Gen Z and eco-existentialism: A cigarette at the end of the world
“Where ignorance is bliss, tis folly to be wise.” – Thomas Grey
Gen Z live inside of an hourglass. The sand leaks steadily from underneath our feet at an imperceptible rate so that we don’t realise the ground is slipping away until we are plummeting toward the bottleneck. The 21st century has been characterised by the impending, seemingly unstoppable doom of climate change and ecosystem collapse. There is a rising epidemic amongst young people of feelings of anxiety and dread towards a future made uncertain by global warming. This sensation, the drop in the pit of our stomachs from a fall that doesn’t seem to be ending, has caused mixed reactions amongst Gen Z. While those who use sustainability as an antidote to their anxiety are praised, others who appear to act in complete denial of climate change are frequently vilified. Young people who smoke cigarettes and partake in fast fashion appear to show blatant disregard for the impact of their actions on the climate.
Unethical behaviours amongst young people are often attributed to delinquency and delayed cognitive development. While, in some cases, this may be true, the impact of climate change on moral decision-making in today’s youth is often overlooked. Gen Z hold the heavy responsibility of reversing the catastrophic impacts of climate change. As such, partaking in activities that cause both physical and environmental damage may stem from an attitude of wilful ignorance that allows young people to feel momentary freedom from this burden. With a reputation as one of the most climate-conscious generations,
Gen Z is often held to high moral standards regarding social and environmental issues. These standards make very little allowance for complex reactions to climate change that may appear to older generations as apathy. Subsequently, young people are owed a greater deal of compassion and understanding from older generations for their reactions to this unimaginable catastrophe.
Young people of the 21st century appear to be both driving and abating the effects of climate change. Some of the world’s most passionate and radical anti-climate change organisations have been spearheaded by Gen Z – reflecting their climate-consciousness. Yet, paradoxically, young people are the biggest users of disposable vapes and are frequent patrons of fast fashion giants. It’s an easy conclusion to draw that these behaviours (in a time of rampant climate change) seem to reflect opposing ideologies at best and a lack of general empathy at worst. In an article for the online publication Refinery29, ‘Gen Z & the fast fashion paradox’, Fedora Abu describes young people as “environmentally engaged yet seduced by what’s new and ‘now’”.
This attitude represents an oversimplification of the mental and ethical impacts of climate change on young people. Abu depicts Gen Z as a generation whose ethical and moral beliefs are easily corrupted by consumerism-driven desire. Many adults are quick to overlook the extreme mental load felt by Gen Z toward climate change and the emotional maturity that lends itself to this responsibility. Amongst young people, there has been a notable rise in feelings of eco-anxiety – described by the American Psychological Society as a “chronic fear of environmental doom”. Climate-related mental health issues manifest themselves through trauma, shock, substance abuse and depression.
In an online article published by the University of Melbourne about the rise of climate anxiety amongst young people, recommendations to relieve negative emotions include partaking in sustainable consumption (recycling, picking up rubbish etc.) and becoming involved in environmental campaigns. While there is no doubt that sustainable consumption and activism are positive, they may not adequately alleviate the anxiety felt by some young people. Those who structure their lives around sustainability and those who indulge in unsustainable practices may seem like opposing forces; they are, in fact, two sides of the same highly anxious, existential coin – both equally valid reactions to a sense of disillusionment with 21st-century adulthood.
Young people adopted their expectations of adulthood from the media they consumed as children. However, within a rapidly changing world, many feel a sense of disconnect with an experience of adulthood characterised by climate anxiety. Essentially, there’s a resounding sense that we haven’t gotten what was promised. As a child, my mother and I spent our bonding time in front of the TV – together she shared with me the television shows and movies that characterised her childhood and early adulthood. Before I was old enough to recognise it, the formulaic American sitcoms of the 90s and grand, romantic flicks of the 80s (often accompanied by a soundtrack of synth-heavy ballads) had begun to construct my worldview.
Watched in retrospect and with the use of a fully developed brain, however, one aspect is glaringly missing from the portrayal of adulthood presented by the media that raised us – the omnipresent threat of climate change. While only linear time is to blame for the fact that media from the past can’t represent our current reality, there is a sense of cognitive dissonance amongst young people between the future we were raised to expect, and the way adulthood has unfolded before us. For young people, the rampant, mindless consumerism of the 80’s and 90’s appears like a neon-lit mirage. The increased uptake of sustainable practices by large corporations is a movement of the 21st century. As such, many young people have rarely made a purchase without considering the environment.
For older generations, sustainability may provide feelings of empowerment and agency against the overwhelming monolith of climate change. However, sustainable living requires a significant amount of intentional thought against habitual, unsustainable habits built over generations. Within the domestic space, in particular, adopting sustainable approaches such as ‘zero waste’ living requires a significant mental load – the often invisible responsibilities of management and organisation. Whilst young people are rarely the organisers of large households, I believe a similar burden is felt towards sustainable consumerism.
Sustainable consumerism is often denoted as ‘morally good’. Thus, any action or purchase that results in waste or promotes unsustainable production carries negative moral connotations.
Climate-based moral decision-making is largely all that young people have known. In some form, choosing not to consider the planet in every choice can provide young people with a prized commodity – freedom from pressure to act with morality.
For young people, living in wilful ignorance of climate change and damaging the planet (and their bodies) in the process is a form of catharsis and escapism. Drinking from plastic water bottles, smoking chemical-filled cigarettes and purchasing clothes mass-produced in sweatshops allows Gen Z to experience a pantomime of the careless, invincible youth that was promised.
Viewed through a binary moral lens, older generations are quick to criticise young people as careless and apathetic. In reality, there’s an unshakable sense of dread amongst young people that a natural disaster will take our lives by the time we reach our parents’ age. In Thomas Grey’s poem ‘Ode on a distant prospect of Eton college’, he states “Where ignorance is bliss, tis folly to be wise”. In essence, if knowing something harmed you, would you be better off not knowing at all? If there’s one thing that Gen Z know, it’s that there is unavoidable harm in their future. If that is the case, and there’s nothing that can be done, may as well have a cigarette.
‘Gen Z and eco-existentialism: A cigarette at the end of the world‘ by Layla Zak-Volpato is one of the Highly Commended essays in our Young Writers’ Competition. Find out more about the competition here.
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BY Layla Zak-Volpato
Layla is a 22-year-old writer and poet living and working in and around Eora/Sydney. With an educational background in ecology and wildlife conservation, her work focuses heavily on the ethical and moral dilemmas of the anthropocene. Through a creative lens, Layla examines the intersections between gender, identity, philosophy and environmental issues. She aspires to use these themes as the backbone for a career as a scientific communicator who utilises both creative and informative literary forms.
Why sometimes the right thing to do is nothing at all
How a 1990s science-fiction show reminds us that just because we can do something, it doesn’t always mean we should.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard commands the USS Enterprise-D, a 600-metre-long starship that runs on antimatter, giving it virtually unlimited energy, and wielding weapons of devastating power.
In its journeys across the stars, depicted in Star Trek: The Next Generation, the crew of the Enterprise-D is often forced to draw on all its resources to overcome tremendous challenges. But that’s not what the show is really about.
If there’s one theme that pervades this iteration of Star Trek, it’s not how Picard and his crew use their prodigious power to get their way, it’s how their actions are more often defined by what they choose not to do. Countless times across the 176 episodes of the show, they’re faced with an opportunity to exert their power in a way that benefits them or their allies, but they choose to forgo that opportunity for principled reasons. Star Trek: The Next Generation is a rare and vivid depiction of the principle of ethical restraint.
Consider the episode, ‘Measure of a Man’, which sees Picard defy his superiors’ order to dismantle his unique – and uniquely powerful – android second officer, Data. Picard argues that Data deserves full personhood, despite his being a machine. This is even though dismantling Data could lead to the production of countless more androids, dramatically amplifying the power of the Federation.
One of the paradigmatic features of The Next Generation is its principle called the Prime Directive, which forbids the Federation from interfering with the cultural development of other planets. While the Prime Directive is often used as a plot device to introduce complications and moral quandaries – and is frequently bent or broken – its very existence speaks to the importance of ethical restraint. Instead of assuming the Federation’s wisdom and technology are fit for all, or using its influence to curry favour or extract resources from other worlds, it refuses to be the arbiter of what is right across the galaxy.
This is an even deeper form of ethical restraint that speaks to the liberalism of Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek’s creator. The Federation not only guides its hand according to its own principles, but it also refuses to impose its principles on other societies, sometimes holding back from doing what it thinks is right out of respect for difference.
The 1990s was another world
There’s a reason that restraint emerged as a theme of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was the product of 1990s America, which turned out to be a unique moment in that country’s history. The United States was a nation at the zenith of its power in a world that was newly unipolar since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
It was an optimistic time, one that looked forward to an increasingly interconnected globalised world, where cultures could intermix in the “global village,” with its peace guarded by a benevolent superpower and its liberal vision. At least, that was the narrative cultivated within the US.
In a time where the US was unchallenged, moral imagination turned to what limits it ought to impose on itself. And Star Trek did what science fiction does best: it explored the moral themes of the day by putting them to the test in the fantasy of the future.
Today’s world is different. It’s now multipolar, with the rise of China and belligerence of Russia coinciding with the erosion of America’s power, political integrity and moral authority. The global outlook is more pessimistic, with the shadow of climate change and the persistence of inequality causing many to give up hope for a better future. Meanwhile, globalisation and liberalism have retreated in the face of parochialism and authoritarianism.
When we see the future as bleak and feel surrounded by threats, ethical restraint seems like a luxury we cannot afford. Instead, the moral question becomes about how far we can go in order to guard what is precious to us and to keep our heads above literally rising waters.
The power not to act
Yet ethical restraint remains an important virtue. It’s time for us to bring it back into our ethical vocabulary.
For a start, we can change the narrative that frames how we see the world. Sure, the world is not as it was in the 1990s, but it’s not as bleak as many of us might feel. We can be prone to focusing on the negatives and filling uncertainties with our greatest fears. But that can distort our sense of reality. Instead, we should focus on those domains where we actually have power, as do many people living in wealthy developed countries like Australia.
And we should use our power to help lift others out of despair, so they’re not in a position where ethical restraint is too expensive a luxury. Material and social wealth ultimately make ethics more affordable.
Just as importantly, restraint needs to become part of the vocabulary of those in positions of power, whether that be in business, community or politics.
Leaders need to implicitly understand the crucial distinction between ought and can: just because they can do something, it doesn’t mean they should.
This is not just a matter of greater regulation. For a start, laws are written by those in power, so they need to exercise restraint in their creation. Secondly, regulation often sets a minimum floor of acceptable behaviour rather than setting bar for what the community really deserves. It also requires ethical literacy and conviction to act responsibly within the bounds of what is legally permitted, not just a tick from a compliance team.
If you have power, whether you lead a starship, a business or a nation, then the greater the power you wield, the greater the responsibility to have to wield it ethically, and sometimes that means choosing not to wield it at all.
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BY Dr Tim Dean
Dr Tim Dean is Philosopher in Residence at The Ethics Centre and author of How We Became Human: And Why We Need to Change.
Political promises and the problem of ‘dirty hands’
The decision by the Albanese Government to amend the form of the ‘Stage Three Tax Cuts’ – in breach of a much-repeated election promise – has not only unleashed the predictable storm of criticism from the Federal Opposition. More seriously, it has once again raised the question of integrity in politics. Yet, this is a rare case where a broken promise is in the public interest.
The making and breaking of political promises have a special significance in democracies like Australia. Governments derive their legitimacy from the consent of the governed – and consent is meaningless if it is the product of misleading or deceptive information. That is why politicians who deliberately lie in order to secure power should be denied office. It is also why prospective governments should be extremely cautious when making risky promises.
Yet, to argue that ‘keeping promises’ is an essential aspect of building and maintaining trust and legitimacy does not entail that a promise must be kept under any and every circumstance. There may be times when it is literally impossible to keep one’s word – for example, when a government commits to build a facility in a specific location that is later destroyed in a flood. And then there are circumstances where the context is so fundamentally altered as to make the keeping of a promise an act of folly or worse, irresponsibility. President Zelensky is bound to have made many promises to the people of Ukraine prior to the Russian invasion – at least some of which it would be irresponsible to keep in the middle of a war that threatens the very existence of the State.
Some people – notably those who adopt consequentialist forms of ethical reasoning – will argue that a promise should always be broken if, by doing so, a superior outcome is achieved. Others – notably those who place a higher value on acting in conformance with duty (irrespective of the consequences) – will argue that promises should never be broken. I am not inclined to line up with the ‘purists’ on either side. Instead, I prefer an approach in there is acceptance – across the political spectrum – that:
- There is a clear presumption in favour of keeping promises.
- Promises may be broken, but with extreme reluctance, when genuinely in the public interest to do so. That is the breach cannot be justified because it advances the private political interests of an individual or party.
- Any breach must be only to the extent necessary to realise the public interest – and no more.
- Those who break a promise should publicly acknowledge that to do so is wrong and that they are responsible for this choice. That is, they should not seek to deny or lessen the ethical significance of their choice.
Let’s consider how these criteria might be applied in the case of the ‘Stage Three Tax Cuts’.
The key question concerns whether or not it is demonstrably in the public interest to amend the legislated package as it stands. This question cannot be answered by looking at the economic and social implications alone. There is a real risk that trust in government will be eroded – even amongst those who benefit from the changes. And that further erosion in the ‘ethical infrastructure’ of the nation harms us all – not least because of its own tangible economic effects. So, that fact must be weighed in the balance when evaluating the public interest. However, Australia’s ethical infrastructure is also weakened by widening inequality – and by a growing sense of desperation amongst those who feel that their struggles are as much a product of unfairness as they are of forces beyond anyone’s control.
We should never forget that the current cost of living crisis is a form of ethical failure. It was neither inevitable nor necessary. At its root lie the choices made by those who control the levers of economic and political power. As things stand, the community does not trust them to ensure an equitable distribution of burdens and benefits. That widespread popular sentiment is reinforced by daily experience. Ethics – which deals with the way in which choices shape the world we experience – lies at the heart of the current crisis.
So, if changes to the ‘Stage Three Tax Cuts’ can be shown to tilt the table in favour of a more fair and equal Australia, it will have a strong claim to be in the public interest – not least by demonstrating that power can be exercised for the good of all rather than the influential few. Thus, some measure of trust and democratic legitimacy might be restored.
Two final points. First, even with the changes, every Australian taxpayer will continue to be better off than the day before the changes come into effect. To that extent, the policy satisfies the third of the conditions listed above.
Which brings me to the final test: will the Prime Minister and his colleagues accept that the breaking of a political promise is wrong-in-itself – even if necessary to advance the public interest? That would be the brave thing to do. It would involve Anthony Albanese in acknowledging one of the toughest problems in political philosophy – the problem of ‘dirty hands’. This is when a person of principle, as Albanese clearly is, decides to accept the burden of violating their own, deepest ethical sense for the good of others. Then their sense of the moral injury they do to themselves exceeds the bounds of all criticism directed to them by others. They are wounded – and they let us see this.
I believe Anthony Albanese when he says that ‘his word is his bond’. Now, he must own this commitment and acknowledge the cost he and his government must bear in serving the public interest. That will not spare him the pointed criticism of political opponents or of those who sincerely feel their trust betrayed or their interests diminished. However, that honest reckoning is the sacrifice a good person must sometimes make in order better to serve the people.
Image by Mick Tsikas, AAP Photo
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BY Simon Longstaff
After studying law in Sydney and teaching in Tasmania, Simon pursued postgraduate studies in philosophy as a Member of Magdalene College, Cambridge. In 1991, Simon commenced his work as the first Executive Director of The Ethics Centre. In 2013, he was made an officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for “distinguished service to the community through the promotion of ethical standards in governance and business, to improving corporate responsibility, and to philosophy.”
Day trading is (nearly) always gambling
It could just be our algorithms, but over the past couple of years there’s been huge increase in the number of online share trading apps advertising across social platforms, YouTube and broadcast/streaming TV, promising quick and easy access to the share trading market.
Historically, buying and selling shares through a stock broker and getting professional financial advice has been limited to high net worth individuals (with the cost of professional financial advice in Australia ranging from $2000 to $5000-plus per annum). But these apps promise an easy, low-barrier entry point and potential side hustle for people to start buying and selling shares from the comfort of their couch or even their bathroom.
You don’t need any knowledge of the market and its statistics to start buying and selling at this entry level. As noted in The Ethics Centre’s latest podcast Life and Shares, nearly 5000 Australians opened an online account and started trading in the months after Covid-19 hit our shores, holding their shares for one day on average, with 80% losing money (although most would be classified as ‘toe dippers’ rather than traders).
The issue is, many of these trading apps are gamified with incentives, like points accumulation and (relatively valueless) gifts or benefits the more trades you make. These companies charge a fee for every trade, so it’s in their interest for customers to make as many trades as possible. Research by the Ontario Securities Commission found that groups using gamified apps, “made around about 40% more trades than control groups.”
This implicitly encourages day trading, where buyers play on the volatility of the market by buying and selling securities quickly, often in the same day, in the hope of turning a quick profit.
“The general market wisdom is that time in the market generally beats timing the market,” says Angel Xiong, head of the finance department in the School of Economics at RMIT.
Day trading flips this by trying to predict rapid price movements based off the news of the day, and this is where it starts to verge into gambling-adjacent behaviour.
Cameron Buchanan, of ASIC accredited online training centre, the International Day Trading Academy, says, “people often treat trading like they are gambling. And the main reason is because most gamblers don’t expect to lose. So emotionally, a lot of us are hardwired to not [want to] experience loss. We want certainty. And if we are coming into the trading markets, there’s a lot of uncertainty in it.”
Even if you know your stats and have a plan for your buy and sell points, Cameron says, “I know from my own experience, you get so locked into that trade and the emotion is so strong. You don’t want to take that loss because of the hope that the market turns around and gives you that positive feeling.”
Angel Xiong, Head of Finance in the School of Economics at RMIT, studies behavioural financial biases. “One of these biases is something we call attribution bias,” Xiong says, “which means people tend to attribute their success to strategy and skills, but when they lose money, they attribute it to, ‘Oh, it’s just bad luck’. So in terms of whether they [day traders] have strategy, it is really up to debate.” Consequently, Xiong believes, “stock market trading and gambling in casinos or online betting are very similar.”
As Ravi Dutta Powell, Senior Advisor at the Behavioural Insights Team, notes in episode 4, “the more that you gamify it, the more it starts to move into that gambling space and becomes less about the underlying financial products and more about engagement with the app and trying to get people to spend more money even though that may not necessarily be in their best financial interests… The real cost is the increased risk of losing the money you’ve invested because you’re making more trades.”
Addiction specialists, like the clinical psychologist interviewed in episode 3, warn that day traders can develop trading habits that closely resemble gambling addiction. “Certain forms of trading are addictive in and of itself,” the psychologist says. “The more high volatility securities or platforms where you can be in debt to the platform. Those are more risky plays and those can become quite addictive. As somebody who works in gambling, share trading looks identical to that and actually responds to treatment for gambling.”
“As somebody who works in gambling, share trading looks identical to that and actually responds to treatment for gambling.”
Symptoms of addictive behaviour include developing an obsession with trading, chasing winning streaks, trying to recoup losses, investing larger and larger amounts to chase the thrill, buying into the Sunk Cost Fallacy, and investing money in shares you haven’t properly researched.
But even if you’re going for “time in the market,” researching your buys thoroughly and buying blue chip stocks, it can still go bad due to that aforementioned “volatility”. Look at the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on the market, or the stock market crashes of 2002 and 2008, and it becomes clear that no stock is a “sure win”, especially when your emotions are pushing you to avoid a loss and hold on for the market to turn around.
All you can accurately control, as Life and Shares host Cris Parker puts it in episode 4, is to ask yourself, “What are my values? How much am I prepared to lose?” – and brush up on your financial literacy before you start dropping bundles.
Life and Shares unpicks the share market so you can make decisions you’ll be proud of. Listen now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
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BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
Lisa Frank and the ethics of copyright
Have you heard the song Lisa Frank 420 / Modern Computing by MACINTOSH PLUS? Even if you haven’t listened to it – you’ve probably heard it.
A buffering YouTube video, the visual glitches of a struggling graphics card, screen burn, unintelligible corrupted files – personified in vocals slowed to wordlessness, drums overlapping at conflicting time signatures and song structure only foundationally laid to be pulled out from underneath you – this is the spirit of Lisa Frank.
The YouTube upload of Lisa Frank has 23 million views. However, this upload is unofficial – there is no place you can purchase Lisa Frank, and uploading it anywhere on the internet is technically illegal. This is because Lisa Frank uses an unlicensed sample of It’s Your Move by Diana Ross. Any upload of the tracks is targeted with DMCA takedowns, or requests from the owners of the masters (record labels) that 100% of the revenue be diverted to them.
This isn’t ethical. Although copyright conceptually is generally uncontested in mainstream society, in this essay I will make the radical assertion that it foundationally enables the worst tendencies of capitalist societies and limits artistic expression.
There are two common angles in favour of copyright protection –
1. Copyright protects artistic intent and originality
This position argues that an artist has an inherent right to control their work. However, this is not the case and is only sensible when you individualise artworks to singular figures. Although useful in discussing commonalities between works, it is quickly outmoded in any other context.
When an artist releases a work, is it necessarily theirs? Do they have the right to control and change the work’s context and reaction?
The original version of Star Wars has been altered over years of reduxes and remasters and is no longer available to legally buy or stream – which is ostensibly an obscuration of the original film’s groundbreaking advancements that make it important to film history.
The changes to the film were essentially Lucas’s testing ground for his new special effects technology – although he insists on his changes simply because they are his, never mind the fact that the film is only special because of the audience’s appreciation of it, and it has no value independent of that appreciation.
Also, said appreciation it is not due to some quality inherent to the director, but rather due to the collaborative effort of hundreds of individuals: cinematographers, actors, set and costume designers, editors, VFX artists, folie / sound design artists and composers – don’t they all deserve some degree of control over these alterations?
Further, this mindset fails to take into account the transformative nature of art. Going back to our Lisa Frank example – the song is unrecognisable from the original sample, very clearly showing original thought, execution, and effort exerted in transforming the song into its own entity. Lisa Frank is far and away different from Diana Ross’s original recording, and yet according to copyright law, it is wholly the sum of its parts and thus at their behest.
There is no denying that plagiarism is a real phenomenon, but in copyright law it is conflated with what is merely derivative, leaving no room for nuance.
This flies in the face of the very nature of art – to eternally question and transform the structures around it (including other pieces). This suppression is very directly bad for art and artists.
Let’s examine the next common justification for copyright.
2. Copyright ensures that artists are correctly monetarily compensated.
This claim is partially true – monetarily compensated, yes. Correctly, no. The royalties/residuals system copyright operates on creates vast injustices in the compensation of artists.
Actors such as Emma Myles received residual checks as low as $20 for a role on Orange is the New Black – an immensely successful show that essentially made Netflix popular. Her work is managed by the conglomerate, and they control her earnings – and they can give her as little as they like.
Did you know that Diana Ross, the singer of the original recording of It’s Your Move, doesn’t actually own the masters to her recordings? She receives similar residuals, and granted, they’re probably much more than Emma Myles’. However, she is not actually in control of who uses her music – that right is reserved by Sony Music Entertainment. Diana Ross – at 79 years of age – likely doesn’t use the internet extensively enough to know anything about Lisa Frank or how her music has been used.
Obviously, these corporations don’t have a complete monopoly – another artist famous for not owning her masters, Taylor Swift, got hers back through a few legal battles and a lengthy re-recording process. However, she is uniquely privileged in this situation being a literal billionaire with essentially infinite legal power. Many other artists, even with a very clear cut case, don’t have the resources to fight back for control of their work.
This is because copyright, as a product of a capitalist system, is merely a symptom of the unjust society that produced it, inherently advantaging those with accumulated wealth.
In many ways its illegal status is an integral part of Lisa Frank. She is an internet vampire, signalling the decaying underbelly of our world, she beckons us away — it’s her move now…
‘Lisa Frank and the ethics of copyright‘ by Kieran Cashin is the winning essay in our Young Writers’ Competition (13-18 age category). Find out more about the competition here.
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BY Kieran Cashin
Kieran is 15 years old and attends Newtown High School of the Performing Arts. Passionate about all forms of art and media, Kieran is interested in exploring complex questions about pop culture and the human condition through the mediums of film and writing.
What we owe our friends
Friendships are confusing. I’ve often found myself feeling that something is missing in my friendships — a sentiment that seems to be shared, yet rarely addressed. One that’s echoed in the paradoxical 21st century correlation between our ever growing hyper-connectivity and reports declaring a loneliness epidemic. One that’s felt in parties full of friends that you can’t wait to leave.
Like many of us, I have learnt that this is partly down to the culturally accepted life cycle of friendships. I never felt lacking when I was younger: I had deep bonds with childhood friends, who I did the wild adventures of youth with, but also spent infinite hours in pyjamas with, drinking tea and learning how to build loving relationships. But as plans with friends became plans reserved for partners, and time became stretched by work and adulting, I slowly processed the idea that their importance will silently decline as you age.
But I’ve also had a nagging sense that something more unspeakable affects the quality of our friendships. Something resigning friendships to the trivial and fun, and shaming a desire for deeper bonds.
It wasn’t until I read The End of Love by Eva Illouz that I felt able to articulate what this is, and why it is so hard to talk about feeling disappointed by friends. Through an extensive analysis of social relations under consumer capitalism, she makes a simple central point: freedom, the value that trumps all for western society, requires the dissolving of expectations in human relationships.
In an age of abundance, the defining feature of 21st century liberal social relations is the practice of non-commitment. Personal autonomy is the main cultural story that guides our lives. We’re driven by the search for personal success and pleasure. To realise this, we must be free to choose our own relations at will, and therefore also leave them at will. We make responsible choices to avoid things that might impinge on our personal growth, including that relationship stopping you from moving, or that friend whose chaotic period has gone on a bit too long.
So we have relaxed our mutual expectations on each other — almost to the point of having none at all.
The value of freedom has transcended left and right politics, and is accepted as an untouchable pillar of morality. Self empowerment has been the prerogative of many left wing progressives as much as neoliberal free-marketers. It’s found in the language of capitalist growth and competition, but also in the language of pop-psychology that tells us to set boundaries and cut people out of our life who don’t ‘serve’ us or bring us pleasure.
But Illouz reopens this debate that has been closed since liberal philosophy claimed hegemony over morality, asking us ‘does freedom jeopardize the possibility of forming meaningful and binding bonds?’
I think about the hollowed expectations we have of our friends. Flaking is normal. We tend to leave maximum space to opt out of plans whenever and minimum pressure to commit, generally resigning ourselves to polite understanding if people cancel even when it hurts, knowing that we often do the same. Asking for support is also done cautiously to avoid overstepping, burdening or offloading, even in our greatest moments of need.
And then there are the ways in which many friendships silently end. When I was 22, after an ongoing period of difficulty where we both hurt each other, one of my closest friends sent me a facebook message telling me she never wanted to speak again. Despite my ongoing attempts in the coming years to reconcile, she stuck to this conviction, and I have only seen her in passing at parties since then. A long term friendship was suddenly gone with minimal discussion, and the invisible rulebook of friendship said that this was fine.
Friendships which diverge from the comfortable space of convenience, ease, and fun can quickly become threats to our personal growth. Consumers at our core, we are well practiced in disposing of things that don’t benefit us anymore and less well practiced at fixing broken things. Systems make their way into our bodies and minds, and the system we live in is one built on endless desire and access to the new. In such a society we owe our friends nothing. We might choose to owe them, but we don’t have to.
We sense this fragility. We know on some level that if friends can exit at any moment without consequence, we must persuade them to stay. Friendship mimics a market in which you must compete to survive, and we are all painfully aware of the limits of what our commodified selves can offer. In this knowledge, socialising often becomes fraught as we feel this pressure to bring something positive to the room that wins us a good review after. Those who lack status built by resource, health, and charisma struggle more, their exclusion a reality made invisible by the language of choice.
The psychologist Sanah Ashan tells us that falling apart is a birthright. For us to feel connected, our relationships must embrace discomfort. Friendships shouldn’t be intolerant of prolonged messiness. We must instead embrace the misery and the insanity; coming together in these times not running away. Intimate bonds are difficult.
We live in an age where traditional sites of belonging have been diminished — religion, community, even family and romantic relationships are more uncertain than they have ever been. Public care structures have been decimated to the point of dysfunction. More and more of us find that we have to make our own communities of care and belonging, found in the friends we make ourselves.
Yet conversation about building these communities is often superficial when we don’t know how to be close to each other. We long for community, but often turn to therapists in our times of need.
Re-envisioning how we build strong and enduring bonds requires us to open a conversation that asks bigger questions than how we balance time between work, relationships, and friends. It requires us to question the promises of fulfillment from personal freedom alone. Wendy Brown reminds us that achieving, and even envisioning personal freedom is far from straightforward:
‘historically, semiotically, and culturally protean, as well as politically elusive, freedom has shown itself to be easily appropriated in liberal regimes for the most cynical and unemancipatory political ends.’
The left has been good at unpicking how the appeals to freedom have created unjust markets and vast inequalities, but we haven’t openly discussed the effects of this in the world of emotions and relationships. The practice of non-commitment in our relationship building mimics the rise of the gig economy, precarious work, and the breakdown of worker solidarity. Free market economics sacrificed security and equality in the name of unfettered growth. We must ask whether the same might be happening in our social relations.
We all yearn for connection, yet our disdain for responsibility in the name of freedom keeps us apart. But we owe our friends something different to the transactional relationships of the capitalist workplace; we owe them love and time regardless of the value they offer us.
‘What we owe our friends‘ by Zoe Timimi is the winning essay in our Young Writers’ Competition (18-30 age category). Find out more about the competition here.
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BY Zoe Timimi
Zoe is passionate about all things mental health, community and relationships. She holds a BA in Sociology and an MA International Political Economy, but has spent the last few years working as a freelancer in various TV development and writing roles.
On truth, controversy and the profession of journalism
The recent dispute between Antoinette Lattouf and the ABC has brought into focus the need to address some fundamental questions about the role of journalism, in general, and professional journalists, in particular.
In my opinion, journalism is (or at least should be) practiced as a profession. This is not to ignore the fact that journalists work within an intensely commercial environment. But so do those lawyers, accountants, engineers, doctors and others who are employed by the private sector. For members of these professions, the fact that they work for, say, ‘industry’ in no way reduces the scope or depth of their professional obligations.
What marks out a profession is first, that its members are obliged to subordinate self-interest in the service of a public good. For example, as Officers of the Court, lawyers are bound by a paramount duty to assist in the administration of justice. This obligation comes before any duty to the client, to the profession or to oneself. Second, each profession exists in relation to its own ‘defining good’. Doctors and nurses work to secure the public good of ‘health’. Members of the profession of arms are supposed to secure the defining good of ‘peace’. Engineers aim for safety, etc. Two professions are oriented towards the good of ‘truth’ – accounting and journalism.
In both cases, the value of ‘truth’ is not in any sense vague or abstract. The preparation of accounts that are ‘true and fair’ is essential to the operation of free markets in which participants make informed decisions. As Adam Smith understood so well, markets can never be ‘free’ if participants lie, cheat, or use power oppressively. Yet, Smith also knew that merchants were always liable to employ such tactics in pursuit of self-interest. Thus, the need for the profession of accounting – made up of people who freely choose to abandon the pursuit of self-interest in service of the public interest and a higher ‘good’.
The role that accountants play in markets is mirrored by the role that journalists play in politics – and especially in democracies. The legitimacy of liberal democracies rests entirely on the consent of the governed. The only consent that counts is that which is free, prior and informed. And consent can never be informed if it is based on lies. That is why those politicians who resort to falsehood in the pursuit of power do so much damage to our democracy.
Unfortunately, just as some merchants can be relied upon to resort to deception in the pursuit of profits, so can some politicians be relied upon to do the same in the pursuit of victory. Professional journalists are supposed to help protect society from that risk – which is why they are so often lauded as the ‘fourth estate’.
I realise that there are some people who claim the title of ‘journalist’ while playing their own part in publishing or broadcasting falsehood, or who lack the ‘disinterested gaze’ that should be demanded of members of this profession. Yet, the fact that some (or even many) fail to uphold professional standards does not mean that the standard is either wrong or pointless.
Now, one might hope that those in charge of the ABC would champion the ideal of professional journalism as outlined above. If so, then you might also hope that they understood what is entailed by commitment to such an ideal. Finally, one might hope that the ABC would have discerned that a core commitment to the truth is fundamentally incompatible with the avoidance of controversy. Put simply, the truth is often controversial – especially when it challenges conventional belief or confronts power (which can reside in ‘settled’ ideas and prejudice as much as in the hands of individuals and institutions).
The truth is often controversial – especially when it challenges conventional belief or confronts power.
That is where I think the ABC ran off the rails. The moment it elevated the ‘avoidance of controversy’ as an end in itself, it set a standard that it is simply impossible for any professional journalist to uphold.
The noted German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, argued that “ought implies can”. That is, one is not morally obliged to do that which is impossible. This clearly applies in cases of actual impossibility (e.g. flying to Mars on the back of a bandicoot). However, I think the maxim also extends to cases where something is ‘impossible’ to do without violating the dictates of a well-informed (and well-formed) conscience. It is in this sense that professional journalists are placed in an impossible position if required to seek and publish the truth without ever courting controversy.
Image by Pat M2007
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BY Simon Longstaff
After studying law in Sydney and teaching in Tasmania, Simon pursued postgraduate studies in philosophy as a Member of Magdalene College, Cambridge. In 1991, Simon commenced his work as the first Executive Director of The Ethics Centre. In 2013, he was made an officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for “distinguished service to the community through the promotion of ethical standards in governance and business, to improving corporate responsibility, and to philosophy.”
Our desire for reality: What OnlyFans says about sexual fantasy
Despite being a generation overwhelmed with technological means to fulfil their fantasies, today’s youth desire sexual reality. The rapid uptake of OnlyFans embodies a paradoxical desire to escape an increasingly grim sexual reality through indulging in consumption of ‘reality’ pornography. But how ‘real’ can pornography ever be, and does it represent an entrenchment of the patriarchal sexualisation of women?
Pornhub’s 2022 annual report demonstrated that the fastest growing trend for 2022 was ‘reality’ – increasing viewership by a total of 169%. Simultaneously, viewership of the ‘amateur’ category declined roughly 20%, leading the researchers to note ‘visitors are still seeking a real homemade porn experience’ – the guise of amateur is not enough. In Australia specifically, the two top trending searches for 2023 were ‘sharing a bed’ (+%600) and ‘therapy’ (+%540), a far cry from what would typically be associated with pornographic content.
Society’s previous relationship with pornography was one of explicit fantasy; a consumption of unrealistic bodies in improbable scenarios conducting inconceivable acts. Aiding this was explicit acceptance of the disconnect present, lusting for the physical specifically because it was not also attempting to be a fill-in for true connection. In other words, the fantasy being indulged in was the removal of emotional or social connections from sex – it was sex for the sake of sex.
A national survey recently highlighted that those aged 18-24 age were most likely to experience loneliness, with 22% of this bracket stating they are either constantly or often lonely. Such trends are replicated globally in the general decrease of sexual activity experienced by young people, particularly in Western countries. But it is feasible to broach this deficiency through faux realities?
OnlyFans is fast becoming a behemoth of pornographic facilitation with users paying more than $5 billion to creators in 2022. Not only is spending up, but content creators have grown by nearly 50% in the past year. OnlyFans’s explosive growth comes from linking creators to consumers in a way porn never did. Individuals are no longer the perverts behind a screen, instead they have become ‘fans’ that are afforded technological involvement with the objects of their sexual desire.
Here the pornographic trope of ‘the girl next door’, previously relegated to a fantasy, has now become a form of sexualised reality and should be taken literally – the girl next door might exist. This merging of sexual fantasy into the real world suggests that today’s youth want more realistic sexual content, and greater interpersonal connection, due to a lack in real life. Porn actors are no longer 2D figures who appear only as sexualised objects for my fantasy to manipulate, the rise of technology and social media means we connect with adult content creators as holistic beings who can perceive us as a human (or a fan) – not simply as an anonymous click or view.
Fantasy for sale
While traditional porn inserted fantasy into reality by imagining all the ways certain sexual desires were unattainable, OnlyFans is seeing a reversal by injecting reality into fantasy by imagining all the ways in which sexual desires may be attainable.
What should be obvious is that escape toward this ‘reality’ is anything but – reality, as a pornographic concept, has now become a commodity. Platforms such as Meta pioneered the sale of ‘reality’ as a commodity, initially through social media which promised global connection and more recently with openly ‘virtual’ realities as places of escape (for a price).
Just as it was once assumed constant connection through Facebook would alleviate loneliness, which it is now proven to increase, society needs to be careful of establishing a feedback loop in sexual consumption. Here the phenomena of ‘parasocial relationships’, where effort and interaction is one-sided, operates in full effect; while a user can ‘interact’ with their favourite explicit content creator. The purpose of this interaction is only as a profit mechanism, there is no symbiotic social relationship taking place.
OnlyFans in essence offers a new commodity of sexual ‘reality’ which, just as social media has, proports to sell us connection to reality, while simply creating a new grey space of pseudo-connection.
In turn, the more reliant society is on technology to fulfil our needs, the less-equipped we are to find such things organically – an increasing trend of abstinence being evidence to the point.
Political-economy of sexual reality
This sexualisation of reality brings with it a major challenge to the sex-positive view of feminism. We should take seriously that the liberalisation of sex and sexuality in the 21st century has positively influenced the lives of women by offering space and safety for progressive practices. Yet, it cannot be ignored that the financial prosperity that OnlyFans affords (largely female) creators comes at the cost of internalising a core patriarchal notion; the sexual objectification of women’s bodies.
The sex positive view typically argues that patriarchy was a limiting factor on sexuality and is instead in favour of removing societal stigma and shame surrounding pornography. Here the trend of reality-centric porn would be supported to further liberate both men and women from sexual restriction – even if the establishment of unhealthy norms which propagate the sexualisation of patriarchal interests through porn continues. Here issues of subjugation, domination and sexualisation must necessarily be supported, providing an indication as to why younger generations are turning away from the positivist view.
In OnlyFans’s case, it may establish a sexual panopticon where women perceive self-sexualisation as liberating, not realising that the patriarchal logic of objectifying bodies has now become self-imposed and self-regulating as women free men of this task. The danger being that, if the trend of sexualising reality continues, what was previously relegated to closed-door fantasies is brought into the real world. Tangibly this could mean that women now find themselves more sexualised as pornographic content increasingly blurs lines between public and private thoughts or actions.
A springboard
As sexual lives become further digitally enmeshed (what will the Metaverse mean for sexting?) there is need to reflect on how our desires are impacted. Desire for reality should reflect an underlying lack thereof as well as the pseudo-reality technology such as OnlyFans sells us as a replacement. In a world of fast fashion, fast food, and fast internet it should be pause for thought that today’s youth don’t want fast sex – they want real sex but will settle for less.
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BY Jack Ryan
J.A Ryan is a former officer in the Australian Defence Force. He holds a Bachelor of Arts majoring in politics & history from UNSW, a Master of Political Philosophy from UPF-Barcelona and is currently writing a book investigating the philosophical implications of the ‘Quarter Life Crisis’.
Ethical redundancies continue to be missing from the Australian workforce
Telling staff that they have been made redundant is one of the most difficult parts of anyone’s job. But what’s consistently lacking from these hard conversations is human compassion.
All too often, there are glaring examples of a genuine lack of concern or care being shown by major companies forced to let people go.
Think about it for a second. A person’s identity is wrapped up in what they do for work. After introducing ourselves in a social setting, the next thing we usually share about ourselves is what we do for work.
When Director of The Ethics Centre’s Ethics Alliance, Cris Parker called out the need for a rethink of redundancy done #ethically on LinkedIn recently, plenty of workers chimed in about their own experiences of tragic redundancy stories.
One senior manager revealed he wasn’t even paid a redundancy when being laid off by an Australian company some years ago. Management got around this because the law states that they don’t have to pay redundancy if there are less than 15 employees in the company.
He admits that he still struggles with what happened to him all these years later and wants to see the law changed, admitting that the process was unethical, resulting in people left unsupported and left to struggle financially.
The closed door meeting you didn’t expect
No matter how committed you are to your role, suddenly being made redundant can be an emotionally crippling experience.
But it’s all too common. Media reports reveal that 2023 has been a year of mass redundancies as profits have been squeezed. Nearly 23,000 Australians have been laid off in reported redundancy rounds this year in response to rising interest rates and stubbornly high inflation.
But the real number of actual redundancies is likely to have been much higher as employers only need to notify Services Australia when they lay off more than 15 staff members.
Among the cuts has been KPMG, which announced 200 redundancies in February. Star Entertainment laid off 500 staff in May, while Telstra cut nearly 500 staff in July. The big banks have also been slashing jobs, collectively cutting more than 2000 jobs, according to media reports. There are also examples of companies pushing for staff to leave if they don’t return to the office.
Back in the pandemic, employers were more compassionate in many ways. We saw into our boss’s homes and personal lives and heard about the challenges they were facing. Bonds that haven’t been seen before in the workplace were formed.
At the time, a huge 99% of workers felt that they were working for an empathetic leader in the pandemic, according to KornFerry statistics. This is twice as high than pre-Covid, and it has shaped a new normal that employers need to recognise, even though they may now be facing financial pain amid a much more complex economic time.
Redundancies announced over the lunchroom speaker
Qantas Airways was among the many companies to downsize teams in the wake of Covid, as work was in short supply. In a bid to save a buck, Qantas Airways replaced the ground handling function with outsourced workers, which the Federal Court has since found to be illegal because the airline failed to engage in proper consultation and communication.
In a particularly brutal approach, Qantas reportedly told the 1700 workers about their upcoming dismissal via a lunchroom speaker with no prior warning, which doesn’t demonstrate empathy or compassion.
The case reminds Mollie Eckersley, ANZ operations manager for BrightHR of the US-based Better.com.au CEO who made headlines for making 900 of his staff redundant via an impersonal Zoom call.
She’s the first to accept that making redundancies can’t always be avoided in a bid to keep businesses viable, but cautions that how redundancies are announced to staff can have lasting ramifications on a person.
Approaching job cuts with a transparent, open and empathetic perspective will assist what is already a difficult experience. If not done well the negative impact on the culture is longstanding.
“The Qantas case has highlighted and served a cautionary tale for other businesses considering redundancy plans for its employees. There’s a clear need for robust records – otherwise businesses risk legal action and irreparable damage to reputation. Specific steps must be followed to ensure the process is fair and legal,” says Eckersley.
The rules state that the employer must initiate a meeting with the employee to discuss proposed changes, and that in that meeting, the staffer should be allowed to express concerns, provide feedback and suggest alternatives to redundancy.
But what about the ethical part of this process? People need to be treated with compassion, and giving the employee reasons for letting them go can help soften the blow.
Asking who might like to take a redundancy can be a good first step, because some employees might already have one foot out the door.
Organisations need to ensure they are acting in line with their values. Integrity, care and ethics need to be embedded into the process of making people redundant, particularly when those difficult decisions are made and there are very real human consequences.
This can be done by ensuring that your organisation has a purpose that can inspire those who remain, and be transparent about the reasons for the redundancy, rather than letting them wonder if they might be next.
A great deal of consideration also should be given to the timing of a redundancy announcement. Alternatives to redundancy, such as offering staff shorter working weeks or even reducing pay for a prescribed period of time, should also be considered.
Growing unemployment, mental health issues and the treatment of workers isn’t being addressed by the largest companies using redundancy as a lever amid economic woes, and our government seems intent on allowing the status quo to continue.
We’re all human beings, after all.
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BY The Ethics Centre
The Ethics Centre is a not-for-profit organisation developing innovative programs, services and experiences, designed to bring ethics to the centre of professional and personal life.
BY Nina Hendy
Nina Hendy is an Australian business & finance journalist writing for The Financial Review, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The New Daily.
Big Thinker: Audre Lorde
Professionally a poet, professor and philosopher, Audre Lorde (1934-1992) also proudly carried the titles of intersectional feminist, civil rights activist, mother, socialist, “Black, lesbian [and] warrior.” She is also the woman behind the popular manifesto “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
Born Audrey Geraldine Lorde in New York City, to Frederic and Linda Belmar Lorde, on the 18th of February 1934, Lorde fell in love with poetry as a form of expression at a young age.
“I used to communicate through poetry,” she recalled in conversation with Claudia Tate for Black Women Writers at Work. “When I couldn’t find the poems to express the things I was feeling, that’s what started me writing poetry,” she said. Lorde was thirteen.
Alongside her education at Hunter High School in New York, and working on the school’s literary magazine, she published her first piece of literature in the 1951 April issue of Seventeen Magazine. She earned a Bachelor of Arts from Hunter College in 1959, preceding a master’s degree in library science in 1961 from Columbia University. Following that, Lorde worked as a librarian for public schools in New York City from 1961 to 1968, working her way to head librarian of Manhattan’s Town School. In 1980, Lorde and her friend, a fellow writer and activist, created a publishing house, ‘Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.’ Throughout these years, Lorde was prolific and wrote some of her most recognised volumes of poetry. A full discography of her work can be found at the end of this article.
Authorship and legacy
Expression of self and personal philosophy through literature became a cornerstone of Audre Lorde’s life and one of her greatest contributions to the discourse on discrimination and equality today.
A proud feminist, Lorde’s authorship strived to offer an authentic depiction of the female experience; the good, the bad and the complex. She felt academic discourse on feminism was white and heterosexual centric, lacking consideration of the lived realities of Black and queer women. Thus, she put the stories of these women at the centre of her literature.
Lorde’s philosophy focussed particularly on intersectional discrimination and academic discourse’s inability to accommodate it. She revered differences amongst humans, arguing true equality can only be achieved through celebrating rather than homogenising our different identities.
Third Wave Feminism
Lorde was a prominent member of the women’s and LGBTQIA+ rights movements during the second wave of feminism. As a woman with many of her own labels, Lorde used her lived experience and literary expertise to shine a light on the experience and voices of other women with multiple signifiers. She implored society to confront racist feminism, the nuances of the Black female experience and the cognitive dissonance between educating yourself on feminism whilst not bearing witness to the experiences of all women, – particularly women of colour whose intellectual labour and contributions to such academia have been so routinely overlooked. Thus, helping kickstart the third wave of feminism, also spearheaded by another big thinker, Kimberle Crenshaw.
Through her words, Lorde aimed to acknowledge and capture the pain as well as the joy she felt as an openly queer Black woman. This bare-all intent and celebration of individuality is particularly felt in her work, The Cancer Journals and her subsequent public encouragement of other breast cancer survivors to wear their mastectomies on their chest, rather than accept prosthesis purely for aesthetic motivations. “It is that very difference that I wish to affirm… I lived it, I survived it, and wish to share that strength with other women.”
Philosophy on difference
Lorde was an advocate for difference amongst human beings. For her, difference was the key to eradicating discrimination and moving forward in unity. As we constantly reevaluate what it means to be human, what we hold dear and the ethical pillars we lean on to guide us, Lorde philosophised that it was vital we harness rather than fear that which separates us from our friends, peers and enemies. Rather than homogenising humanity, the future of equality relies on our ability to relate across differences. Finding community is not about conforming, it is about accepting. It must be an act of opening up, not of shutting down.
Lorde examined difference particularly through an intersectional feminist lens. Identifying and subverting the conditioning of women to view their differences as causes for separation and self-judgement.
What we need first, however, is courage. To have our beliefs and perspectives stretched and challenged as we begin the journey of embracing that which makes us different from those around us.
Intersectionality
Lorde was acutely aware of and vocal about the pressure on marginalised people to divide their identities in order to fight for recognition of their discrimination. Academia was constructed to examine, debate and interrogate ways of being. At the time, it was established by white men, and thus contributions to this school of thought were limited to the lived realities and perspectives of these men. As a result, the notion of a human norm came about, and this norm was white, male, heterosexual and often, but not always, wealthy, educated and upper class. Every deviation from this ideal was considered a handicap and treated as such.
In her speech at the New York University Institute for the Humanities, where she debuted her admonishment: “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Lorde cautioned people of colour and other marginalised demographics against the pressure to conform to the limited criteria of ‘acceptable’ laid out by discrimination discourse in white academia, in order to have their needs met. She argued fighting for equality within a system with the notion of a human ideal will only lead to disappointment. True and deeply entrenched equality can only happen through an entire paradigm shift; the unravelling of a human norm in the first place.
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