My Mammon Phase
“But if you ask for a rise, it’s no surprise, they ain’t giving none away . . .”
I encountered a story on Reddit which initially elicited a rather snide and ungodly reaction from me. The text will be reproduced below, followed by a screenshot based on the ancient internet law of “Pics Or It Didn’t Happen”:1
PMC2 Asian male in need of meaning in my life
The post yesterday about how lame Asian American art is the other day really struck me as it stirred up the existential dread in me as a 24 year old Asian zoomer male.
Ever since graduation, I’ve been thinking about utterly lame and pointless my life is. Raised by two Asian tiger parents, I’ve spent all my life grinding academically and got into a T10 college and now I work at a boring PMC job. Most of my time has monopolized by work/school so I’ve never been able to develop much hobbies other than reading, working out, sketching, and going to the bars with my friends on weekends. Every 6-12 months I might get laid through Tinder. I volunteer four-ish times a year picking trash in Central Park but that’s the only contribution I’ve ever made to society.
Writing this made me physically cringe and l imagine reading this has made you cringe harder. That's how soulless my life is. If I disappeared tomorrow no one outside of my parents and small circle of friends would care. My boss would just hire another PMC striver out to replace me. I’ve accomplished nothing actually meaningful in life, only accumulate pointless accolades for Linkedin.
I am seriously considering quitting my job and joining the Peace Corps or the military. I need some random spontaneous stuff in my life to give it meaning and give me interesting stories to tell at bars (and hopefully my grandkids). My job gives me Sunday scaries and my workplace is infested with bootlickers and politicking. Please give me some advice, I am going to make a decision in the next two weeks.
Pretty grim, no? This lad is clearly having an existential crisis, a true crisis of meaning, and what did I do? I mocked him.
Yes! Me! I don’t have the full text of my response, but I basically castigated him for his “Boo hoo, I’m a member of a demographic that does far better academically and economically, the only two markers of success in modern secular America, than the native born Americans—even the white ones—and my parents pushed me to succeed and now I have the sads because I don’t have hobbies (even though I listed a bunch of hobbies) and work too hard. Woe is me!” I then said I’d gladly trade jobs with this 24-year-old winner of the life lottery (because let’s face it, luck and who you know get people more than 50 percent of the way there, and “hard work” is kind of overrated). Yes, let’s mock the “strivers” and the “bootlickers,” even though they’re the only ones who achieve upward mobility in America!
What a bitchy little response, right? It says far more about me than this young man.
Go on, you can say it:
But . . . someone3 then commented about my lack of sympathy as to someone having an existential, spiritual crisis, asking me, Have you never had the same? And then, and here’s where things get interesting, I came upon this quote seemingly by random:
Never speak badly or ironically about anyone . . . Your words can be transmitted even not out of spite or ill-will, but simply from inattentiveness or as a joke—and now you have gained an enemy.
The path to salvation is by repentance for your sins, not in judging others. If a person judges others then it means he doesn’t feel his own sins and has no repentance. And conversely—non-judgment of others is a sign of consciousness of our sins and repentance. Take care of your business with which you have been entrusted; don’t bother with others’ business; keep quiet as much as possible; never burden others; as a rock in the sea, let all the words that you hear drown within yourself; pity all, and bid farewell to all in your soul, and in reality if you have such a chance.
Close your eyes to others’ sins, but if it’s impossible not to see, then pray for these sinners, as for yourself, that the Lord would forgive them, and you will receive grace from the Lord.
– Abbot Nikon Vorobiev
Well, “random.”
The point is, here I was, a Christian, making fun of someone’s spiritual crisis based on money and the desire to acquire more of it. For shame! Who am I, chief among sinners, to judge! Acting like I myself don’t have my sins! Acting as though I don’t need to repent! While money itself isn’t the root of all evil—love of money is, as St. Paul tells us—and while it is not impossible for a rich man to get into heaven because with God, all things are possible, as our lord and savior Jesus Christ tells us—here I am acting as if money might make me happy. Again I ask, who am I to judge?
Okay, okay, I get it. Geez.
Money isn’t evil. It, like anything, can reflect on us, because money is a manifestation of power. What we do with it matters, as is my church’s official position, which is in turn the scriptural position. Good does not want us to be rich for the sole purpose of acquiring material possessions, but if we are to be rich by His grace, we must do something good with it. If you think that makes me sound like a “commie” or whatever, well, I’ll pray for you too.
Sadly, money has been given primary importance in America. If you’re rich, you’re clearly morally superior, and if you’re not rich, you’re a failure. I know not everybody literally feels like this, but you cannot deny that we are a nation set up by merchants for the purpose of commerce. You cannot deny that these ideas are in the zeitgeist and have been for multiple generations. Examine your reaction the next time you see a homeless person begging for money on the side of the road and then get back to me.4
May this young man find peace and may he do something worthwhile with his blessings, even if he can’t see them as blessings. He has been given an opportunity. I can relate—my time in the legal profession made me feel like a net drain on the world—but in crisis there is opportunity, right? God routinely brings good from bad, from the consequences of our own choices. Please forgive me for being so uncharitable to this young man.
- Alexander
Thank you for reading this post. Here I am, lamenting mammon-worship, and holding out my own hat. But if you like my writing, I do want to at least let you know where you can find more. So please share and subscribe, and check out my books on Amazon, and toss a few drachmas into the tip jar over at Buy Me A Coffee. Thank you and God bless.
I am fully aware that even pictures can be photoshopped, as we said back in the old days, or more accurately now, created with AI. I leave it to the reader whether they, like me, accept this screenshot as genuine. And even if it is a fabrication, it is irrelevant to the sentiment contained therein and this discussion thereof.
PMC = professional managerial class. Briefly:
“Professional-managerial class” (PMC), a term coined by Barbara and John Ehrenreich in a 1977 essay for Radical America, has recently emerged from academic obscurity as a shorthand, of sorts, for technocratic liberalism, or wealthier Democratic primary voters, or the median Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member, depending on who you ask.
The Ehrenreichs characterized the PMC as distinct from both the old middle class (self-employed professionals, small tradespeople, independent farmers) and the working class. Emerging with monopoly capitalism in the late nineteenth century, the class came into its own by the mid-twentieth century and formed a core of the New Left. In their essay, “class” is both “a common relation to the economic foundations of society” and “actual relations between groups of people, not formal relations between people and objects.” In other words, the authors felt that their erstwhile New Left comrades related to the working class in a distinct way, not simply as fellow workers.
When the social worker confronts her client, or the manager his worker, they do so in an “objectively antagonistic” relationship. The PMC are “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.”
See more at Dissent magazine, October 22, 2019 if you want a more intellectual discussion of the term. In internet parlance, it basically means “white-collar urbanite shitlib bugman.”
And I cannot find it.
Please don’t day “He needs to BOOTSTRAP!”
So, not that long ago, I stumbled on a Korean drama series called Death's Game. It is about a young man, who fails to find material success which prevents him from romantic success and then he kills himself over his failure. The premise of the show is that death then punishes him by making him die ten more deaths each of which reveals something about himself and his life and causes him to cherish it and thus regret his suicide. Anyway, it is actually very good. I bring it up in this context because apparently large numbers of these 'tiger children' are finding their life extraordinarily unfulfilling and ending them.
I am acquisitive and jealous over material things, over success as a writer, over domestic bliss when my marriage and family seems to be a constant struggle. It seems like other people have it so much better. But I'm not sure that the way it seems is really true. Maybe, it is not better just different? People that we are envious of are blowing their brains all over the pavement and drinking themselves into oblivion, etc. etc. Probably time to reevaluate.
BTW great quote from Abbot Varobiev
The toughest part of my materialist habit to shake is when I think about my kids' future. I want them to be spiritually successful, but also materialistically successful. I like to think I'd take the spiritual success over the materialistic success, but the latter is more easily defined and measured. Here's hoping I mature enough to make my children's relationship with God the top priority.