For the audio version of this essay, followed by a thoughtful conversation with one of my closest and wisest friends, go here:
Welcome to Wonka World
When I was about thirteen years old, in the late 90’s, you could scarcely grasp the abundance of consumer goods, the variety and accessibility. Stores on every corner, stocked with more than everything you could ever want.
But by far the coolest thing I knew of was a portable DVD player. I loved movies, I loved electronics, and I loved the idea that I could have this secret magical box in my backpack that would let me WATCH MOVIES whenever and wherever I was. I wanted one so bad it made my throat hurt.
That was 25 years ago.
If you had described to me, back then, the device that lives in my pocket now, with its incredible camera and its permanent connection to the infinite internet, with its crystalline screen that strokes the pleasure centers of my brain every time it lights up… my very heart may have ruptured. The future, I would have thought, is gonna be lit.
And it is! By any rational metric, our era is, in very deed, lit.
The fact that we don’t drift through our modern lives in a constant state of awe is a testament to our truly limitless ability to take things for granted. This is actually a good thing: it’s a function of our adaptability, and it’s probably the main reason we keep inventing new things and improving our overall quality of life. We’ve got to be green and growing, or ripe and rotting, as a friend of mine is fond of saying.
Still, it’s worth taking a cognitive step backward to survey the water we’re swimming in.
Because it’s made of candy.
“What kind of candy?”
All the kinds. For instance…
Screens!
The most obvious and most talked about candy delivery system in our modern era.
You're looking at one right now. Probably there's another one (or three) within arm’s reach. Big ones small ones touch screens too. All of them practically throbbing with the promise of delicious dopamine. Movies and TV and games and social media and all media and VIRTUAL REALITY, which basically wraps the screen around your whole brain...mmmmm *shiver*.
Oh yeah and
Porn!
Porn everywhere!
Which, sex, sure, but also political pornography, which I'm pretty sure is the most popular kind right now.1
To say nothing of all the other kinds of porn out there that have nothing to do with sex or politics. Food porn, eco porn, disaster porn, torture porn, ASMR2, and on and on and on.
What makes porn porn? It triggers the deepest parts of your lizard brain to induce a heightened physiological response. Just like…
Drugs!
Sad? Bored? Existentially angsty?
Good news! You have so many options!3
First, and perhaps most popularly, there are at least a dozen different kinds of alcohol.4
And also did you know marijuana is legal now? I hear there's at least a dozen ways to get that into your body, too.
And psychedelic research has been on a glory run for the past ten years and I'm pretty sure it's just getting started.
Or just stay home and snort the Internet all day.5
Oh, also:
FOOOOOD!
If you want a tasty treat that isn't already within arm's reach, well we’ve got that covered just fine.
Instacart, Amazon, and Uber can give it to you RIGHT NOW.6
By the way, did you see that story from ten years ago about how Frito-Lay spent like thirty million dollars a year to make Doritos as addictive as possible? They used a forty thousand dollar machine shaped like a mouth to determine the "perfect break point" of a chip. It’s four pounds of pressure per square inch.7
The Monster that Feeds
But it's not just chips it's everything.
The relentless demand to "increase shareholder value" has turned consumer facing corporations into perfectly calibrated engines of dopamine delivery.
This is the giant tentacled monster behind ugly little words like “commerce,” and "consumerism."
We have all been reduced to consumers, and we all have at least one weakness that can be exploited for quarterly profits.
What's yours?
Maybe it's actual mouth candy. Having trouble with your weight? Or maybe you're skinny fat, certain in your brittle bones that you're doomed to an early death because you can't lay off the goddesses of gratification like Hostess and Frito Lay.
Or maybe it's eye candy. In which case, god help you when a thirst trap slides into your TikTok feed.
Or brain candy — raise your hand if you can plug four to six hours of a typical workday into a thrilling new TV show.8 Courtesy of the streaming giants, who collectively spend more than the combined GDP of most European countries to keep an iron grip on your little eyeballs.
How about ear candy? Let the horror of silence be banished forever. Listen to a magical (algorithmically generated) playlist of music and the spoken word every waking second. Maybe you’re one of those people who hooks into the sonic IV as soon as they wake up in the morning, and can't get to sleep without it.
Look, I'm not even going to talk about video games. Practically everybody plays video games, and practically everyone who plays them (skewed male, research suggests) is at least a little bit addicted to them. Somewhat poetically, if it's a competition between gaming and every other kind of entertainment, games probably win.
The world, the world, is full of bounty
You don't have to move your head or twitch a muscle -- it is all delivered to you, free of charge, free of thought, free of anything.
Oh, sure, a subscription. Five dollars a month? Ten? Twenty? The monster only needs a little, just a little.
And perhaps not even from you. After all, a whole cacophony of content is subsidized completely. And you thought socialism was dead. How so, when some people spend thousands of dollars on Fortnight skins so the rest can play for free?9
Look guys, we did it. This is utopia.
Please stop feeling bad
In this paradise, everybody is addicted to something. Some kind of candy.
How could we not be?
This isn’t to say you shouldn’t resist. You should. You must! But you also need to stop berating yourself for eating one more cookie at 2am as Netflix serves up the next episode of Ozark.
There are ways to build up your tolerance. There are strategies you can learn to resist the relentless temptations of the infini-tentacled monster of consumerism. There are tools you can use to build boundaries and save yourself from a junk food induced health crisis or yet another doom scroll spiral.
But before you can pick up a tool, you have to put down the shame. No more self-flagellation. It’s not your fault that the world you live in is full of candy, pressing in on you from every direction.10
To the extent you can feel empowered, rather than guilty, you’ll be able to help build and support a counterbalance to the unbridled indulgences of an economy built on the 20th century religion of consumerism.
The Ascetic Economy
Within this Wonka World of hyperabundance, I believe a new economy must emerge. The Ascetic Economy will be built on the premise that people will pay for products and services that protect them from the corrupting excesses of the consumer economy, and equip them to lead lives of spiritual maximalism.
Already, something like this is taking shape:
Freedom.to is a cloud-based, hand-tying software designed to free you from distractions when you’re trying to get work done. I’ve been using it for many years, and its popularity seems to be on an exponential growth curve.
The Center for Humane Technology produces an extremely influential and widely listened-to podcast called Your Undivided Attention, which I would highly recommend.
Subscription Box Meals - Say what you want about the ecological cost of these kinds of businesses, but I believe they are successful at least in part because people are trying to save themselves from drive-throughs, and impulse purchases of junk food at the grocery store.
Apple’s Screen Time is mostly a superficial and political move, but nevertheless exists only because people recognize that something does, in fact, need to be done.
There are plenty of other examples like this, but what’s perhaps more interesting is the blossoming of communities that have little or nothing to do with money.
Fasting, for instance, is asceticism at its finest. Far more than a strictly religious phenomenon, any kind of fasting is fundamentally anti-consumerist — it suggests that there is a powerful battery of potential solutions to all kinds of problems that are based on what you DON'T consume.11
What other examples can you think of?
Making the Wonka World a Better Place
The next time you feel exhausted or overwhelmed by the economies of attention and consumerism, think about what you can do to support the ascetic economy instead.
Don’t know? Ask someone.
Come up with a great ascetic hack? Tell someone!
This is how we will build what we need to survive the endless supply and variety of CANDY, everywhere.
Because here’s the thing — even if we wanted to, we can’t move out of Wonka World. And I don’t want to. It’s great here! Life is delicious all the time!
It’s just that I need to stop gorging on the snozzberries.
If you liked this, you’ll LOVE…
Also take a look at
, a new publication that distills short, practical philosophy from classic works of great fiction.And of course, if you haven’t yet…
What's your fetish? Fox or CNN? Or no you're a Twitter guy, aren't you? Little bit of "intellectual dark web," maybe? For a treat? Whatever you're looking for, I promise you we've got it. And yeah, it's the good stuff.
Yeah I said it go ahead and fight me.
I’d like to go on record as being generally supportive of moderated, recreational drug use.
[citation needed]
Don't worry, you'll never run out of novelty. Go ahead and try I dare you. It'll be fun. You'll have so much fun.
Two hours, max. Really sorry about that -- we're working on it.*
*With DRONES. Very soon, we'll get bags of Doritos dropped into our hands from the sky, and we didn't even need a goofy genius named Flint to do it.
I know it sounds like I’m making this up but I’m not.
Or, OK, one you've already seen.
I guess technically it is your fault, insofar as all of this is an emergent cultural phenomenon, and you are just as much a constituent of that culture as anyone else. But shame spirals don’t typically respect that level of nuance, so we’ll leave it alone for now.
Incidentally, this is why most diet fads end up seeming quasi-religious in nature.
Ah, ASMR. Nothing like listening to people trim their toenails and slurp ramen noodles to soothe the mind.
I sometimes worry Substack is my candy. 😳
No, it definitely is.
Holy cow, did you just read Johan Hari’s “Stolen Focus” too? I finished it yesterday and you two are both spot on. I’m going to start by grabbing my loppers and going out and trimming some fallen limbs at one of my favorite trails and I’m going to leave my damned phone behind.