This video has been on my mind for days:
Larry Miller - “the show business is not about the shows. It’s, ‘the shows are just there to justify the meetings.’”
In oh-so-dramatic phrasing, life is pain, or life is boredom. At least, a lot of it falls into those two categories. Both emotions are ones we strain to avoid.
Negative-emotion-avoidance is probably the most consistent and widespread driver of human activity. This is obviously a good instinct, guiding people away from bad situations and occasionally towards discovery, invention, epiphany.
I used to characterize the Information Age as the Uncertainty-Reduction-Age, tipping my hat to Claude Shannon (The Incredible Mind of Claude Shannon). This explains some aspects of the Internet - 24/7 news reduces uncertainty of what’s going on in the world, Instagram or Snapchat reduce uncertainty of what our friends are doing without us, instant messaging reduce uncertainty in relaying a message to a friend.
But there were still swaths of behavior still unexplained. I posit that most of them fall under the category of Seinfeld’s meetings. An antidote - or attempted antidote, for it is temporary, fantastical, and in some senses a charade, meant only to last until the next round of shots - to pain and boredom is, in so many words, wishful thinking.
I had written about this previously, characterizing most of the economy as porn (Most Content (and Spend) is Just P*rn). We watch pornography not to be with the bombshell woman, but to be the guy who is with the bombshell woman. We drink Dwayne Johnson’s tequila because it makes us feel like we are, in our own small way, like the Rock himself. We watch Shark Tank because we laugh at the bad pitches and think, I could do that - I could be an entrepreneur, and be better than this joke of a businessman.
But porn (and porn-adjacent economic behavior, as outlined above) is only a subset of wishful thinking - the wishful thinking of self, fantasized identity. And that’s why I can’t get away from Seinfeld’s meetings: they are the umbrella category. It’s not just identity we can think wishfully about. We should include a future of outcomes (any ‘strategy’ meeting in a business context, as Seinfeld so perfectly describes), a future of group dynamics (‘this plan will turn our team into killers,’ or ‘this transfer and this-or-that player will make us a cohesive team’), the future broadly (the feeling a presidential candidate gives in a speech, in fifth grade or at a national level). When life is pain or boredom, we look to the future to tell us it won’t always be this way.
Seinfeld’s meetings give people a buzz, an optimism, a hope based on little more than a dream. That buzz pushes down the pain or boredom of everyday life, of unavoidable existence. And in today’s world and economy, it is ever easier to get that next high, that next dose, that next meeting that will change everything. So ‘we live for the meetings.’ As antidote, I will drop this quote, which requires no further comment -
“To make things real is the battle cry of life” - George MacDonald