Reminder and warning: this blog has become my personal sounding board. BoMA is on hold, but writing is an artform I practice regularly, so here it is. My art. It is unfiltered and may not be appropriate for children.
I love Dropout Comedy, and I recently gave Dimension 20 a shot. I’ve never played D&D, but I’ve always wanted to try. It’s fun to learn a bit about how the game is played, and, of course, the Dropout cast provides plenty of laughs.
This season started with a description from Brennan Lee Mulligan about the post-apocalyptic world the imagined adventurers inhabit, and he described what led to the downfall of the previous civilization:
Number go up.
And I’ve been a little extra depressed thinking about it, because, like a lot of good comedy, this three-word phrase is a perfect distillation of a phenomenon we frequently encounter and rarely examine. I just ran into a signature collector outside of this Starbucks. He’s gathering signatures to put the redistricting proposal on the ballot. I immediately asked him where he was from, because it’s well-known around Salt Lake City that some bad actors have hired non-Utahans to gather signatures for this proposal that doesn’t serve us.
It was a short conversation, and the guy said, “I’m just doing a job.” I said, “I feel you. Good luck.”
He can’t let his number go down. Number go down, life get scary. He’s just here keeping number up. Good for him. Find a job, work that job, keep number up.
As a society, we are so far removed from struggling for survival that now we survive by doing things that aren’t necessary for survival. We gather signatures from strangers in another state – he was from Missouri, by the way. But capitalism never quits. Once survival is technically handled, the system doesn’t stop – it just keeps insisting on more proof that you’re winning. Number, number, number, number. Number must not go down.
Take neighbor recommendations to neighbors via a new marketing channel? Number go up.
Hire a contractor and don’t pay after the work is done? Number go up.
Cut costs. Optimize. Scale. Number go up.
Number doesn’t care what you did to make it rise. It doesn’t know whether you helped anyone or hurt them. It just reflects movement. Humans are the ones who attach meaning after the fact.
And because number go up usually comes with better toys, more comfort, and a little insulation from fear, we learn to care about it. Even when we don’t want to or even pretend not to.
That’s the trap: the system rewards those who are best at making number go up, not those who are best at doing good. Winners stand on the podium because they climbed well, and if you’re going to climb, you have to step on something. Number doesn’t care where your footfalls landed.
You can call it capitalism. You can call it incentives. You can call it reality. But once you see it clearly, it’s hard not to feel the quiet depression of a day spent serving a metric that doesn’t give a fuck, while knowing you’re forced to care anyway.