The Power Process
Also: what is going on with pharma ads
“Let us handle the grocery shopping so you can get back to doing what you love,” said a smiling woman on my television screen. It was an advertisement for Instacart or one of its many peers.
I can’t help but think, do we really need to outsource grocery shopping? Should we?
It strikes me as a strange service. Maybe it’s because I have fond memories of food shopping with my mom as a kid. Trips to the store where I’d eat a bagel from the bakery section before getting to the check out and sneak Kraft Mac & Cheese into the cart.
Countless businesses exist to take supposedly mundane tasks off of our plates. All for the same stated reason of letting us instead spend that time “doing what we love.” But how do we actually spend our newfound free time? Just what is it that we love doing?
Recent research claims that the average American spends around 2.5 hours on social media and just over 3 hours watching streaming video services every day. I shudder to think how much of the remaining time is spent betting on sports.
Through mass adoption of the smartphone, we traded in the fabric of life for comfort and convenience with the promise that it would make us happy. But instead, it’s delivered record rates of obesity and depression with a heaping side of personal debt.
Comfort, it seems, is a mass murderer of the human spirit. And I think this extends beyond what we do in our free time.
For reasons I can’t easily explain, I’ve been interested in understanding the roots of depression for most of my adult life. To figure out why comfort seems to lead to a deep dissatisfaction. One explanation above all others has always stuck with me:
In order to feel meaningfully satisfied, human beings need to undergo the Power Process.
This is to say that people need defined goals which they can achieve through the exertion of meaningful effort. Ideally with some level of autonomy.
The further removed a goal is from the basic needs of survival, the less it does to satisfy our need to go through the Power Process. Activities with concrete goals that can be achieved through effort, but which are wholly unrelated to the needs of survival, are effectively “surrogate activities” meant to simulate the Power Process.
These “surrogate activities” may seem to scratch a proverbial itch, and they may even be a lot of fun, but over time our brains can tell the difference. And there are consequences.
For thousands of years human beings had to hunt and gather to survive. At some point we learned how to farm and started to settle down. Yada yada yada and here we are today working email jobs and ordering seed oils masquerading as food through our smartphones.
It would seem to me that huge swaths of people aren’t experiencing the Power Process at all. Most aren’t even partaking in meaningful surrogate activities.
I think this concept explains a great deal of the broader issues we face at the root level. People are broadly dissatisfied because the base needs of life are taken care of with minimal effort.
Running contrary to this, mainstream psychological studies argue that affluence has an inverse relation to mental health issues. In other words: more money, fewer problems. But I’m not sure this is true.
I think that a greater percentage of well-educated white collar professionals suffer from mental health issues than people who exist at, or near, the poverty line. It’s just that the issues the upwardly mobile have are not as easily classified as the general anxiety faced by the working poor. Or worse, their issues are rationalized away by people with PhDs doing mental gymnastics.
Someone who is truly impoverished will face more stress around basic survival needs, like making rent and putting food on the table – and I’m not trying to make light of this. But at least these are real problems to tackle. In some sense, the working poor live out the Power Process every day of their lives.
Contrast that to the increasingly strange behavior we see from well-educated, and often well-off, people that spend all of their time in front of screens. Whether at work or at home.
Do you think educated people would question their gender if they had to do hard manual labor to feed their kids? Would they want to “just stop oil” (and thus bring about the collapse of the entire world) if they spent their days operating a forklift?
Could it be that there’s a reason homesteading videos on YouTube – about people literally living off the grid with no plumbing – garner millions of views?
This is not even to mention the endless advertisements for various anti-psychotic meds that run on channels like HGTV. Fixer Upper being interrupted to tell you all about Fanapt is not the sign of a healthy society.
“Hey HGTV viewer, I see that you enjoy Modern Farmhouses and vaulted ceilings, surely you need medicine to help with your schizophrenia.”
When I see these sorts of ads I think to myself – was Mao right? Should we ask our friends in advertising to spend some time working the land?
As an aside – what is actually the goal of advertising medicine to treat schizophrenia? Is the target market even going to be of sound mind to respond effectively? I’m not kidding!
Though tbh, I don’t really think pharma advertising exists to get you to “ask your doctor” about whatever branded version of adalimumab they’re hawking. Rather I think it serves two purposes (neither of which strike me as something that we should be ok with): a sort of legal money laundering and a general means to prime people to seek medicine for all of their problems. But that’s a discussion for another day.
Anyway. I recognize that it’s much easier to diagnose these issues than to provide solutions. But unlike the guy who coined the Power Process, I have a few ideas that people can at least consider as starting points (without going to jail):
1 – People should seek work in fields that have some ties to the real world
This doesn’t mean that everyone should start learning to put up drywall or work on an oil rig (actually sort of my dream). But I tend to think that doing something connected to baser industries is inherently more satisfying than working at a “neobank” or an eCommerce data company, for example.
And given the way the world economy is moving, and despite how many images of wind farms we’re blasted with, an oil rig may not look so bad in a few years.
All jokes aside, I think that the more directly you feel the results of your labor, the more satisfied you are with your work. Salespeople get a bad rap, but I respect that they actually eat what they kill.
Even if you aren’t a sales guy, working somewhere that contributes to something further down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs probably gives more peace of mind than joining a bespoke pet food delivery startup. (I wonder what the venn diagram of bespoke pet food delivery customers and Fanapt users looks like)
2 – Do your own grocery shopping
While you’re at it, skip the self-checkout and say hello to the person ringing you up. Maybe it’s less efficient than Instacart, but life is fundamentally not about efficiency.
3 – Read physical books
In a world of screens, reading a physical book may as well be a revolutionary act. If nothing else, it’s proof that you actually have an attention span. Though given that the attention span of the average person is estimated to be around 6 seconds now, I suppose that isn’t saying much.
But you’d be surprised how much richer your interactions with people are when you read. Because of the speed and transience of information today, most things that get traction online are increasingly vapid. Surface deep garbage that fades into oblivion, gone as soon as it scrolls off the screen.
Actually engaging with information on a deeper level, which is always going to be best accomplished through reading physical books, takes you out of the frenzied world of the extraneous and gives your brain room to breathe.
There are halo effects to this — and it doesn’t require reading anything serious. In fact, it probably shouldn’t be serious. People too often equate reading with homework and it’s a shame.
4 – Keep your phone out of your bedroom
I haven’t had my phone in the bedroom for almost a year. I cannot recommend this enough as a starting point for less time on a screen.
Now I realize that the above is not going to solve the bigger problems we face. And telling people to remove conveniences from their lives is a bit like telling the Mayor of Tent City to throw away her (local gov’t provided) heroin needle.
But I think that injecting just a small dose of the mundane – not even the difficult – can go a long way towards a healthier frame of mind. At the very least, it’d probably kill the market for Fanapt.
Gotta start somewhere.