What is anomie at the daily level? How does if feel like? Does an academic definition suffice? Or is it better to examine it from a daily, experiential viewpoint? This entry explores the latter.
What is Anomie?
Anomie is a with many connotations and definitions in different social sciences. They center around a lack of social norms or the practical inability to achieve them, resulting in a sense of social alienation and purposelessness. From a layman's view, I guess you could liken it to a proletarian lifestyle: long hours, low pay, forever cut off from the status and prestige of wealth & power. But it's not just the proles who feel this way now - graduates also work on the clock, face increasing competition and with it, the pressure to 'do more for less'. I want to be a clinical psychologist - I want to look back on my career and know that I made a difference to someone - and I know from part-timing in an office that we, as Karl Marx suggested last century, are increasingly reduced to automatons in large social or corporate machineries. I think it's important for me to understand peoples' daily struggles in order to provide what assistance I can to make it that little better.
Why is the Daily Grind Anomic?
Marx said that society's superstructure of norms, values and practices rest upon an economic base insofar as social practices cannot contradict the means of production needed for economic survival. This concept is know as the base-superstructure critique, but such a macro-social perspective hardly addresses the affective symptoms behind anomie. How does it feel to live an anomic life? I would liken it to the Greek Myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was condemned to roll a large rock up a hill in Hades for eternity. After he reached the top each day, it would roll back down and the process was repeated ad infinitum. No one for company, a laborious, never-ending struggle, and ultimately futile. The existential philosopher Albert Camus drew a comparison between Sisyphus and the meaninglessness of life. Camus likens it to the Daily Grind. Camus concluded by saying "one must imagine Sisyphus happy", but Marx would call this a pathetic response and advocate rehauling society through a proletarian revolution. While I don't see the validity of full-on Bolshevism anymore, I do agree that life a la Sisyphus is not an acceptable mode of life.
I first saw Sisyphus' story in the Daily Grind of real life while I worked part-time in an office. Everyone wears a deadened expression facing their computer screens, processing the same papers everyday, and under these circumstances tempers easily flare over trivial things. In the short 2 weeks I could bear to stay there, 5 people resigned. It's not hard to see why: they clock in, they clock out, 5 days a week, most of it spent in a cramped 3-walled computer cubicle, then they go home and do it all over again tomorrow. Sisyphus is not a myth. If I'm not mistaken, these were workers with diplomas. Would a degree guarantee a less deadening work life?
Not to my knowledge. I know of many well-qualified graduates whose work life mirrors the proles'. My father is a CPA-Certified accountant with an MBA, yet he is not spared from the daily grind. Nor is my friend (Maj. Mass. Comm. cum laude, University of Sydney) who formerly worked at Young & Rubicam, the global advertising company, or even my M.D. (National University of Singapore) cousins in Singapore. They liken themselves to hawkers - some days you can sell your services, other days your retail 'outlet' is a ghost town (no offense to the deceased). You meet your colleagues for lunch and the mandatory corporate function, but you hardly have time or energy to meet them outside the office as friends. The daily grind exists for the white-collared as much as it does for the blue-collared. The meaning in work is lost through the anonymous clients that pass trough your doors, the long hours, and the pressure to perform as a professional. Real ncome, too, isn't a certainty with increasingly volatile global economies, labour competitiveness and inflationary pressures. The difference between the white- & blue-collared worker lies in the extent of financial insecurity experienced rather than its presence. Either way, the stressful, confining circumstances and tedium of the Daily Grind tends is fertile ground for sterile anomie.
What Can We Do?
Since anomie involves social alienation and purposelessness, I first asked what social alienation actually meant in realistic terms. What does it feel to be alienated from others? Wherein lies meaning in relationships? If it isn't likely to be found in the office, where we arguably spend most our days, where else can we find it?
Perhaps we can find it in each other. At the Arts Faculty's recommendation, I've been reading the novel "Boat People" by Nam Le. He writes about the lives of different people in different social and economic contexts. The central theme running through each of his short stories is the emotional importance of our relationships to our lives. The rich painter longs to be a part of his estranged daughters life, and the relatively wealthy Columbian assassin finds himself willing to throw it away for love and friendship. It reminded me of Victor Frankl's book "The Search for Meaning" - a set text for sophomore psychology majors at the University of Melbourne - where Frankl narrates his Holocaust experiences in the Theresienstadt Nazi concentration camp. In the midst of intense suffering that approximates the anomie of Sisyphus' story more than any other 20th Century event, the men in Auschwitz find solace in each others' company and the thought of their loved ones waiting for them beyond the barb-wired fences. His wife was later killed. There is no guarantee of life, no certainty that their lovers await outside - yet it was marginally bearable because they had each other. They had the socio-emotional support that arises from being a part of each others' daily struggles - they were friends, brothers, comrades, perhaps even soulmates, except they never married.
Frankl's account suggests that the anomic symptoms of purposelessness & alienation can be made more bearable through social bonds. Again, a Marxist will say that this distracts us from the fact that we can purportedly address the root cause of working-life anomie through revolution, and even the Hippie of the American counter-culture of the '60s and '70s will say that we can live 'outside the system' in communes with barter trade, free sex, drugs and rock-'n-roll. These are the great experimental phases in human history, movements that were short-lived and imploded because they couldn't provide a comfortable level of economic sustenance. It is ironic that Marx's base-superstructure model of society should be refuted by an attempt to abandon the capitalist system he criticised. Even in our daily lives, it is obvious that abandoning the Daily Grind jeopardises our finances, and hence it's around the Daily Grind that we must attempt to forge social bonds that make life bearable.
Please note that the bonds he described were not structural or hierarchical connections between guard and prisoner or, for in our context, employer-employee relations. It may not even be the bond between shallow family members. Instead, Frankl's descriptions indicate that the supportive factors against anomie were affective bonds of friendship. This is where I depart from big theories, names and events.
The Buddy & BFF
Among my male friends of my generation, the buddy is the best friend, the kindred spirit, the one you play soccer with and talk about girls. The BFF - what girls call their "best female friend" - the ladies' equivalent of the buddy, except they go shopping and watch cheesy drama serials rather than soccer. Before the feminists et al kill me, I'm just stereotyping so that we have an idea of the sort of friendship I'm talking about. These are the friends who share their joys and sorrows with you, the ones who you can count on at the end of the day.
Sometimes, just talking about your troubles can be cathartic. The buddy who's there when you get passed over for a promotion, the BFF who can empathise with a break-up, the one who swings an arm around your shoulder or gives you a pat on the back. Even in good times, friends make things better: someone to buy you dinner when you graduate, when you win a medal, before you fly overseas for studies - a special someone for the special moments in life - I believe that these are the moments that gives life its special meaning. When someone lets you know that they're proud of you, that you're special, that they care and are happy that you're in their life, I think these are the things that conventional social values gloss over.
Perhaps it's part of the superstructure that emphasises the virtue of wealth. Travie McCoy's song "I wanna be a billionaire (so fricking bad)" will be familiar to my peers. I always believed that the zeitgeist of an epoch is manifested in popular culture, and this Platinum hit in multiple countries hints that the age-old worship of excess wealth is still alive. Do we need that much wealth for a comfortable lifestyle? Do we need that much wealth for a contented life? I don't think so. I think contentment lies in the timeless inspiration that transcends space, place and culture: love.
My cycling coach shares a two-room apartment with his partner. He teaches English, she's a psychological counsellor. I thought their flat was almost squalid, until I saw how they talked to each other and smiled. The room was brightened by their synergy and obvious affection. It didn't matter that he was from New Zealand and she, from Singapore. Before she came home, my aged coach was showing me their pictures and their plush-toy 'children' like a young boy in love. He behaved a lot like I did during my first relationship. They found time for each other, to go on hikes and scuba dive, to cook dinner and travel overseas. They had a contentment that I envied... and that's when I realised that beyond a comfortable income, affective bonds are really all you need for a happy, contented life.
As Train's US Billboard no. 1 song "If It's Love" puts it:
If it's love
And we're two birds of a feather
Then the rest is just whatever
A psychologist can't prescribe love. I can't find friends for patients, and whatever compassion I extend is limited to the clinic's professional ethos. I cannot be a patient's friend... but perhaps I may use my knowledge to point them in the right direction.
Maybe I entertain these romantic notions of friends and lovers because I'm still young at 21. Maybe I say these because life has not jaded my spirits and a hollow where my heart still beats. Maybe it's because I've realised the absurdity of life after 2 suicide attempts & daily anti-depressants worse than Prozac. But dare I say that it's because I find inspiration in the possibilities & adventures of friendship & romance.
If Sisyphus was still happily married
If he found a friend in Prometheus just as Frankl found his
Then maybe, just maybe, one could imagine Sisyphus happy.
N.B. I find it fitting to mention:
My buddies Hon Ding, Junwei & Eric & Eunice Teo, the truest friends there ever were
And to Ng Xue Wen, my Precious Dear, my salvation, and inspiration.
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