Why we still haven't found what we're looking for.

Leveling up, breaking the curve, and walking on a treadmill.

Image © Julie R. Neidlinger. All rights reserved.

Louis C.K. made the point that everything is amazing and no one was happy.

We have air conditioning, indoor plumbing, hot and cold clean water right in our homes, refrigerators—all things royalty of the past would not have imagined. And yet we complain. There are few things more infinite than the human being’s ability to find something to complain about.

In college, I studied art and art history.¹

While the cost of college today would likely make my degree path wildly overpriced, in the 1990s it wasn’t as outlandish and I was able to pay off my student loan with manageable payments in ten years. In that light, I don’t have any regrets about my studies and consider them worth it. There are a lot of things you learn in pursuit of an art degree that are peripheral and surprisingly useful.

How to BS.

How to BS through critique.

How to make it through critique in general.

How to be creative and BS when you forgot and had to throw a project together, and get through a critique.

How to BS to yourself and sometimes defeat imposter syndrome, and get through critique.

How to solve problems, BSing your way through until you find the solution, so you’re ready for critique.

We also learned a lot about art mediums and techniques, of course, but it is these peripheral ones you don’t realize you’ll attain.

My university classes had several phenomenal artists. There were the Holz brothers, good-looking twins who were excellent painters. There was a guy named Jonathan Twingley whose pen-and-ink linework inspired me to mess around with ink dip pens and pay closer attention to line quality. There was a guy named Jeff who saved me from the weekly three-hour agony of a nighttime highly feminist-charged art history seminar class due to dropping out after the first night thanks to his grand soliloquy on bagels as our snack for break, and the appropriateness of using a pastry with holes for such a class.

My fifth year, as I worked for my B.F.A., we had weekly critique sessions where everyone in the B.F.A. program had to bring in their work and put it on the wall of the huge white critique room. We were all prepping for our senior show, building portfolios, and trying to keep a poker face when really weird stuff was brought in.²

Critique was something else. It was a real guts builder if there ever was one, as well as a generator of the gift of BS. One critique class sticks out, though. Jeff, of the bagel-fixation fame, was a decent painter. He brought in a large painting that had a horse in it, a subject matter he didn’t usually include. The change in expected subject and style really lit up the critique class. After a while, though, I was rolling my eyes because a lit critique class is not as glorious as you might think, especially since I was pretty sure several really were lit.

God forbid, but Jeff had allowed one paint drip to stay in place instead of working it in with his brush, and this was the iceberg taking the ship down.

“The drip is too distracting.”

“The drip draws attention to the medium of paint rather than the actual subject matter that’s been painted.”

“The drip is the most interesting thing.”

“That drip down the side, that makes this more about the paint than the subject,” one person said.

“I’d like to have seen more drips.”

“There should be no drips.”

A new instructor, one who was prone to using the word “specificity,” agreed and said that the drip created a “lack of specificity” in the finished piece. The whole thing was stupid; one person brought up the drip, and now it was a pile-on.

On and on it went, getting more ridiculous. Jeff looked like he was about to burn his painting. Finally it was my turn to “critique.”

“I like the painting,” I said, swearing to myself that I would make no mention of the stupid paint drip. “Maybe check out some horse books at the library, though, because that fetlock isn’t going to let your horse walk anywhere.” I got up from my seat on the multileveled carpeted floor and pointed to what I was talking about. “The rest of your painting is fairly realistic, so I wouldn’t stylize the horse’s hooves and legs,” I added.

One person started with the drip, and in moments, the drip became the only thing the class could discuss. They forget they were even talking about an entire painting, but instead, on the complexities of a paint drip and what existential meaning it held. What started as a painting critique had leveled up (or down?) to the value of alerting the viewer to the painter’s presence via a drip.

I was amazed how quickly the class lost perspective once they tightened up their criticism glasses.

My college advisor, Tim Ray, told us to remember that if critics were too harsh, we should remember that a critic is like a eunuch in a harem. He sees how it’s done, knows how it’s done, but can’t do it himself. Teddy Roosevelt pushed back on critics as well (though more tastefully) in his “Man in the Arena” speech.

Let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure, beware of that queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as a cynic, as the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs, the man to whom good and evil are as one. The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt.

[…]

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

But everyone is a critic of something, especially today. The more opportunities and the easier it is to speak out, the more we fill the ages with complaints and criticism.

Just look at any place where people can leave reviews.

We’ve built entire algorithms that support massive industry and commerce, the bulk of marketing and exposure, which is based on a critique of services, people, and products by fickle humans who will take down a business and become completely nasty if they have any minor inconvenience.

Forget to bring the ketchup? Burn it down.

Didn’t smile enough when you brought the food to the table? Burn it down.

Found dust in the cupboard of the hotel room? Burn it down.

Brought in a picture of a model, and your salon visit didn’t leave you looking like that? Burn it down.

We’ve pared down our online social action to various emoticons and “likes” that indicate emotion based on our critique and response to a post. It’s because of a lot of things, but dissatisfaction due to hedonistic adaptation is a big part.

Hedonistic adaptation is sometimes referred to as the hedonic treadmill, but they don’t seem to be quite the same to me.

With the treadmill, from my understanding, we have a set point of happiness, and whatever good or bad experience comes our way, we eventually return to that point. We keep on trudging, chasing after the highs and enjoying them for a wee bit before we realize we’re where we were all along, on the same treadmill.

That’s not a bad thing if you have a good treadmill and understand what’s going on. You can enjoy the highs and not fear the lows because you know you’ll be back on an even keel soon enough. But it’s terrible if you get caught up in chasing after highs to try and move your setpoint and make your life more exciting artificially. It’s like trying to run away from something you fear, all the while…you’re running in place on a treadmill.

At least in this example, however, your treadmill stays steady. That’s not always the case.

Hedonic adaptation seems different to me, though experts might disagree. It suggests that every new pleasure or convenience we experience quickly becomes normal. We adapt to it by assigning it as a normal state of being.

Flying a private jet somewhere is super exciting at first, and then it becomes the expectation, and you find things to complain about on your private jet flight. Other travel options are no longer on your radar. The five-star hotel room was so exciting until it’s what you always get, and then you see what could be better. It’s you and I complaining that our food hasn’t arrived at the table fast enough, our shower isn’t hot enough, our fridge isn’t full enough, and our phone isn’t fast enough. It’s coming home from a missions trip in Nicaragua after having seen people living at a city dump, eating garbage, and hearing your group complaining that your food wasn’t hot enough at a restaurant (true story). It’s the income increase that causes you to raise your living expenses accordingly, so you never get ahead.

It’s the long-term client you’ve had who suddenly turns on you when you do one thing they don’t like, forgetting all you’ve done for them because they adapted up to a level of expectation each time you did something kind or generous. The generous exception became the standard expectation.

“Wow thank you for doing this for me!” becomes “this is what you do for me” becomes “why aren’t you doing this for me?”

My friend and I often discuss being wary of inconsistency because it sets precedents that people quickly assume are the new normal. Fudge the rules once for an employee, and they expect it next time; other employees find out and want it too. The one-time-only price break you offer a client who then assumes they will always receive that price.

Not every person does this.

Some people understand what’s normal and what’s an exception. Some people can be thankful for the one-off and carry it as a wonderful memory rather than a measuring stick. Some people can put the bonus in the savings account instead of buying a bigger house. But the more conveniences and speed we’ve injected into our culture, the more quickly we gear ourselves to adapt upwards without realizing it.

Our new setpoint or baseline is the higher bar. What we couldn’t dream of in the past, we now expect in the present. It’s being surrounded by amazing convenience and opportunity, like Louis C.K. said, and not being happy about it because there’s a new level ahead.

I despise the whole “level up” concept that’s being pushed alongside hustle and girl boss culture.

“Let me help you level up” deserves a slap on the face.

Though packaged as maximizing potential, it’s really just a toxic mixture of comparison, discontent, competition, and hedonistic adaptation, and it’s a driving force behind many self-help and motivational speakers to make a few bucks because you can’t go wrong marketing discontent to customers. There’s always a new level you can sell them. It’s still a treadmill, but one that keeps you running faster and faster, one you can’t slow down.

Of course, you can level down, too.

Years ago, when I worked the night shift at a post office, a worker pulled me aside and told me I was working too fast. He pointed to an elderly woman who was walking around with a clipboard and some kind of watch.

“She’s timing us. If you keep working fast, you’re going to make it impossible to slow down. We’ll have to work fast all the time.”

The locked-in level-up can be terrifying if someone else is controlling it, for sure.

I was much younger at the time, and my mind was blown away by the admonition to work slower and less efficiently (though the concept of blowing the curve should have been recalled from high school). I just wanted to get the mail trucks out as fast as possible and finish boxing the mail as accurately and quickly as I could. Being told to purposefully slow down and do what I didn’t consider my best work was really hard and laden with guilt.

I was told to adapt down to avoid being locked into a level up, as if life was a zip tie.

So which is it? Leveling up or down? Is leveling up just us not being able to find what we’re looking for, and leveling down little more than a dog returning to its vomit? Shouldn’t we all be pressing forward for improvement?

I don’t know.

I don’t want to get trapped in a cycle where yesterday’s successes are today’s failures, which is the case if you’re trapped in a state of always leveling up. But I also don’t want to have a subsistence living of eating participation ribbons, where you level down to maintain the status quo.

The theory of a setpoint suggests that staying level is better than trying to level up or down. I suspect, even as there are variations up and down within normal limits, that the world could use a few more level people.

1. Before you begin the standard riff about worthless college degrees, consider this:

Obviously there’s a numbers game; we told more people to go into computer science and encouraged fewer people to pursue things like art history, so the numbers are skewed due to sheer quantity of computer science majors wandering around wondering what hath AI wrought.

2. Like a pile of dirt. Really.