Mark Osborne's MORE

By sheer coincidence , I just finished a watching an Oscar nominated short film called MORE which exactly parallels Notch's situation. It's saddening and quite moving. ▶ this video I think both Notch's feelings of isolation and ennui and the resentment of those around him are both valid. One doesn't preclude the other , in fact they feed into each other.

Everywhere Americans look they're pressured to consume more, achieve more, live beyond their means, go into debt (student loans, car loans, home mortgages), and have a family on top of it all while saving for some fabled retirement and college tuition for the kids. If you unplug and simplify your life, don't bother with pursuing a family, you'll see how disincentivized to be busy you are and how absurdly everyone else appears to be living. But if you pursue all the things your competitors are pursuing, you'll find yourself having to acquire similar levels of resources. There's not enough to go around for _everyone_ to have that amount of excess, hence it must be fought over. Basically what you have is a non-violent (most of the time) resource competition determining who gets how much of what in what order, where the participants aren't even pursuing a specific quantity - they're just after as much as possible while they're still able, MORE. edit: After writing the above, I remembered this short video from the 90s, semi-related. [1] [1] ▶ this video

The entire presentation, and the look of the glasses reminds me of the quite dystopian short Movie 'More': ▶ this video