What Fight Club can teach us about social media

1999 was a good year for film. Hollywood hadn’t yet devolved into “mostly superhero movies and sequels”. Instead, we got some movies that were original, different, or just plain strange. The Matrix. The Blair Witch Project. Magnolia. Being John Malkovitch.

Three movies, in particular, stood out to me, because they questioned the value of work. The economy was booming. We were in the middle of the dot-com bubble. And some people were starting to wonder what the point of it all was. Three films asked whether corporate work was rewarding and whether consumerism was an empty lifestyle.

Office Space told this story in the simplest way. A man simply stops caring about his desk job. He stops filing useless paperwork.

He takes the office printer out into a field and beats it.

And he ultimately finds simpler pleasures. He finds a woman that he likes to spend time with. He gets a construction job, working outside.

I think we have made progress since 1999. Young people today care less about money or material possessions. They don’t judge each other as much by their houses or their cars. Many of us have turned to a different competition, though, one for status and attention online.

There’s a whole genre of medium articles devoted to this search for attention. A few examples:

how to skyrocket your medium followers to 1000 in 4 months

Medium for Marketing: How to Get 1,000 Followers

My journey to 10K readers on Medium in 2018

How I Went From 0 Medium Followers To 14,000

Should I read the article about getting 1,000 followers? Or the one on getting 14,000? Also, should I do my abs workout in 8 minutes or 7?

It seems like one of the best ways to promote yourself, to get a lot of views, is to tell other people how to self promote better.

All those writers are living the dream: getting clicks, getting paid. But it sounds like all they’re doing is selling you the dream of doing the same: getting clicks, getting paid, while writing self-promotion advice.

It all sounds a bit like a pyramid scheme, if you ask me. And it doesn’t sound like it’d even be fun to be the writer at the top of that.

This competition is fairly new. We barely had social networks in 1999. Livejournal started that year. Friendster didn’t come around until 2002. Myspace, 2003. Facebook, 2004. Twitter, 2006. Medium, 2012.

In some ways, the new competition is actually harder than 1999’s corporate culture. Just like money, attention is a limited resource. Attention is given out according to the Pareto distribution. The idea is pretty simple: if you have a thousand followers, you have some visibility, so you’re fairly likely to get one more. If you have 5 followers, not so much.

Articles on the medium frontpage get a lot of clicks. The medium frontpage promotes content that has already gotten a lot of clicks. It’s a positive feedback loop: the more clicks an article has, the more likely it is to get another.

The first good comment on an article will sit at the top, get more claps, and stay at the top.

Past a point, the cycle is self-sustaining. Think, Kim and Kanye, who are mostly famous for being famous.

This is the same principle that explains why we’ve had 8 Spiderman movies since 1999. And 8 Saw movies. And 19 Marvel superhero movies. Studios know what sells, so they make more of it. People go to see what comes out, so it sells better.

It’s the same reason Joe Rogan has millions of podcast listeners every day, while the average podcast only gets a few. The largest podcast gets the best guests and more people tune in.

The frustrating reality is that most people end up getting no attention in this system.

You could look at followers the same way as wealth.

The richest person in the world has about 100 billion dollars. The 1000th richest has about 3 billion dollars.

The most followed Twitter account in the world has about 100 million followers. The 1000th most has about 3 million.

It’s about as easy to make a billion dollars as it is to get a million followers. Most of us are sitting at the bottom, in both cases. Half of Americans have less than $1000 in savings. 96% of twitter accounts have less than 500 followers.

In the attention economy, Joe Rogan is the equivalent of a billionaire. The rest of us are merely beggars. Please, sir, do you have 9 minutes to read my blog?

It’s harder to earn attention than it is to earn money. You can earn a corporate salary without doing much real work.

But the hustle for attention never stops. And the rewards of the attention economy are less tangible.

Ask yourself:

What would you do with a billion dollars?

Now ask:

What would you do with a million followers?

Office Space gives one possible answer:

Okay, if you’ve somehow managed to arrange threesomes because of your social media fame, I salute you. And if you can make a living from all that attention, that’s also worth it. Everyone has to eat.

For most of us, it’s just a number on a screen. It’s fun to get a few notifications in the morning. It’s fun to have a conversation or an argument. Would it be more fun to get 1,000 notifications? Or a million? Would it go to your head? Would the negative attention outweigh the positive?

I’m not sure. Getting 100 likes feels about the same, to me, as getting 10. Getting 1,000 would probably feel the same. Actor Joseph Gordon Levitt says that he’s not satisfied with his 4 million followers, it’s never enough. He seems humble and reflective about his experiences.

But we’ve also elected the Twitter narcissist in chief as president. I suspect that important national decisions get made based on what will get the president more attention.

It’s hard for the mind to comprehend feedback from thousands of people. We’re tribal monkeys, we’re designed for living in smaller groups. Most of us can’t maintain connections with more than about 150 people. Psychologists call this Dunbar’s number. It’s the average size of a wedding. Invite more people and you’ll barely know the guests, or why you’re buying their drinks.

You might get 1,000 Facebook friends if you add acquaintances and strangers. But it’s unlikely that you really know more than 150 of them. And you might even be harming your social life because you’re trying to keep track of strangers’ lives. Or because you’re comparing yourself to famous people.

How many of your 150 slots are filled by celebrities and influencers?

This brings us to Fight Club, which offered a destructive alternative to consumerism. I’ve seen some recent reviews saying that the film taught us harmful lessons about masculinity. This is partially true. Some men feel lost in the modern world. Some have aggressive impulses and no healthy outlet for them. But it’s not like the movie gave healthy role models for women, either:

Fight Club’s biggest message wasn’t about masculinity. It was about transience.

The film showed that anything you can acquire is just another thing you can lose. Just like Office Space, Fight Club asked whether consumer culture had any meaning. The things we buy don’t define us. But many of us spend years of our lives working hard to buy things we don’t need. Things that won’t satisfy us.

Fight Club shows Edward Norton’s character obsessing over his clothes and his Ikea furniture. The biggest problem with his consumerism isn’t that it’s shallow. It’s not that it’s environmentally harmful. The problem is that he is filling his condo with consumer goods because he has no idea what he actually wants to do with his life.

Fighting is a self-destructive activity. I don’t think it’s the healthiest way to spend your life. But who am I to judge? I like to climb mountains and do drugs. Both are self-destructive pursuits. They’re also opportunities to step away from everyday life for a moment and look for a new direction. These are all paths to feeling alive. Intense or traumatic experiences can sometimes help a person snap out of a routine and see the bigger picture. They can help you see through consumer culture and find your own way.

Like Norton’s character, many of us lack a strong identity or sense of direction. As traditions fade, we lack a common culture that tells us how to live. We deal with anxiety over all the possibilities we have and depression when we’re not succeeding. Capitalism steps in to tell us what we want, what we should buy to feel better. (Did YouTube serve you any ads, along with those clips?)

It’s the same damn thing online. Instagram influencers tell us how we should look, what lifestyles we should aspire to. Medium articles tell us how we should think. Facebook and Twitter give us numbers on each post, to tell us how successful it was, to tell us our worth.

Fight Club’s message isn’t just about consumer greed. The lessons apply just as well to today’s attention economy, to all of us sitting here addicted to Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and Medium.

Fight Club’s message for today would be:

You are not the number of likes you get.
You are not the number of followers you have.
The accounts you own, own you.
This is your life and it’s ending, one click at a time.

I want to end there, but I worry that take is too cynical. The thought might help you to avoid playing a harmful game. It might help you ask how you should be living. But I’m not sure it gives much of a positive model for life.

American Beauty won best picture in 1999. It also dealt with cynicism for workplace life. Lester Burns gives up on his corporate job and starts looking for simpler pleasures. He tries to get his wife to care more about his affection than about her couch:

He reverts to an adolescent existence: getting back in shape, smoking weed, and lusting after a teenage girl. The last bit goes over very poorly today, as our society tries to grapple with the ubiquity of sexual assault. Otherwise, there’s something to be said for the man’s lifestyle and his rejection of a corporate routine.

Other characters in the movie struggle, too. Lester’s wife has her own midlife crisis. His neighbor can’t deal with repressed homosexuality and jealousy.

The film’s sanest character, Ricky Fitts, spends his time filming random things, looking for the simple beauty in the world around us. He could find himself transfixed by something as simple a plastic bag, swirling in a gust of wind.

To give you a positive suggestion, I’d go back to Joseph Gordon Levitt, who argues that seeking attention makes you less creative. It’s easy to see why. Indie movies in 1999 were more creative than Spiderman reboots, even if the superhero movies make more money. Likewise, if you optimize your writing to get attention, you’ll end up writing clickbait. Or you’ll tell other people how they can get 1,000 followers.

The truest pleasure in life comes not from getting attention, but from paying attention. Paying attention to people. To the world. To the beauty in nature. To the big questions in life. Paying attention to doing one thing well, not checking 4 social media sites to see if you have any new notifications.

Life is best when you’re focused on what you’re seeing and what you’re doing, not when you’re thinking about how you look to others.

Sharing your thoughts and experiences is a satisfying part of that. Writing can be great. It’s a pleasant struggle to polish a thought, to present it, to get it right, perhaps even to make it beautiful.

But don’t write for attention. Write something because it’s true. Write something because it’s beautiful. Write it because no one else is saying it. Write it because that’s what you want to be doing with your life.

The best movies of 1999 taught us that chasing after money won’t make you happy. Today we need to learn that seeking attention online won’t, either.

You probably have no idea what I’m talking about. But don’t worry… you will someday.