Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/#9a417fe513f58988c3b5b1e84cfc57397194a79b 2016-07-01T13:50:01Z Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/ ranprieur@gmail.com July 1. http://ranprieur.com/#e24021ecbf3286a23b449c89d0ed41650a74fed0 2016-07-01T13:50:01Z July 1. Two self-critiques on this week's subject. First, like a lot of public intellectuals, I've been framing this in terms of myth vs reality, as if the problem is that suddenly too many people are behaving mythically. But as soon as Leigh Ann said it I knew it was true: myth is the human default. To challenge ones own mythic instincts with careful observation and rational thinking is a learned skill, and one that not many people have learned in this time or any other time. So the real question is not how society veered from reality into myth, but how our cultural myths have veered from creative to destructive.

Second, I mentioned the lack of evidence that Brexit or Trump will make people's lives better -- but how do we even define that? The best place to start would be subjective happiness, but it's surprisingly hard to find data. I went on Google looking for a ranking of countries based purely on asking people how happy they are, and instead I found stuff like the World Happiness Report, which muddles up subjective happiness with numbers like GDP per capita. That seems like circular logic from people who have already decided that quality of life goes hand in hand with economic development. I mean, I still don't see evidence that Brexit will increase subjective happiness, but we shouldn't assume it will decrease happiness just because it crashes the economy.

On exactly these subjects, a reddit comment argues that zombie fiction reflects a societal death wish:

In many ways the return to a simpler life about survival in a hostile environment, is a fantasy about how to remedy alienation. The feeling of hating one's job and doing it only for the money has never been as prevalent as it is now. Even fifty years ago when many jobs appeared worse, people took a certain pride in them. Today most workers feel like their job is absolutely pointless. That's what they would like to overcome, but they don't know how, so the outlet is an apocalyptic fantasy promising the return to human nature. Imagine living as an animal, or in an ancient tribe instead, as a very natural life where issues like depression don't come up the way they do in our developed way of life.

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