Weltschmerz: Infantilized Adults and Managed Choices
Childhood isn’t for children anymore, but instead is fed into a nostalgia machine for adults. What I mean by this is that childhood itself is no longer treated as something to be protected, where kids are allowed to be kids, where their development is fostered by caring adults. I mean, it’s been getting worse, as all things have, for years… but in this case the shoving of technologies in the faces of toddlers is no doubt having an impact that no one is quite sure of yet. Childhood has been reorganized into yet another extraction process that begins as soon as information can be gathered from a child for the purpose of eventually capitalizing on youth and exploiting parents, and even the children themselves, for money and data.
Children have long been the subject of concern because, well, they’re our future. However, today is the first time in human history that they are being scheduled down to the minute, monitored with their every move, evaluated in every conceivable criterion, and “optimized” in every way that adults think they should be. Every step of this has been recorded, data kept in databases, every single bit of digital footprint from birth stowed away on some server that will inevitably be hacked. Many are even medicated to make them conform to “normalcy” without actually properly evaluating a child for their needs! Many do need medication and are not getting it as well. It’s all backwards, topsy-turvy, and conditions exist because of an indifferent system, ignorant parents, and children who are to become good workers – not good thinkers.
To that effect, their days are filled to the brim with activities: busy work, structured distractions, and every conceivable way to prevent the formation of true independent thought. Movements are tracked with such precision that it boggles the mind at how very un-private we’ve made their little lives, and our efforts to turn everything into a point of data created the terrible monster that haunts them forever now. Their inner worlds are, through this brutal system of quashing childhood wonder, neglected. Their imaginations are directed in the way the conditions want them to be directed, their interests and wants are pressed upon them, their days are filled with the “wonders” of our modern world – not with the wonders of just being allowed to be a fuckin’ kid.
The wonder many of us had as kids was also this way, don’t get me wrong here. I’m not saying our childhoods were better, or some nostalgia for a time past – but there were more opportunities to be bored. Being bored is a wonderful thing once you have reached post-boredom and realize what you’ve lost. Boredom was mind-leisure, and well, we can’t have that now can we? How dare we use any of our valuable time for leisure when we should be working every moment of our lives so that we can have every ounce of our souls extracted for a profit for someone else! The horror of boredom and all the wonders it can create in our minds! You know… thinking for ourselves! Oh what terrible outcomes that could have…
Childhood wonder is quashed and neglected because it isn’t profitable to have children growing up and thinking beyond their limited skill sets demanded in a world where your greatest value is how much you can be exploited until you just die. It’s not by accident, nor is it fully intentional as in designed by some mysterious “they” (and you should realize that the “they” in this is not some grand cabal out to make every system hurt you, it is in fact the system itself that creates the conditions that allow this to happen). The indifferent systems of our modern world see no value in childhood wonder, and in fact find it a long-term threat to managed economies that are supposedly economies based on freedom. It’s always economics in the end, isn’t it? It is like a monster deep in the ocean that drives everyone to a state of mundane madness that no one can quite put their finger on most of the time, and yet when someone does – it is like touching an electrified rail and it makes them seem insane.
Well then call me crazy I guess. I really don’t care about that. It’s not like many people will even read this far anyway.
When your world is entirely inside Plato’s cave, your dreams reflect only that which you’ve been able to experience and see. So your dreams are tolerated only when they can be turned into something productive, or can be used in the future as some kind of branding. You dream of improvements to a system that will never help you improve because that is all you or I can do, unless we see beyond the shadows against the wall. By the time we reach adulthood, much of our judgment has never been allowed to develop without some kind of surveillance, and for children growing up in the overly-digitized quantified and measured world of today? They will never know what even half of it feels like.
Unless you’re crazy and you let them, of course, but you would be holding back the tsunami of terrible influences as just a few adults. Worthwhile, but no matter what you do, the cracks are there, and they will eventually be exposed to the data monster. It is a monster we can only shield children from for so long if we even try. The other option is inoculation, letting them know about the monster, and carefully guiding them to avoid its teeth. Social media is the gateway to the gnashing and ever-consuming maw of data, but regardless of that, data will be extracted from every other activity you or your hypothetical children will do. I mean, Ring can track your dog now because they don’t care about privacy, so good luck with kids and avoiding their total consumption by the data fiends.
When these kids reach their working years (which the systems seem to be hellbent on undoing labor laws that prevent child labor so it could be before they’re even 15 now) every failure, mistake, and misstep they have made will be accessible and usable against them. Failures are no longer private matters where you learned your mistakes, and those mistakes live in the past. Now they will haunt them. Forever. That stupid thing you said in 7th grade? Well that’s why we denied you a 2-cent raise now that you’re 50. Hyperbolic, I know, but not infeasible. It is more likely to be “remember that terrible thing you said when you were 13? Now it’s everywhere because BigDataCo got hacked, and now everyone thinks you’re a monster who never grew up.”
Autonomy is a thing of the past with this horrifying future we’re in now. There is nothing without digital records attached, and the adulthood we all live today has already been compromised. I need not explore every data breach, and I know I must sound like a broken record but… your data is not safe in the hands of a big entity because at no time have we figured out really good ways of stopping systems from breaking down. Every single data set is a point of failure simply because it exists now. Big tech just sucks at this because they honestly don’t have any incentive to truly protect data they use to mine you for more of your money!
Adults are being infantilized by all of this at an alarming rate, and many seem to just… go along with it. It’s easy after all, and in our evolution we found shortcuts to be advantageous, so why wouldn’t we want this kind of shortcut too? It’s far easier to go along with the happy little system that will coddle you and do everything for you so you can get back to thinking about your job. I mean, that’s the most important thing to think about, then you can think about your family, but only after bills, taxes, and anything else to grind your attention span away. Our adulthoods, assuming you’re an adult reading this under the age of… what… 90? Our adulthoods were already compromised and watched, so we’ve been given a preview of what is to come.
We’ve already been told we are irresponsible and that you and I cannot be trusted with freedom, and in fact they’ve been stripping those away bit by bit for years. I’m not even talking about freedoms of the press, freedom of fertility, freedom of education (although this plays a big part in it)… no. I am talking about freedom to be. Freedom to be you without some kind of god damn influence pressed upon you beyond the expected societal norms we all get from our parents and extended communities. I’m talking systemic influences that push you toward things the system wants from you in the end (remember, the current system(s) only wants to exploit you) which is a kind of mundane obedience to a barely visible economic violence and your own sacrifices to sate it.
You are therefore taught that complexities are bad, that things must be simple, and so the complexities of our very interconnected world are hidden away. It’s for your own good that you don’t think about the implications of a supply chain that could easily be disrupted by any kind of minor error, and that its capacity to absorb those errors is thinning because of AI planning and as-needed or just-in-time supply systems and the ethics of those systems. You are influenced and molded to not even think about these kinds of things while companies demand deeper access to your identity, location, biometrics, and behaviors to adjust systems to further their efficiencies in getting things from you rather than delivering things to you. God forbid a worker takes a day off and suddenly half the country is without burgers for a day because the system has become so efficient that redundancy is dead.
The systems and subsystems and overarching meta-systems are presented to you in simplified, homogenized, convenient little data bites to prevent comprehending them. It’s best to just not think about the collapse that is impending from the various interwining complexities of a madness that has taken our world over. It’s too disturbing. Here, let’s turn on the TV or the streaming service, or blast our brains with clips on X filled with AI bullshit and a million people asking Grok “Hey is this AI?” when it is a cat dancing the cha-cha down a street while the Titanic floats by.
Interfaces themselves on the various web apps that now dominate our existence replace comprehension, just as the procedures we follow replace our judgment, and from there our compliance replaces competence… all the while every action, click, time on screen, etc. is quantified, measured, stored, and fed into indifferent algorithms. Financial systems and subsystems require intimate personal data to function, and that data becomes a permanent liability that will eventually be exposed in data breaches. It’s all ripe for the taking now, and the reason it is so easy to take? Well I already explained that – but there’s no true incentive to prevent the breaches when the fine is a slap on the wrist and the consequences are the bare minimum (oftentimes people end up with bonuses at the top anyways).
Healthcare systems demand identification and they require verification at every step, turning your vulnerability as you communicate into just more data to be stored, stolen, or at worst-case… sold. Our workplaces reinforce this dynamic through mandatory positivity. Smile for the customer. Be happy with your lot in life. You’re better here than homeless, right? The corporate values system that gets shoved down your throat and the demanded emotional regulation that is enforced by policy and monitored by digital tools strips you of your humanity even now. Every thought, decision, and bathroom break in some of the worst places to work is quantified, and you are steered toward what the company wants. You are, to them, a slobbering infantile unit of productivity that must be pushed constantly toward being productive, otherwise they cannot maximize your profit potential.
Under conditions like this, competence itself becomes a liability because competence requires privacy, time, and the freedom to learn from your mistakes. You can’t make mistakes and learn from those mistakes if you’re never allowed to make those mistakes in the first place. Manageability becomes the ultimate goal of you or I in this workforce today, because it is far easier to rely on manageability with tracking, predictive models, and eventual replacement as we wear down like the tools we are. Choice is introduced as a proof of freedom, but those choices are limited and only within the choices that are possible inside the system. You are still in the cave, and the cave is making you docile, stupid, and compliant.
Nearly every choice offered within this system will come with a sacrifice or with some strings attached. They are pre-selected, and they also usually force more of your information into the data-monster that consumes us all as nothing but collated informational points to feed an ever-expanding algorithm… that tries to quantify us to make sure we don’t drop too far into our efficiency matrices. You get the choice of one bad job, or one worse job, or being unemployed and left to die under a bridge. Each job option requires even deeper access to your identity or your histories — or obliteration of your physical self. Debt, more debt, or collapse. Pick your poison.
Choice that lacks power does not create agency, choice without privacy prevents agency from ever forming, and choice with no meaning just gives you the illusion of agency in the end. There may not be any free will, but there is the agency that comes with being free to make choices that you should have been allowed to make. You are told you chose this life, that it was your decision to live here. It wasn’t, because you did not choose the moment of your conception, nor did you choose the parents you were born to, nor did you choose the childhood you had, nor did you choose the societal influences that shaped you, formed you, molded you. I never chose to live this life. Neither did you.
Refusal to plug into this online system of ever-demanding vampire-data-driven technicide is punished severely. You are deprived materially of the means to survive, you are excluded socially from the pack mentality of a population deformed by this world, and you are excluded by the automated subsystems which ensure your compliance to the meta-system of modern day access and control. We don’t know what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, or to what end it is leading us. That’s no moral failing, or some stupidity on our part, or even a consequence of any choice we made. It is the indifference of the grand meta-system that keeps us ignorant to ensure its own very survival, created through unconscious choices of generations of humans motivated by capital and ever‑present hoarding of resources, based on a mutation of our own base instinct that to hoard a resource is to survive the winter.
To be a competent and whole person, you need time. You need forgiveness, not just from others, but also to learn to forgive yourself and learn from mistakes you made. You need the ability to make errors and mistakes in your learning and your work without permanent records of those mistakes that may haunt you. I am speaking of mistakes relating to life skills, work skills, and things of that nature; any other kind of mistakes through carelessness or that cause grievous harm are outside this scope. The earlier generations were also given systems that changed slowly, slowly enough to be learned and accounted for, even if they were systems that were predatory in the meta-system. This allowed them to adjust to those systems and work around them, and being more primitive these systems did not require as much data because data had not become a major way to monetize you.
These past mothers and fathers of the previous eras were allowed to fail without the risk of immediate annihilation and without digital trails that would haunt them forever. Those that spectacularly failed were indeed recorded in the annals of history, but out of the billions of people, they are quite few and far between. I, for example, could tell you nothing of the mistakes that my great-grandparents made that weren’t noteworthy enough to be passed down in the oral traditions of my family. I can only tell you of the fatal mistake that killed my great-grandfather when he skinned a squirrel, cut himself, and died from an infection in the age before antibiotics. A cautionary tale, and one which is not as common now that we do have some way to treat it.
Just as not all medication is bad, neither is all data. Data itself is a tool, like a machine, or the unlocking of a chemical or atomic process. It can be used for the great benefit of our species, as bumbling as it is, or it can be used for the annihilation of our species, just like a chemical that can be used for crops can be used as a weapon, or in the most easy example the use of the atom to boil water, or to boil entire cities. It is the meta-system of our current age that preys upon us the most, and so data will be misused as long as the meta-system consumes it and misuses it.
Imagine though, being allowed to accumulate understanding through easy repetition, to be allowed the freedom to fail, to dust yourself off, and to try again with iterative changes and self-discoveries along with cooperation with your peers and the knowledge of those who came before, so that perhaps you do find that working methodology, and maybe even improve it! That’s what our grandmothers and our grandfathers were free to do.
They were allowed to become adults.
The modern day meta-system, and its underlying data-systems, management-systems, corporation-systems, and more, ensure that today’s workforce must navigate systems that mutate constantly and demand identification and further information at every point of contact with that system. Mistakes are swiftly punished in near-instantaneous speeds, and disproportionately at that. Those mistakes become a permanent point of data, a mark against you and me, and they will exist for as long as these machines that record everything we have ever done in some way exist.
Institutional memory is being systematically consumed, mutated, and erased. Apprenticeships have been fundamentally disabled, dismantled, and deprecated in most industries. Trial and error has become in itself a trial of the individual, and is seen as a failing when it should be seen as progress, but trial and error requires time and the privacy to make mistakes and learn from them, even if it is a group privacy and not so much an individual privacy. They took your ladder away and still expect you to climb to the top of the mountain, and now every failed attempt to reach the summit is seen as a moral failure that will exist forevermore in your digitized immortality.
Our children see this, they see how adults have become so infantilized, they see what they too will become. They see you and I being exhausted, monitored closely, and afraid of making any mistake. They learn early now that questions are dangerous, curiosity can cause complication, that resistance to these systems is recorded, and that deviation comes with severe consequences. Their wonder at a world they’ve never seen is crushed and neglected because wonder asks why things are the way they are and how things became the way they became.
Their dreams are taken out back behind the metaphorical shed and unceremoniously shot, because those dreams mean they can dream of a different world, and a different world is an existential threat to the current dying husk that is our meta-system. Even as it has begun to fray and gangrene at its outer extremities it refuses to stop growing, so it consumes more, to stay alive longer. What are a child’s dream to a data-monster in the end, except seasoning to the food of data it is gifted with each new birth?
The neglect itself is a quiet and insidious monstrosity all its own. It is built on procedures, compliance, and consumption of media designed to supplant and suppress. Endless slop media attacks all ages, from babies to boomers. It takes the shape of AI generated slop for babies, to AI generated slop for outraging boomers. It lives in constant forms, logins, tests, content, and the ever-present bombardment of the push notification hell that is our current meta-system hell. You can see it on our faces when we look in a mirror. Usually just a glimpse, for I myself cannot stand my reflection for very long. I have been taught to hate that which I see with my own eyes, because it is imperfection in the meta-system’s overall outlook of never-good-enough.
But when I stare at my own face, and maybe you do this too, I see the lines that have formed, the eyes that have sunken in, and the mind behind them shouting at me that this simulacrum is just a fading dying gasp of an old world that refuses to die so that the new world may be born. At times I am too tired to answer hard questions that I may ask myself, and too afraid to give the honest answers. We all face obliteration in the end, and no amount of romantic storytelling or spirituality is going to stop what is coming when the cosmic gardener decides our time has come. Sometimes, I will admit in this moment of vulnerability, I wish to speak with the cosmic gardener and ask them why it must be so.
This all leaves us with a method of governance in the meta-system that is built on surveillance, exhaustion, and the managed decay of our imaginations. It demands obedience, not understanding from our exhausted minds, and drained souls. Infantilized adults do not organize effectively because that requires privacy, to have time to ourselves to think and listen, and eventually to speak. I can’t plan beyond the immediate horizon because long-term planning requires stability, and the hope that there is a future for me that I have some choice is shaping. I barely trust my own judgment anymore because it has been shaped by this system, and as much as I am trying to unplug it all, and perhaps you are too, we are conditioned by it.
So deferral to authority, whether that is the authority of leaders, the authority of an algorithm, or the authority of “expertise” in an age where expertise is fleetingly rare is an easy choice at the cost of yet more of ourselves. What we give up in exchange is our agency and our data. As a people this makes us all easier to manage perceptually (albeit in reality I do not think it truly is the case that it is easier, but rather that conditions were made harder to make this seem easier), easier to market to, easier to blame, and far easier to replace.
A populace trapped in the mind-cave of shadows that tell them they are constantly and forever behind other people is far more willing to accept guidance from the meta-system that profits from confusion and requires data to function. Responsibility is in fact demanded without authority in this, blame itself is assigned without power, and freedom? Freedom is promised inside structures that cannot be exited, unless you seek obliteration. How, then, is that even close to freedom?
The children of today and the future are raised to step into this arrangement without the tools to question it, for it is all they will know. They did not enter the cave willingly to watch the shadows, they were brought up never seeing the light, and so all they will know are the shadows. Shoved in front of screens without answers, metrics instead of meaning, and supervision without any trust in their abilities to cognitively disconnect are irrevocably harmed, and the damage, if it can even be repaired, will likely take a long time. But of course, that assumes there will even be space to allow for repair.
Autonomy.
Competence.
Dignity.
Wonder.
Dreams.
These were not luxuries. These were essential to being a human being. A fucking normal human being. They have been, and are being, stripped away. They are being neglected. They are being reframed as unrealistic expectations or even worse as personal weaknesses.
Knowing all of this hasn’t made it easier to endure, and honestly it doesn’t feel great to have this burden of knowledge, if you can even call it that. It is more of a grief, that we have come so far and fallen. That our meta-system and our meta-future is meta-fucked.