I think I can offer an explanation for why I keep talking about the “life of mischief.” I’ll spoil the surprise by telling you that I’m talking about intrinsic motivation. Let’s start at the opposite end, with economies.
The concept of an economy seems harmless enough. People buy and sell stuff, they make deals and exchange goods and services, often using the symbolic medium of money; groups of individuals form firms that take on supraindividual qualities, and it makes sense to develop some concepts to measure and track these interactions in the aggregate. It’s meaningful to know how many transactions there are, their value, whether movement of value is bidirectional or favors one category of participants or another, whether there is a need for more of less of a product or service; these are honest questions.
Once you have some of that information, it is just human to try to figure out what it means. What factors cause value to flow toward certain individuals and groups, and away from others? What adjustments can affect the dearth or abundance of opportunity? And so you get ideas about risk and debt and so on, which go beyond the observation of economic transactions to explaining them. And the next step, we almost can’t help ourselves, is to go beyond explaining how it works to trying to explain why it works, that is, why do people make the value choices they make?
This is a bizarre way to arrive at human psychology but, what can I say, this is what we have become. Take a simple rule like “people try to maximize profits,” which is a fundamental assumption of the economic theory of human behavior. We can say – we actually believe – that people try to have friends who will add value to their lives, or who give them an advantage in such-and-such situation. We can apply a cost-benefit analysis to every life choice, to explain why it “makes sense” for someone to do the things they do. When we use the phrase “makes sense,” we are saying that the behavior can be explained in terms of economic assumptions, we are evaluating the resulting balance of value after a choice has been acted upon. Making sense just means that the individual made a profit from a choice. Of course it doesn't have to be in the realm of money; "I always have fun with him," or "She always has something interesting to talk about" describe the rewards of a social interaction, which justifies whatever effort is involved in maintaining the relationship. Common economic sense says that we will keep a friend if the rewards outweigh the effort involved. Economics notoriously supports its theoretical system on the assumption of rational actors; when we can see how a person’s behavior is explained by profit-seeking then we say their behavior makes sense, and that’s what they mean by rational. And we accept that way of thinking, as a culture.
At the personal level, profit-seeking means pursuing rewards. It means we do things for the reward, which may be money or attention or prestige or … it’s a concept without a definition. Today’s behavioral economics is a naive offshoot of Skinnerian behaviorism, in which an organism’s behavior was explained in terms of reinforcements that shaped their responses. Behaviorism fell apart largely because the tautology was too close to the surface: a reinforcer was defined as something that would cause a response, and a response was defined as action caused by a reinforcer.
In our contemporary world, when we ask conversationally why some person did some thing, we are looking for the economic logic that resulted in the observed behavior. We are asking what the person gained or hoped to gain by the choice they made. When we ask what motivated them, we are almost always asking what reward they sought. The word “incentive” is your tip-off here – what was the incentive for the choice? You will hear reference to our species as “homo economicus,” replacing “sapiens” – which implies awareness, knowledge, thinking, wisdom – with the preferred descriptive term.
This belief system offers no explanation for impulsive behavior, or any behavior that has no clear reward or possibility of reward, and especially play. Either we assume that there is a covert reward system going on, that is, that the person gets some kind of hidden value from their apparently-unprofitable behavior, or we assume that they are mentally ill. So, by the way, we have millions of people with depression and anxiety, millions more self-reporting some form of autism (being “on the spectrum”) or attention deficit, millions of people with eating disorders, drug and alcohol disorders and other addictions, sexual paraphilias, anger management issues, low self-esteem, unjustifiably high self-esteem (Dunning Kruger)… Millions of people literally taking “psych drugs” for their mental illnesses and millions more who are diagnosed or self-diagnosed with some syndrome or disorder that explains why their choices do not result in personal profit. A lot of money goes into convincing us that these impulsive and irrational qualities are actual diseases and should be treated by medical experts who support the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. Granted that some people have actual mental illness, most of these common disorders just mean that the person’s behavior cannot be explained by rational economic principles of profit maximization and reward-seeking. It is only in the most recent modern phase of human existence that anybody thought of personal quirks and the suffering of ordinary life as diseases.
You can tell from the tone of my discussion that I don’t buy it, which is an ironic way to use an economic concept to say that I think all of this is bullshit. An economy has to exist, people’s lives are greatly enhanced by specialization and exchange of goods and services. That’s not bullshit, it’s genius, we are definitely smarter than the other monkeys in that way. But let’s put it into perspective.
I know people hate to say it out loud, but we were not created in the image of God. We evolved from some other kind of ape, and through a slow ratcheting process based on reproductive success we arrived at the hairless, upright, speaking species we are now. The ability to label things and talk about them gives us the ability to manipulate them, but because we focus on labeled things and actions we tend to miss everything else. The result is that we live in an artificial Umwelt that is different from the world that is perceived by other living things. For instance, we recognize objects. But objects don’t exist, this cup is not independent of the table it sits on, they are a system of matter and force, codependent, and joined to the atmosphere and to the floor, joined to the globe of the earth that provides mass for gravity and interacts with the gravity fields of other astronomical bodies, and so on. We have a word for a cup and a word for a table, they are defined by their utility, and we treat them as unique and separate things. But no other living thing does that. There may be perceptible edges and some degree of functional independence between two parts of the world but you can't have one without the other. This object-view is not a comprehensive or accurate way to portray the environment, but it is useful and has served us in surviving and reproducing for a couple hundred thousand years, give or take a million or so. What we call “the world” is a configurable mesh model of the ambient environment that exists around us and includes us.
When people worry about computers taking over the world and making us their slaves, it is because they think that manipulating data – labels with or without numeric values – is what we do mentally. Of course digital machines will get better at that than we are, because we are apes with a language trick, and our nervous systems are mostly not evolved to calculate and compute. So now that computers are reaching that stage, it’s going to force us to ask, what is special about being human? Look around you, read the newspaper – it clearly isn’t fucking intelligence. The future will force us to try to learn what it is to be a living animal on the earth, and let computers do the computing. This is the optimistic view of AI, the view that we will be humbled and learn our place in the scheme. We are not gods, we are monkeys. We are not even good at being rational.
Skillful manipulation of labeled objects can bestow social advantages within our troops of apes, for instance a person can gain power over others by acquiring control of resources that others need. And expression of agreeable beliefs and attitudes (politics) can stimulate consensus and a group-feeling that goes deeper than language; an aptitude for this skill allows a person to lead others, whether their goal is noble or evil. When someone acquires power then others are forced to acquire some power to resist them, and a sort of emergent tension arises, which sweeps one way and then the other, between love and violence, between conformity and chaos.
These social-interaction things really happen, and you have to deal with them. Something has to fill the moments of your day, and we end up filling our moments addressing interpersonal concerns about power and reward-seeking, worrying and conniving and patching things up all day long.
A question is, what else are you going to do? You have to play the game because you have to eat, you need a place to live, transportation, a cell phone (a new necessity, is that weird or what?), and to get these things you have to dress a certain way, talk a certain way, be nice to people – if you don’t play the game you will fuck your life up. Look at the way they have managed to tie your health care to your job, which is insane, it enforces a kind of servitude where you have to keep the company happy or your medical care will get cut off. You can live without playing along but you won’t live very long. My question is, is it necessary to devote your entire day, every day, to profit-seeking?
People sometimes try to live off the grid or outside the economic system, but it won’t work for most of us. Isolation is not better, solitary confinement is considered a form of torture. We are a social ape and we need our group.
The details of maintaining our personal economic security are actually bullshit, the things we do to keep dinner on the table. These are activities we have to do, the routine is not created by you or for you, but people come to acclimate to their routines and live in them like comfortable clothing. It’s just that it’s not meaningful. If you love working eight hours a day to make money for somebody else you’re a sucker. If you think everyone should “do what you love” to coincidentally make someone else rich you’re an even worse sucker. The commercial system offers you a very short menu of options and you have to commit to one and eliminate the infinity-minus-one other possibilities that make up reality. Yes, you have to choose one. And as usual, not-choosing is a choice.
An amazing thing that all animals do is play. They do things for no good reason, for the pure pleasure of being in a physical body in a physical world. Why do flocks of starlings murmurate? Hmm, uh, well, harumph, it is to protect them from predators, of course. “Of course” because the only thing that makes sense is that there is some reward to it. They couldn’t just fly around for hours on end in amazing shifting patterns because of the joy of flying, could they? And how many predators do starlings have? It makes sense to fly, which takes care of cats, foxes … but I have never seen a murmuration of starlings fleeing from a hawk – it probably happens but it is hard to believe that is the explanation for flying around in insanely beautiful patterns for hours on end, day after day, one century after another. It makes sense to us that young animals pretend they are fighting as preparation for adulthood, but that is a pathetic way to look at it. You and your buddy are having fun. Hand-to-hand combat isn’t a big part of adult life for most species of animal including humans, we don’t need to spend our childhood training for that, but keep-away, chasing, fetch, hide and seek, wrestling including free-for-all, peek-a-boo, tug-of-war, all these forms of play are found across species – and between species. To call it training for adulthood is to get it all backwards. Adulthood is when you don’t have enough energy to play any more, and a lifetime of dealing with mundane details will sadly convince you that life really is a boring series of trivialities that we should always be serious about. Starlings murmurate for the same reason everyone was doing the electric slide at that wedding last year. Dancing is found in every human culture on earth, and its evolutionary adaptive value is what again? The reward is in doing it: interesting concept.
These days you see advice everywhere that such-and-such is “good for brain health.” Dancing, playing an instrument, sex, sports, meditation, jigsaw puzzles … we can’t justify it if there isn’t a reward promised. Maybe some people do things because they want to, because they enjoy it or want to learn to enjoy it. But we can’t make sense of that, we can’t do something just because we like doing it. It has to have a payoff, it has to add value to our lives. We have to be pursuing a personal profit.
It is estimated that thirty five million human beings surf. Why do they do that? The answer to the question is so simple we can't see it.
If we take off the economic spectacles, if we stop trying to reduce everything to reward-seeking, then it becomes obvious that most species of mammals, at least – it’s a little hard to tell what bugs are up to – spend a lot of their time not-seeking rewards. They have to find or build a shelter, fuck, raise offspring, sleep, and eat. Then the rest of their time they either sit around looking at stuff and just experiencing their own existence or interact with their conspecifics and with the environment, exchanging affection or just playing and satisfying their curiosity, feeling the movement of their bodies engaged with the physical world. The idea that things have a real purpose or inherent meaning that we can discover, or that things are “meant to be” some certain way is pure human delusion.
I’m not going to dwell on it here, but operant conditioning – Skinnerian behaviorism – was built on the idea that an organism, as they liked to call us, will learn a behavior in order to obtain a reinforcement. When I was in college we were assigned a lab rat, and we taught them to pull a chain, turn around in circles, and do other tricks, by giving them a drop of water every time they approximated the desired behavior. It really worked, you can get a pigeon, rat, or person to do almost anything if you can link their outcomes to their behavior.
But the thing that is not mentioned is the “deprivation schedule.” The night before we trained our rats, we went to the lab and took away their water. Then the next day the little guy would do anything for a drop of water. If you didn’t deprive them, the reinforcement didn’t have any effect. The importance of this cannot be underestimated. Who is imposing a deprivation schedule on us? You don’t have to look very far to figure it out. There is enough of everything for everybody. There are more empty houses than homeless people. There is enough food for everyone. There is medicine. The world itself offers everything we need. This is not Pollyanna thinking, it’s just true. Add things up, and there is enough for everybody. Somebody doesn’t let somebody else have their share, it’s as simple as that.
People who have accumulated wealth and power own the media and can manipulate the information that the rest of us receive, and our beliefs are based on that information. So, let me state the obvious: almost everything you see and hear is an advertisement. Corporations need docile workers and consumers to give their time and money to the companies that can push even more money and power to those at the top. Everybody knows this. But unfortunately it works, even if you know what’s going on. We believe what we are led to believe, and those beliefs are not in our own interest.
When I was young we had a term, “population explosion,” that referred to the fact that the world had almost three billion people in it, that number was growing exponentially, and the point was that the planet can’t sustain that many people. Now we’ve got more than eight billion people and the experts are worrying because the numbers are dropping. As I write this, today’s morning paper has a front page story about how to address “declining birth rates.” I heard a story on the radio yesterday about all the countries that are worrying about their diminishing populations. If you pay attention you will hear this message every day.
Why is population decline a problem? There will not be a skeptical discussion about this because the concern with population decrease depends on unquestionable assumptions about what’s important; population declines are considered a problem because they weaken the economy. That’s all there is to it. The corporations need workers and they need consumers, and also old people are expensive to maintain and do not add much to the economy, so we want a younger population. We don’t need eight fucking billion people on this little planet, with unimaginable pollution and violence and disease and poverty. But there are serious groups including powerful governments planning agendas to boost the population to increase GDP and profits and stock values and other such measures that suddenly seem to be more important than the world itself.
The newspapers complain when petroleum prices, or house prices, have dropped to a dangerously low level. So now – people can afford gas, they can afford a house, and this is bad, because what matters is the economy, corporate profits. That money is supposed to be flowing toward rich people, the rest of us are just here to keep the machinery going. The rich want to be richer, and for some reason we enthusiastically help them attain that.
You gotta love a society that puts its faith in the “invisible hand,” bless their heart. Somehow, the market seeks equilibrium and everything works out as wages and prices find their own level, magically. Firms and their employees individually are competing to maximize profits, and that means they are going to produce things as cheaply as they can, pay workers as little as they can, and sell their shit for the highest price they can get. We all know this, it’s just a fact of our world as we have communally created it. Workers will work for the highest pay they can get, consumers will pay the least they can, and if everybody follows the profit maximization strategy then, it is believed, the market settles in a state of dynamic equilibrium.
But the reality is that a person has to decide what to pay you, a person has to decide what their product will cost. The hand is not invisible; it’s at the end of somebody’s arm. Those Costco hot dogs are the tip of a radical iceberg.
“The market” doesn’t do any of this. The market is an abstract figment of the imagination, it is a concept, not a real thing. We could call it a conspiracy if we didn't mind being called "conspiracy theorists," because the market only works if everybody has the same goal. Some people who believe in profit maximization make daily decisions that result in our dynamic, inequality-creating economic monstrosity. Profit maximization is not a universal law, things didn’t always work this way and it’s not like this everywhere but we accept these terms because now we can’t imagine anything different. We accept it and go along with it, trying to make the best of the situation; is this really the way to live? Come on; there is no fucking invisible hand. There are just people putting price tags on things and trying to squeeze value out of the system for themselves. Invisible hand, can you believe that shit? For some reason the invisible hand inevitably, magically, sweeps all the money into the pockets of the few who already have an outsized proportion of it. Just so happens.
If your neighbor comes over to borrow a cup of sugar, do you give them three-quarters of a cup of some lumpy old sugar you still have, with dead ants in it? No, you don’t try to cheat people in your day-to-day life. It is not a natural way for people to live, we are social and we help each other. We care about each other, it’s universal. But you know full well that there are fewer cookies than there used to be in the same bag, and that a quarter-pound steak doesn’t weigh a quarter of a pound, because the company is trying to make a profit. This is not normal. People aren’t like that. Economics describes a system where everybody is constantly trying to fuck everybody else over, and we are idiots for accepting its premises as credible.
Prioritizing of the economy is pure ideology that blinds us to other perspectives. Have you ever met someone who was satisfied with their life? I know the answer, and it is no. Satisfaction is not considered to be a possibility, never mind a goal. To reach a point of comfort is just not something we do. Having enough is not something we can imagine, nobody knows what that would be like. Dissatisfaction is the blood that runs in our veins.
When I talk about mischief I am indirectly referring to the fact that it’s ridiculous for ordinary people to worry about “the economy.” We should be taking care of our own lives, seeking satisfaction, playing, indulging our curiosity, loving the people around us and not some ideal taught to us by a TV show that exists so they can attract your attention for the commercials. The economy is supported by norms and guidelines for behavior and there can be actual punishment for contradicting those norms. If they find out.
The norms are encoded in language that uses the term “supposed to.” The term is never used actively, it is absurd to name the person who is doing the supposing. Supposed-to applies to the person who the supposing is about, not the person doing the supposing: you’re supposed to do such-and-such. The assumption is that the supposing is done by everyone, or everyone who matters, or relevant people, or some authorities – it’s definitely not clear. You have permission to do what some generalized group of other people supposes you will do, and you are discouraged from doing what the group does not suppose you will do. I hope the reader sees the tyranny of this kind of concept. It is a mandate for mediocrity.
It seems to me that the sensible thing is to allow yourself some personal indulgence. Take some time in your life to do something you are not supposed to do. I don’t know what you would want to do, but do it. Don’t try to charge for it, don’t establish a public identity around this thing that engages you, don’t seek credit or try to impress people, just do something for the reason that you want to do it. Do it for yourself. You still have to participate in the economy, you’ll need a job, we are given a world where powerful people manipulate the availability of needed resources and we have to live with that, but you don’t have to believe what they are shouting at you through their enormous media bullhorns. There is no profit for corporations or billionaires in sharing the truth with people, or in strengthening individual’s abilities to make independent choices about their own lives. You’re not going to become personally empowered by the TV or the Internet, and you’re not going to get valid knowledge from your friends and neighbors who spend all their time scrolling on their phones and watching the latest series. What is a satisfied person going to buy? A satisfied population is an economic nightmare. That’s why satisfaction is regarded as impossible.
As an aside, we are well aware that politically self-serving individuals and corporations own the media. People see what Elon Musk has done to Twitter. But I have not heard a good discussion of the impact that Jeffrey Epstein had on science. Yes, science. He funded a lot of scientific programs that dominated various fields, he made rock-stars out of science nerds, and guys like that don’t throw their money around for fun. What scientific hypotheses do we currently accept as facts simply because Epstein and others invested in the business of the horse race and manipulated the race result? Don’t tell me that prestige is not taken into account in scientific decision-making, and a billionaire backer can buy a lot of prestige. Look at the Edge Foundation.
You and I can’t do anything about the way things are. The power has been bought and sold and we didn’t get to bid on it. We have to look out for ourselves: mischief.
By mischief I mean that you allow yourself to playfully do things that you’re not supposed to do – nobody is supposing that you are doing this thing. Other people don’t determine your interests, the media don’t tell you what the correct interpretation of the facts is, nobody knows what you want but you. By mischief I mean don’t tell people, don’t join an organization, don’t start a web site, don’t monetize your fucking side-hustle. Just do the thing. It might be something you do with someone else, in fact, it could be a group project, one you do for the pleasure of doing it. I’m not here to say what is true mischief and what isn’t, I don’t care what you call it. I’m suggesting that it is possible to find satisfaction doing something that is completely unrecognized by the economy and by the society that hosts our particular form of malignancy.
I am tempted to suggest examples but no, I won’t go there. Mischief is of course not a defined concept, in fact it is just a misappropriation of a normal word to mean something different from what everybody else thinks it means. Mischief usually means something like “playful troublemaking,” but you have to think of the definition as just part of the campaign against it. Part of the fun of mischief is knowing that you’re doing something that you are not supposed to do.
Besides just doing a thing you like, there is a rare kind of pleasure in knowing that you are doing something because you love it, or are curious about it, or it attracted your attention for some reason, and not because everybody else wants you to do it. There is pleasure in feeling the momentum coming from yourself. You get the pleasure of doing something you love and the second layer of pleasure in knowing you did it your way.
As soon as somebody hears what you’re up to, they’re going to try to destroy it. Maybe they will give you recognition, which will ruin your mischievous project for life, or pay you for something. Maybe they will just label you as a weirdo and word will get around and it will become hard to find friends. Social pressure is subtle and it sneaks in through any crack, so it is best to dam it off from your mischief; maybe by "mischief" I mean "witchcraft," where you go off into the woods sometimes and do your own naked dance where nobody sees you. Your Book of Shadows says to deny everything. You have to do this without alienating everybody, because being a normal human being is fun and worthwhile, and we all need that. Mischief doesn’t mean being an antisocial freak, it just means keeping part of your life for yourself. I mean, I get it if you want to be an antisocial freak, I’m not opposed to that, it’s just not what I am talking about here.
One interesting thing you will find when you practice mischief is that nobody actually cares. They don’t monitor you twenty-four seven to make sure you are always being a team player. When you’re out of sight, you’re out of mind, and that is what we mean by freedom. You can do what you want when nobody’s watching. Other people are too self-absorbed and self-interested to really care what you’re doing, unless it affects them. So the life of mischief involves defining time for yourself when nobody expects anything from you – you can say, sorry, I got a thing I gotta go to that night, and nobody really wants to know any more about it. Absence is powerful – when you are absent, nobody is actually wondering where you are, nobody is telling you what you should do. They’ll see you when you get back. An important skill for the practice of mischief involves learning to be absent. Nobody knows where you are, they just know you’re not here right now, so they don’t have to account for you. Absence is the most powerful force in human life.
I started by saying there’s a reason I talk about the life of mischief. I hope I have given you a clue about it. An economy is a system of interpersonal interactions where each participant is assumed to be trying to maximize their own outcomes. The agreement is that we are all in a state of competition, and it is also assumed that everyone tries to gain as much value for themselves as they can, by maximizing income and minimizing output. In fact, there are powerful, that is, rich, people who need for you and me to believe that, because they can’t make money off a population of people who are satisfied with their lives, and the rich can only exercise and maintain their power by controlling our deprivation schedule.
The economy is there for us, interactions in human society offer us goods and services plus the economy pays wages for labor as part of the exchange of value, and we need to be part of that. But it is a meaningless system, not even amoral but immoral in its quest to beat the competition and to punish those to fail to participate wholeheartedly. The economy is a terrible role model. It provides for us and tempts us with what it can offer but there is no joy in it. So use it, partake of it, participate in the economy, but don’t look there for meaning. Don’t define yourself in economic terms. Do what you have to do and then disappear into your own life. You don’t need approval for everything you do.