Making It Look Easy
Performative Effort Minimization as a Style
We (in much of the English-speaking world) live in non-trying times. Rather than trying ones. If you disagree with this you’re probably something the internet labeled a “tryhard” for a while. It’s not simply a put-down, another arrow in the troll’s quiver. It means to describe the feeling we get when something’s out of proportion, when we attempt to do too much for the stakes. We’ve become lost in someone else’s concerns, and so we give our all to a tenuous barista job at a McDonald’s, or to defending the honor of an OnlyFans model.
It’s embarrassing, sure, but who cares how people spend their time? Why does it feel like it’s a breach of ethics rather than a lamentable personal problem?
We live in times of great efficiency. The steam engine. Wikipedia. Huel. The stuff that greases the skids of our life, monuments of human ingenuity that have been run through an engineer’s optimizer to the point that they come out like rabbit shit of the mind, tidy compact spheres. We reward this achievement. It looks better, more “aesthetic.” The mind slides off its unanswered questions, recoils from trying to explore the history or wrong turns. The things of the built environment were once rude sticks and mud huts, flint shaped by harder rocks, gut lashed to poles. We think of these things, parts of the natural world being laboriously arranged to create dwellings, nutrition, tools, as “ugly.”
Our taste has contracted around the procession through finer and finer seives of capital, things that deposit into our experience nearly idealized forms. Why do we have this experience, where we like unnatural surfaces and dislike wild, unruly ones? Why do I want to keep a tidy lawn, but better yet, to pay others to keep it tidy?
We live in times of incredible laziness. There are artists winning massive audiences and people’s choice awards for doing very little indeed. Taking three unoriginal ideas and using a modicum of effort to express them. There are entire industries that exist to allow capitalists to detach themselves from the anxieties of their wealth, the need to feel like it’s being “put to use” without themselves actually being required to make any decisions about it. Politicians who win expressly because they will ensure that no work actually be accomplished. The reasons for all these people’s existences can be summarized as follows:
They exploit the free energy gradient to good effect. They have an instinct for making it look easy. They know that, if it looks easy, people’s engineer-tuned aesthetics will appreciate it.
The Earth has distinct regions in which this feature of biological systems is rewarded, too. The ideas as to where they are get baked into our prejudices about people that come from there, in a way that’s illustrative.
Where it’s hotter, we find animals will avoid overheating so they won’t run into dangerous internal temperatures. The safe thing to do will look very lazy.
But this will become the more prevalent experience, as our energy consumption further heats the planet. It’s going to be true that some people will work out in air conditioning to stimulate muscle growth and not consider the strangeness of that arrangement. But most people will get lazier because it’s hotter out.
Our culture went through an authenticity phase. Could be said to be in it, still. It glamorizes the intuitive, and dislikes of the expert. This doesn’t mean that badly done is acceptable, because of the energy required to sort out what’s happening in something that doesn’t conform to an already agreed-upon trope, style, or genre. We want expert-made things, but they can be fairly rude and still appeal. This is, famously, the epiphenomenon of “fan art,” sometimes known by its Otaku-originated term doujinshi and with a more erotic overtone. Effort done by amateurs because they really badly want to see specific characters in specific sexual situations and if it has to be them to do it, that’s just the way it goes.
But many appreciate the authenticity of their effort. And, coupled with this lowering of the bar to entry comes a machinery of information dispersal and algorithms keyed for “news” which reward easily packaged, clearly demarcated, repeatable blocks of attention. Interchangeable and uniform in mechanism. This is assembly line thinking. In at least two levels of meaning.
We have selected for low energy expense, for repeatability, the “sweet spot” between the novel and the familiar.
The political domain has a remarkable amount of this at a core level. The thing is an overlay on naturally occurring human society that renders mass desire legible. Maybe a political scientist would be deeply disappointed by this bad misunderstanding of the case, but that’s how it looks to me, anyway. Politics takes the force of the natural world and systematizes it so we can all do less of our own — well, anything. Even politics. If it’s working well, you won’t even know it’s there. This is golden wisdom from the Taoist philosophers.
There’s no conclusion to be drawn. It’s a description of a process that started when the first lipid bilayer was formed and started organizing the world into more or less attractive. Things to be pulled towards, or repelled by. But it’s interesting to turn attention, sometimes, to the ways that the constellations of human activity and diversity of effort are actually all following some deeper heuristic. And, anyway, who am I to try too hard?