Use this magic bullet to shoot yourself in the foot

Everyone I know has given up. That’s how it feels, at least. There’s a creeping sense that the jig is up, the fix is in, and the party’s over. The Earth is burning, democracies are backsliding, AI is advancing, cities are crumbling—somehow everything sucks and it’s more expensive than it was last year. It’s the worst kind of armageddon, the kind that doesn’t even lower the rent. We had the chance to prevent or solve these problems, the thinking goes, but we missed it. Now we’re past the point of no return. The world’s gonna end in fascists and ashes, and the only people still smiling are the ones trying to sell you something. It feels like we’re living through the Book of Revelation, but instead of the Seven Seals and the apocalyptic trumpeters, we have New York Times push notifications. On the one hand, it’s totally understandable that these crises would make us want to curl up and die. If the world was withering for lack of hot takes, I’d assemble a daredevil crew and we’d be there in an instant. But if history is heading more in the warlords ‘n’ water wars direction, I’m out. On other hand, this reaction is totally bonkers. If our backs are against the wall, shouldn’t we put up our dukes? For people supposedly facing the breakdown of our society, our response is less fight-or-flight and more freeze-and-unease, frown-and-lie-down, and despair-and-stay-there. Maybe humanity has finally met its match, but even though people talk like that’s the case, the way they act is weirdly...normal. Every conversation has a dead-man-walking flavor to it, and yet the dead men keep on walking. “Yeah, so everything’s doomed and we’re all gonna die. Anyway, talk to ya later, I gotta put the lasagna in the oven.” If things are just about to go kaput, why is everyone still working 60 hours a week? Something strange is going on here, and I’d like to offer an explanation in two parts: a wide circle, and a bullet with a foot in it. Forty years ago, the philosopher Peter Singer argued in The Expanding Circle that humans have, over the course of millennia, decided to care about a broader and broader swath of the living world. Originally, we only gave moral consideration to our immediate family, then we extended it our tribe, then the nation, and now we are kind-of sort-of extending it to the whole globe and to non-human animals as well.1 I think Singer was right, and I’d add three things to his analysis. First, the trend has only continued since the ‘80s—for instance, some people are now worried about whether shrimp are having a good time. Second, while the circle has gotten wider, it has also, paradoxically, gotten closer. It’s one thing to “care” about distant strangers when you can only read about them in a newspaper; now we can all witness the suffering of anyone in the world through a glass portal we carry in our pockets. And third, when you stare into that portal, the portal stares back. Social media has made everyone into z-list public figures, and now we all have an audience watching us to make sure that we’re sufficiently concerned about the right things. Expanding the circle was, in my opinion, a good move. But it comes with a problem: if we’re supposed to care about everyone and everything...that’s kind of a lot of caring, isn’t it? If I have to feel like a mass shooting in Tallahassee, a factory farm in Texas, and a genocide in Turkmenistan are all, morally speaking, happening in my backyard, my poor little moral circuits, which evolved to care about like 20 people, are gonna blow. When there’s too much to care about, what’s a good-hearted person to do? I think many of us have unconsciously figured out how to escape this conundrum: we simply shoot ourselves in the foot. Humans are pretty savvy at social interaction, even though we get so anxious about it. (Maybe we’re good because we’re freaking out all the time.) Evolution and experience have endowed us with a deep bench of interpersonal maneuvers, some of which are so intuitive to us that we don’t even realize we’re deploying them. For example, sometimes life puts us in lose-lose situations where it’s embarrassing to try and fail, but it’s also embarrassing not to try at all. It sucks to study for a math exam and still flunk it, but it’s foolish not to study in the first place. When you’re stuck in a conundrum like that, how do you get out? Well, one canny solution is to subtly manipulate the situation so that failure is inevitable. That way, no one can blame you for failing, and no one can blame you for not trying. Psychologists call this self-handicapping, and as far as impression management strategies go, you gotta admit this one is pretty exquisite. Here’s what self-handicapping looks like in the wild. I had a friend in high school who “forgot” to apply to college our senior year. Literally, May came around and we were like “Nate, did you get in anywhere?” and he was like “Oh shoot that happened already?” Nate was a smart kid but a bad student, so it’s possible he actually did forget, but some of us suspected that the entire application season had conveniently slipped his mind so he wouldn’t have to face the shame of being rejected. We could never prove it, though, and that’s exactly why self-handicapping is such a clever tactic. Of course, Nate’s self-handicapping came at a cost. No one can ding him for being stupid, but we can all ding him for being irresponsible. The ideal form of self-handicapping, then, is one that obscures the role of the self entirely.2 In fact, it works best when even you don’t realize that you’re doing it. Nate’s months-long brain fart is more believable if he believes it himself. If you’re gonna shoot yourself in the foot, best to do it while sleepwalking, so you can wake up and be like “A bullet!! In my foot!! And it got there through no fault of my own!!” Which is to say: many of the people who are engaging in self-handicapping would earnestly deny the allegation. You can see how self-handicapping is a handy response to a world that demands more care from us than we can give. If all the world’s problems are fait accompli, well, that’s sad, but it ain’t on me. I don’t want it to be that way, of course, but it is, which means my only obligation is to bravely bear witness to the end of it all. That’s why it’s actually very important to maintain the idea—even subconsciously—that democracy is unsalvageable, AI is unstoppable, the Middle East is intractable, the climate apocalypse is (literally) baked in, and so on. For the aspiring self-handicapper, the best causes are lost causes. The problem with shooting yourself in the foot is that now you have a bullet in your foot. A self-handicap can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more we believe our situation is hopeless, the more hopeless it becomes. We’re never gonna right the things we write off. Succumbing to despair might offer you a reputational reprieve in the short term, but avoiding the blame doesn’t mean you can avoid the consequences. When rising sea levels, secret police, or AI-powered killer drones come for you, they won’t ask whether you have a doctor’s note excusing you from the greatest struggles of your generation. In my experience, this is an unpopular argument. To some people, suggesting that our problems are solvable means denying that our problems are serious. (But of course our problems are serious, that’s why we want to solve them.) Or they’re offended by the implication that they have any responsibility to fix the things they didn’t break, as if a sinking ship only takes you down with it if you’re the person who punched a hole in the hull. Or they’re so certain that our fate is sealed that they scoff at anyone who believes otherwise. Most of all, though, I think people want everybody else to admit that life is really hard, and they’re being courageous just for showing up every day. As Kurt Vonnegut said: What is it the slightly older people want from the slightly younger people? They want credit for…