On Wastmen

Def: A man who acts like a boy, lacking maturity, and generally wastes his time and life by doing everything to achieve nothing.

Everybody knows someone who fails to do anything, lives in their parent’s attic, and maybe : to navigate a career, to find and hold onto partners, even to be more the averagely good at computer games. In fact, everyone has been that person: lying in bed late instead of getting up, ordering takeaway instead of cooking, lounging on the sofa instead of exercising.

You /know/ you should either do something productive, but you also know that you should commit to better relaxation; what’s striking is that you persist like that anyway, being neither wholly useful nor fully resting. Some people make a life of this - seemingly unable to navigate a career, nor a relationship. I was this person for a long time, and even now I’ve only got one of them sort of under my belt.

There’s nothing under the sun, and the Wasteman is a new mutation of the Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, and Nietzsche’s Last Man. Slackers, which were an update of the Flaneur and the Artist, are essentially comic roles. They are archetypes of idleness, people involved in strenuous work, naturally, aren’t able to hang back and observe; the Worker has insights which come from elsewhere. What’s interesting about the Wasteman, in contrast to the Slacker, is how it’s a tragic archetype; there’s no longer any space in society for people who aren’t ‘productive.’ Which is the genesis of the anxiety.

This is a fundamentally Western phenomenon. Eastern society has a fundamentally different approach to men who want to leave society. In the east if you want out, to go to a forest and meditate, you’re out. Sever connections with society. Go to the forest. But you have nothing to say to us now. Society respects the Guru, and the Guru respects society. In comparison, in the Christian West, we have the Priest. Early Christians were counselled to obey Ceasar, but be loyal to God. So they could stay in society, bu they had to find something to /do/.

In pre-modern western societies, your worth was determined by your place in society. It was an accident of birth. Nowdays there is a relentless, utilitarian, focus on productivity. A person’s worth, particularly a man’s worth, is tied to their ability to turn inputs into outputs. There is now no way to be valued by standing outside society

Stripped of religious or artistic ambition, slackers have nothing to do. So become Wastemen.