What the hell is wrong with everyone? We’re surrounded by incivility, incompetence masquerading as caution, and a complete lack of ambition. It’s a pandemic of shittiness which has taken hold of the world and until we figure out what’s causing or contributing to it, we can’t take any steps to turn back the tide of awful offal.
Organizations and agencies we rely on to keep us safe and treat us when we’re unwell are failing in those basic tasks. When two young people on a university campus die because at least 4 different responders who should have known better let them down, those people and their employers should be apologizing, investigating and vowing to do better but instead they lie about what happened, despite there being any number of recordings of the chain of events, and point fingers at each other. Whatever happened to common decency?
Training programs which impart job-critical skills are bypassed as too hard and too expensive in favour of tick the box online programs which consistently fail to achieve the objectives. Getting the paper that says you have completed the “training” has become more important than actually attaining the skills. Whatever happened to pride in your work, or even fulfilling your mandate?
Relying on AI to write your university essays, your job applications and even your address to the jury has become so commonplace that the penalties for this kind of cheating simply can’t keep up. Whatever happened to integrity?
And don’t get me started on customer service. The notion that the customer is always right was never all that helpful as an organizational objective, but at least it was a mindset that put the customer first. Judging by a random and entirely unscientific survey of customer service standards today we see a lack of helpfulness, attitudes which were once the sole domain of high-end French restaurants (we’re doing you a favour allowing you to spend loads of dough here), and an abject lack of knowledge about the products and services on offer.
Here at home, where the ferries on my route are routinely late by up to 90 minutes and sometimes simply cancelled due to outrageous delays, the shitty reason most often given is that “crews are working to load as many vehicles as possible” to which I ask, isn’t that your actual job? Research tells us that giving a reason, even a stupid one, mollifies people but when it happens over and over we remain unmollified. To be fair, my late colleague David McPhillips would turn down invitations to dance by sharing the sad news that he had a bone in his leg. It seemed to do the trick but then again, where there’s dancing there’s likely to be drinking and a vaguely suppressed sense of logical scrutiny. Well played, sir, well played.
Even in prisons, where we don’t expect the milk of human kindness to be overflowing, there’s been a surge in shittiness, manifesting as violence.
And then there’s the appalling behaviour of people online, rabidly attacking, just because they can. This has been an issue for many years, predating the pandemic of shittiness I describe, but it has exploded. There was a day when someone announcing the opening of a new business received congratulatory posts and well wishes and while there are those still, there are far too many sarcastic comments predicting failure and questioning motives. Once there were three good fairies for each evil one but the tide has turned and the numbers have shifted.
Go to 26:35 in this Dr. Rangan Chatterjee podcast for more on how social media “communication” continues to dehumanize us. “The higher the follower count the more we think it’s okay to dehumanize them; it’s quite mad, isn’t it?”
Trump, Ukraine, Gaza, the economic, political and psychological crises; are they causes or simply symptoms of some underlying rot?
Perhaps there is a solid explanation for all this, and I’ve just missed it while doom-scrolling.
There are theories, sure, plenty of theories and I really appreciate and support many of them, so far as they go. One explanation goes something like this: we Earth loving, socially conscious parents have raised our children to care about everything and everyone, so much so that they’ve thrown up their hands and now refuse to care about anything because it’s just too overwhelming.
Another interpretation says that we are suffering from collective, community trauma for reasons I certainly don’t need to spell out. At a recent presentation on trauma by Dr. Rahul Gupta, he covered the different types of trauma and its antecedents and also commented that we can’t care about others when we don’t feel safe, when our collective anxiety triggers our fight, flight, freeze or fawn responses. What resonated particularly was that a lack of power over our circumstances triggers this feeling of danger and we either shrink, lash out, or sell ourselves out by agreeing and appeasing, all responses which do us some level of harm. I’d be hard pressed to find anyone who truly believes they have power over all the circumstances of their life. If that’s you, let’s talk immediately!
Many people blame AI, smart phones and technology in general and there’s a huge debate around the loss of childhood in an era of online “connection”. I draw your attention to the work of
, a social psychologist who studies morality, and is a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business.His Substack is a fulsome collection of essays around this very topic, on which, admittedly, I barely scratch the surface.
I also turn your attention to another of my favourites,
who isn’t writing specifically on the epidemic of shittiness, but does perambulate around the periphery. Check out this recent post.
Look, every generation has its challenges and existential crises. Do you remember being drilled on hiding under your school desk in case they dropped “the big one”? Thinking the world was going to end because Dolly, the cloned sheep, would become the poster child of the next generation? Desperately hoping BC Telephone Co. would upgrade the local system so you wouldn’t have to wait for the neighbours to GET OFF THE PARTY LINE so you could call your friends?
Good times. Good times.