Wealth and Blandness

Tying together two major Slog themes:

1. We have, comparatively recently, become wealthier and more comforted and entertained than the most ambitious dreams of our forebears - and we don't notice because we're spoiled princesses increasingly vexed by smaller and smaller mattress peas.

2. We've grown blander and blander. When I was a kid, most people rolled their eyes at uptight corporate speech patterns. Since then, HR-speak has become normal in most workplaces, and is now the prevalent mode even for social conversation (for just one example, constant pained effort to avoid giving offense has - per the mattress peas - made everyone increasingly sensitive to nano-offense). When I was younger, a number of people you'd describe as "characters" showed passion, personality, and discernible life signs. I haven't heard that term in ages. Now we are dominated by puddy pudpuds; corporate creatures through and through, and the average American could not pass a Turing Test. G.F.S.P.!

But, back in the 70s, when spontaneous characters roamed the earth, it was a wilder, more un-tamed place. Workplaces were less efficient because people didn't behave like obedient cogs. The 1977 hit "Take This Job and Shove It" struck a chord, whereas one imagines a contemporary American furrowing her brow:

"Eek. While any employment situation certainly has its challenges, and many workers might prefer, at a given moment, to be pursuing personal interests, such language and sentiment are highly inappropriate for the workplace. This individual clearly has only themselves to blame for their failure to assimilate team values."

Let's integrate the two observations.

The messy, wild, untamed nature of 1975 left money on the table. Everyone dropping dead of emphysema and inhaling leaded gas fumes and being dehydrated most of the time (no bottled water) and enjoying three martini lunches and plenty of fun non-stigmatized recreational drug use and defiantly failing to assimilate into team values did not foster optimally efficient profit-making.

We're wealthier now because we're blander. HR won.