The Joyless Pantomime of Optimizing Ennui

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The joyless pantomime of optimizing our alienation is not a substitute for authentic fulfillment.

We all know that geopolitics, the stock market, AI, the unemployment rate and all the rest of what’s presented as “explaining” everything is “important,” but all these analytic abstractions ignore what we actually experience. This divide between what we’re told we should be experiencing and what we are actually experiencing is what I call the politics of experience, a term coined by R.D. Laing in the 1960s.

The basic idea is that there’s a widening gulf between what we actually experience and what we’re told we should be experiencing, and this disconnect is inescapably deranging. Since the entire realm we inhabit is telling us everything’s great and the sky’s the limit, we pantomime this same claim as if we’re actually experiencing authentic joy because everyone else seems to believe it.

If we confess that we don’t feel everything’s great and what we actually feel is a complete disconnect from everything we’re supposed to be feeling, then we risk an internal and social divide that threatens our entire status quo: if we recognize it’s all a joyless pantomime, then what?

But everyone else doesn’t actually believe it, either; they’re just going through the motions in the hope that the joyless pantomime will keep everything they’re afraid of losing glued together. But if we’ve substituted an optimized-for-optimization pantomime for authentic experience, then we’ve already lost ourselves and our ability to discern the hollowness of the civilizational psychosis that claims a life of ennui and alienation is “living our best lives.”

The gulf between what we’re told is joyful and wondrously promising and our lived experience is now so wide that the cracks are showing. Consider these excerpts from recent articles:

The Strange Feeling So Many Adults Can’t Explain: The quiet epidemic not enough people are talking about. (medium.com)

Now I hear the same sentence from people all the time. “Nothing is wrong, I just don’t really get excited about anything anymore.”

They’re not saying they’re depressed. They’re still working. Paying bills. Taking care of their kids. Walking the dog. Going to the gym. Life keeps moving. But the excitement isn’t the same. That spark that used to make ordinary things feel meaningful doesn’t seem to show up anymore.

What’s strange is how many people seem to be feeling it at the exact same time. Spend a few minutes on TikTok, Reddit, or Instagram, and you’ll find thousands of comments from people describing the exact same experience. Different ages. Different careers. Different backgrounds. But they’re all asking a similar question. “When did I stop looking forward to life?”

Why does everything feel so joyless? Welcome to the age of decadence without pleasure: Decadence in our era comes in technologically mediated forms, emptied of desire and obsessed with self-optimization. (theguardian.com)

AI marks a triumph of artifice more sweeping than the old decadents could have imagined. Yet far from bolstering our capacity for perceptual intensity, AI presents new threats to both. Its productions are eerily hollow, with no felt experience, embodiment or sensation behind them. AI is the pleasureless decadence machine.

“There is no pleasure or pain for an AI, no skin in the game,” the philosopher Carissa Veliz writes in her recent book Prophecy. As a result, an AI “cannot care, and therefore cannot value.” Without some felt relation to pleasure and pain, judgments of value and taste become abstract and bloodless.

Art, sex, nature: why is everything sold to us as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself? How a reductive worldview is stripping meaning from our most valued activities. (theguardian.com)

I have seen countless other examples of all the things that are good in life being promoted not for their own sake but for the material benefits they bring. This instrumentalization has become normalized so insidiously that we don’t even notice that it is odd, let alone wrong. Nor do we seem to be aware of quite how pervasive it is. Yet its effects are profound, leading us to lose sight again and again of what is truly of value in life.

Our autonomous agency has increasingly been expressed through our status as consumers. Freedom is above all the choice of how to spend our money, with the promise that everything we need can be obtained in exchange for cash. The consumer mindset has affected how we relate to everything, not just the things we buy.

The result is that the world has become essentially transactional, meaning that everything is an instrument for getting something else. It is no coincidence that dating apps give the impression that we are shopping for partners because we approach even relationships with the consumer framing.

Combine an inflated belief in personal autonomy, a transactional consumer mentality and a reductionist attitude to how things work, and it is inevitable that we treat the world as a collection of resources we can plunder to promote our own well-being. The tragedy is that when we do so, we neglect rather than serve our deepest needs.

The cornucopian fantasy of AI generating super-abundance is the joyless pantomime taken to the highest level of civilizational psychosis. The more we strive to optimize ourselves and everything around us, the more we rely on metrics as guides to “living our best lives,” the more we strive to work harder and work smarter in the hopes that more stuff and more transactions will finally become fulfilling, the farther we drift from ourselves and our own experience.

The joyless pantomime of optimizing our alienation is not a substitute for authentic fulfillment. The pantomime–going through the motions of finding fake fulfillment in ultra-processed products, experiences and optimizations–is not just joyless, it drains our life force, leaving us in a depleted state of ennui, burned out and wondering why we don’t feel the fulfillment we’re supposed to be feeling in our hyper-optimized existence.

We don’t need therapy and supplements, we need out.

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Source: http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2026/08/the-joyless-pantomime-of-optimizing.html