood in days gone by.
Marriage was an activity vital to the formation of a small tribe of like minded souls pursuing common material interests. There is safety in numbers. To say that people in the agrarian age were having children out of some selfless desire to nurture life is delusional. Children were vital to personal survival. Today, an adult exchanges labor for wages from an employer and any children he produces are a net economic drain for 18+ years. Whether childless or not, he pays half his income in taxes because he thinks the state will take care of him in old age instead of his children. Therefore, he can skip them as an added expense with no payoff.
Childless men and women of good health and adequate mental ability were shunned socially for not contributing to the well-being of the community since in rougher times, the defense and maintenance of a town or village was handled locally. One owed a certain debt to the fatherland, the patria. Armies were staffed by men who were locally grown, not imported from a developing country in exchange for citizenship. This practice only appears in late stage terminal empires like ancient Rome and modern America.
Today, children are a massive liability with very little chance of giving an ROI. A father in the old days could be reasonably certain that, if he did his job right, his children would turn out well and would assist him and his wife in their old age. The offspring would provide a peaceful consolation that whatever property and wealth had accumulated would be kept among people closest by natural affection. This provides a kind of happiness that is part of the profit.
As far as educating children goes, technology – and the scientific mindset it is anchored by – requires increasing time be spent in education, from age 5 - 18. At 18, occupational specialization is required if the youngster wants any shot at property ownership and social standing. At least it did up until the 1990s. By then, university education had reached astronomical prices, setting up a debt cycle for wage earners whose degrees were in no way necessary in most cases to the jobs they took after graduation. Still, the techno mindset believes in credentials, certificates, degrees, post graduate degrees, authoritative endorsements and so on; price is not an issue since it will be paid by people desperate to escape menial labor and life lived in a trailer or van. That was the theory at least when I was younger, but not anymore.
I'm reminded of a woman I ment many years ago who had obtained an advanced degree in voice. Between this and her undergraduate work, she was in the red to the tune of $100k. Her music training was suitable for a job singing in a metropolitan choir for $50k a year. Factor in the high costs of living in New York City to work in the opera and you have a recipe for economic disaster. Her education was worthless and last time I spoke with her, she was planning on returning to nursing school. After learning a bit about the New York City arts scene from her, I became less impressed by it. It seems kind of servile for someone to take on such massive debt for such a low return. The fine arts can't really pay for themselves and unlike the Gilded Age, I'm not sure our insanely wealthy oligarchs devote much to subsidizing them.
In the old days, a young boy was considered a man by 15 or 16 and had already learned most of what he needed to make it in the world from his father. Each man passed on his skills to his son through the school of practical hands on exercises. In some cases, a father would apprentice his sons to other skilled tradesmen, giving him yet another economic resource to draw on if needed. Need a blacksmith? Junior is a blacksmith and can hammer out a set of horse shoes in no time!
Modernity is very different. It's rare that a son will follow in his father's footsteps because the economic walls are closing in and whatever job pop had, junior wants something better, with more income, status and "meaningfulness." Higher status Westerners frown on the manufacture of domestic goods since the emphasis has been placed on skilled service professions and knowledge work, people who build stuff that expands the footprint of technology and makes our lives... easier? Better?
Factories were gutted wholesale in the late 80s, into the 90s and transferred to Mexico and China. It's only recently that young men have found a renewed interest in the trades given the Great Replacement's oligarchic-endorsed rollout in the corporate sector. Suddenly, steady high paying work and a shot at small business ownership seems better than life in a cubicle, waiting to be replaced by an Indian.
About a year ago, I had to replace my mailbox which had been hit by a driver, probably drunk. I ordered the new box, assembled it and bolted a 4x4 post to the aluminum sheath, but decided to hire someone to dig the hole and set it in cement. That cost me $150 and the job only took about an hour and fifteen minutes. People will pay the rates though just to avoid having to take off time from work. I spoke with the owner of the business and he said matter of factly that $95 was the going base rate and he was having no problems doing more sophisticated jobs like deck building. Why? Most men can no longer do them. Again, services and knowledge work were the focus of education and most men after 1970 didn't even bother to show their sons how to change the oil on a car. YouTube has become a kind of dad in DIY matters for three generations of young men.
The old days of apprenticeship, social networking, family businesses and empire building are long gone. Men a hundred years ago with some foresight would build a multi-generational plan for economic and social stability for their heirs. I knew one fellow in college who came from a family of sausage makers – the company had been around for like 100 years. His parents were so wealthy that they paid for his degrees and thought nothing of it since he was a good student, level headed and thirsty for knowledge. When he left school, he found work that made him happy even if it was not especially lucrative. His trust fund took care of the worries that consume most of us plebs. Last I heard, he was childless and I think his family's company was purchased for a handsome price. Such is the Western way.
The foregoing has been all to say that the human form is not a good fit for the techno context we have now. We ask the human body to delay its urge to procreate until the late 20 or 30s knowing full well that this isn't how the hormones work. We get in return very broken sexual degenerates or, in most cases, groups of unhealthy incels, obese, poorly socialized and lacking any skills with which to establish a decent life. Society works these shlubs if it can until they breakdown in their 40s (if not earlier). The number of people I've known who ended up on disability years before retirement age is reflected in the broader stats on disability and workforce participation. The body and mind wear out and the more intense kinds of mental energy needed for skilled professions is no match for the relentless grind of aging. I frequently deal with people over 40 who just don't seem like they are that sharp anymore. Life does that to you. Whatever passion you had a for a field or subject drains away over time and you end up a husk of your former self.
But our democracy needs everyone contributing their fair share! That includes massive military and foreign aid packages to keep the world aflame in violence and strife.
As mentioned already, our techno life demands 40 hour workweeks until 70. If technology was supposed to lighten our load, free us from hardship, it has. Please don't get the impression that it hasn't, but in essential areas – pay, benefits, good healthcare, comfortable retirement, healthier relationships – it has failed miserably. If it were the case that everyone was suffering greater hardship over the last fifty years, when the long slide down the ladder began, then it would be socially more tolerable even if the crises are just as pressing. The fact is the wealthy have benefitted incredibly from the techno innovation. Thanks to it, they were able to ship many thousands of good paying jobs to distant sweatshops, call centers and "corporate campuses" in places where shitting outdoors is the norm for over half the population. The total commoditization of skilled professions made it possible to redirect wealth from the shrinking middle class to the top. Technology is not very democratic in the distribution of its gifts, with a tiny few being way more equal than others.
The oligarchs understand on a deep level that the human form is obsolete. This is a softer way of saying that humans are obsolete. The human libido is programmed by evolution to produce additional units and these live, cooperate and prosper together as groups and networks within larger networks. Short circuiting this natural instinct through the introduction of gadgets has turned humans into slaves to the techno-science framework which builds them. Noah Juval Harari has become the spokesman for this point of view, writing depressing books which address themes related to this in excruciating detail. To be fair, Harari is aware of the existential problems caused by technology and AI. Like him, I'm not endorsing the end of humans.
We only recently saw a video go viral of Larry Ellison gushing about the promises of AI, which in his mind is a perfect control grid where everything – everything – is monitored by tiny cams and audio devices, where every person has their DNA data sequenced for the purpose of mRNA vaccines. In none of this is any promise of the end of human toil because that's not how the oligarchy wants the AI revolution to go down. And Ellison is not the only oligarch who thinks this way. As mentioned in part 1, the IoT devices were conceived and built by large, powerful companies run by billionaires. He is saying openly what all of them think – that AI overcomes the great vulnerability of all hyper-oligarchies, the problem of numbers. There are very few of them and they are easily removed from power if the mob gets fed up with them. Create an AI that is connected to everything and everyone, you – if you are so lucky as to be at the center of everything – can shape the destinies of millions with perfect efficiency and never need fear going under the guillotine. Ellison's Jewish forebears in Russia tried to build a control grid system called communism in Russia in the early 20th century. They will be proud when he outdoes them with his humming data centers feeding in streams of monitoring data from everywhere.
The decline in the traditional activities of mating, marriage and so on creates a new backdrop that looks pretty blank. Once your families go, the jobs go, the workers go, the communities dry up and turn into characterless centers for grubby retail outlets, bereft of any liveliness. Of course, it only follows that the nation itself will dissolve as well since it is, like the human form, a kind of anachronistic leftover. The culture becomes an amorphous mass of conflicting interests rooted in diversity, low grade economic and ethnic strife. Mexicans in Mexico take over good paying factory jobs, Indians replace heritage Americans in corporate jobs, more Mexicans replace still more heritage Americans in jobs like construction and landscaping. The battered and bruised white plurality ends up surviving by doing gigs as Uber drivers and waitresses. The nation loses any semblance of a coherent narrative shared by everyone.
Humans are today rootless, disconnected. Their families either don't exist or are dysfunctional enough to be a source of additional stress and suffering. Their nations are no longer theirs, no longer the nursery for culture and the arts, but rather economic zones in which various humans are collected for the sake of capital. The racial diversity and ethnic vibrancy of these zones is essential to preventing the outbreak of organized labor and solidarity-style politics. An internal memo was leaked from within the bowels of Amazon which expressed this point, that diversity was the natural enemy of a labor union. That was good for Jeff Bezos. I take only a little liberty with the rendition.
This concludes part 2 on the anti-Christ series of blog posts.
