If the price goes up a bit (even if their wages more than match it) the price increase just feels like a random, unfair, morale-reducing loss. I conjecture this is a big contributor to the American Vibecession.
I think the stronger contributor is that society feels less worthwhile now. To use a specific example, even teachers are almost unanimously declaring that the K-12 public education system is awful now, despite vastly higher inflation-adjusted spending than when American education topped the charts worldwide.
If you're a taxpayer, you put in, say 20 percent of your income every year. When you see schools full of bright-eyed, inspired young people brimming with greatness, this feels like being part of a wonderful effort to build a greater future, and your morale goes up. When you see schools such that even the people whose salaries depend on believing in public education consider them a zoo, things are different When tax day comes around, you see your money - your year's worth of effort - completely squandered, and you don't feel like that part of your effort was worthwhile at all. You aren't immediately worse off, but it's a massive, immediate drop in morale.
Looking at footage of my city 60 years ago, I can see this in microcosm all around me. My work would feel a lot more worthwhile if the bridges it funded weren't crumbling, and if there weren't trash on the sides of the roads.
Not to mention, increasing spending on wars I don't want and cutting funding for some of the worthwhile things the US gov does
Wars are a particularly hard thing because of course they might sometimes be necessary, but here is the other kicker - feelings of disenfranchisement, of lacking control over the political process (as in meaningful control; if voting one side or the other feels like it always results in the same policies anyway that's enough), mean that any successes are not also your successes, and you can't trust any promise that this particular effort is important and worthwhile for you too.
Let's not use polite euphemisms here.
GP didn't mean wars in general (though they're very often bad!), they were clearly referring to the Trump administration starting a massively costly war with unclear objectives and no realistic way to achieve the stated ones, tanking the global economy and triggering a likely famine a year down the line, right after cutting funding for many life-saving programs at USAID with the stated purpose of cutting spending.
In that context, "they might sometimes be necessary" and "any successes are not also your successes" are not going to ever be relevant.
Fair, but in general the US have been waging random wars for a long time now and this argument is one I've seen used often (and to be clear I think most of the wars I've been alive to see were also bad). It's just that now, specifically, it's especially egregious. Even if we conceded that taking Iran's nuclear ambitions down a peg was absolutely critical and that acting with force right now was the only way to achieve that (debatable), obviously the means of acting are ridiculously ineffectual, messy and incompetent.
, they were clearly referring to the Trump administration starting a massively costly war with unclear objectives and no realistic way to achieve the stated ones
I think it applies cleanly to every U.S. intervention and proxy war in the past four decades - not singling out one issue. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and the list goes on. The proxy conflict in Eastern Europe seems popular on LW, but it is very unpopular with the core fighting-age male demographic that is meant to be most invested in a nation's military success or failure.
Of course, the Iran war is terrible as well, but it's one on a long list. None of the wars that Americans bleed and pay for are in the interest of America, and most are to its outright detriment. This isn't an isolated or partisan issue.
The proxy conflict in Eastern Europe seems popular on LW, but it is very unpopular with the core fighting-age male demographic that is meant to be most invested in a nation's military success or failure.
I would maybe not lump together "propping up a country defending itself from an aggression by a different superpower" with all the shit that the US started on its own, often based on questionable if not outright false assumptions.
If we're talking about the damage done by small-but-visible crimes like fare-dodging, you might also wish to consider the impact of quietly normalized moral atrocities like the treatment of homeless people in a city like LA, or the blatant corruption and extractivism of the current federal government. These are deeply corrosive to societal morale in ways that go beyond merely failing to reward the everyman's effort.
Morale comes from having the nice things in your life correlated with effort.
Well said. The flip side is learned helplessness https://dictionary.apa.org/learned-helplessness.
Morale comes from having the nice things in your life correlated with effort.
Hmm I think this is only sort of true, and my disagreement stems from my disagreement with the provided definition of morale.
Morale is, roughly, "the belief that if you work hard, your conditions will improve."
My first pass rephrasal is:
Morale is, roughly, "the belief that if you try, your conditions will improve."
I want to capture that sometimes you want to work smarter, not harder, and indeed, getting great outcomes for low-effort-but-smart solutions is extremely satisfying and seems like a central type of morale-building experience imo. Admittedly you can interpret “effort” and “work hard” in ways that automatically capture this, but I feel like this point was missing.
(This is more a response to the post than your comment, I like the connection to learned helplessness.)
I understand the point here, but I don't really think that "try" really changes the meaning much in the direction you want, because of course you can also try really hard without taking a break to think that perhaps your attempt vector isn't quite the right one. It's functionally identical to the term work here.
Perhaps a more accurate phrasing for your interpretation involves "doing the right things", which I think compounds both the choice element and the hard-work element. (This also ties the word morale nicely to the word moral, an etymological sibling.)
I think the core important belief is that your actions have consequences, and that those consequences matter. To be fair to the post, I think the original definition with "working hard" is a respectable simplification that boils it down to the component that we can really control longer for our life as a whole.
If we do decompose the problem into the components hard work and good decisions, then hard work is the part which we need dopamine for. Which we need to try and get our body to produce for us through habit. It is this that I think the post is actually about, and thus why that is a fair definition to choose.
Although I agree with you that there are cases where the choice component is important to factor in. That component is, I think, controlled much more by how smart you are, both intrinsically and from an having environment that boosts your decision-making skills (for example: parents that teach good life lessons, or role models that show you how they make good decisions). I think this is somewhat already conditioned on when we talk about the morale of a specific individual. But it could potentially be important when comparing people(s), depending on how much it actually matters for morale overall.
Very tangential, but this made me think that perhaps the latter is also one of the reasons that less intelligent people are more prone to addictions (for example problematic gambling, adjusted for socioeconomic factors). My hypothesis here is that if, on average, your effort correlates less with reward due to making poor decisions, the scale of reward required to disrupt your standard morale is also lower. This is pure conjecture of course; I just thought of it and wanted to share.
1I agree that 'hard work' does not precisely capture that which high morale systems reward. 'Effort' might be closer, but rewarding someone who is effortlessly friendly or effortlessly smart (when either is required for the job) would not hurt morale.
I would perhaps phrase it as the alignment of perceived incentives of the individuals to the goals of their employers. You get what you reward.
For example, a terrible workplace in which it is common knowledge that promotions are the result of having sex with your superior might seem low morale, but strictly speaking is not. Over time, you will attract a lot of people who are highly motivated. Specifically, motivated to have sex with their bosses and land cushy bullshit jobs. Naturally, for most organizations this is orthogonal to their mission, so as far as advancing the interests of the org are concerned, morale would be low, just as if promotions were assigned by lottery.
This makes me think of my current job, which I think is somewhat typical:
- Compensation tracks an industry percentile
- Big payout from future exit is a lottery largely disconnected from performance and even level
- Level is more about ability to multitask and choose a different type of role rather than excellence in current role, and there are perhaps 85% fewer available seats in the next rank
- It's very unclear how much better one employee is than another past a certain point
My effort on a month to month basis has effectively zero impact on my earnings
So the only thing left is whether I'm employed or fired
I can get employed again rapidly, and my employers know this
So they occasionally signal in subtle ways to indicate that you might be in some slight danger of being fired
So employees tend towards jobs that are more interesting, because at least they are intrinsically energizing even if the job in the abstract is morale-draining
But then per market efficiency, the most broadly interesting jobs pay worse and treat employees worse (similar to the music or gaming industries)
I think most people fully understand this over time and find it deeply draining in a meta sense
Almost every company is playing the meta and it's so tedious and unsatisfying
There is no escape, it's just a suboptimal Nash equilibrium
Overall it's fine, more of a penumbra of Moloch than anything else
But at times I find it oh so tiresome
Not sure to what extent I endorse the following, but a thought I've had on this topic:
Conservation of expected evidence means that unless you're reasoning in a predictably incorrect manner or outright deceiving yourself, you can't deliberately change a belief in a particular direction - any test that could disprove it must also be able to reinforce it, depending on the result.
Insofar as morale is "the belief that if you work hard, your conditions will improve", there's no principled way to, on expectation increase it. You can try working hard and see if your conditions improve, and if they do, you'll gain morale, but if they don't, you'll presumably lose morale.
And this is fine, actually! We tend to presuppose that high morale is good, but sometimes, your conditions are not responsive to being improved by hard work, and when that is the case, isn't it worth noticing?
So perhaps the lesson is not to try to raise morale, but to keep at least a little bit of an open mind on the question of whether hard work will prove worthwhile, and to be willing to update on that as your situation changes.
I don't think the OP was using "belief" to mean Bayesian credence; more like "what your System 1 expects". Also, you can definitely make it the case that your conditions improving is correlated with effort, and the OP gives several examples of how to do this. Changing the territory is a pretty good way to change your (approximate cached proxies for) beliefs in a predictable direction.
Well, what you can do is put yourself into situations in which you expect better feedback. E.g. maybe you get a feeling that your effort goes to waste because your workplace is shit and it does go to waste, but changing jobs might help that, and maybe see you better rewarded for what you accomplish.
Of course if after enough attempts you seem to always notice that things don't work out either you have a systematic bias or maybe the world around you is, indeed, pretty fucked.
I think one thing you can do is get involved in spaces and activities in which it is known that effort and diligence give results.
The classic example is exercise. Other examples could be tidying your home, the author gives the example of cooking for yourself.
Personally, during Covid I was one of those people who got really into chess. I did a LOT of practice puzzles and developed a sharp tactical instinct, as well as a sense of gritty perseverance and attention to detail. More importantly, I do feel it improved my sense that “I can get better at things, look, that’s the graph of my chess rating”.
I think it makes sense to find areas of life where feedback is faster, improve morale, and port that over to careers and relationships, where feedback is slower and often full of setbacks. You might get an amazing job, only to find that your company does layoffs, and you struggle to find a similar job and have to take a step back into less interesting work for a time (I am personally in the middle of this, lol)
Tiding one's home is a bad example. Cleaning it doesn't really stop it from getting messy again, especially if you live with other people that make messes.
I read this essay not as a guide to improve your own morale but as an explanation of yet another one of the ways society is currently fucked up.
I think you're getting at something here, but I'd frame it a little differetly, notably that the learning from the experience of low morale could be that continuing hard work for hard work sake is not the answer to improving your conditions.
I think many of us are conditioned to want to "do our part," especially if you find yourself to be a particularly value-driven person. Unfortunately one only need a cursory understanding of game theory to know if your strategy ("work harder when times are tough to improve material conditions") is predictable, it will be exploited or, to put it more generously, "priced in" to labor models.
There's a halfway decent book on this called "Exit, Voice, or Loyalty," and I think at its root, low morale is a signal that Loyalty and/or Voice are not being respected, and an Exit might be the necessary reframe to preserve correlation between effort and outcome.
Agree and I think pervasive low morale is causing much of the split between material conditions being fine and people reporting that they feel they are doing poorly. Effort can get you stasis, but it doesn't feel like it can get you meaningful level ups (for many people, myself included often).
Curated. I found this a nice, sharp articulation of a simple concept. I think I had maybe heard this once before, but not with the specific label "morale" attached. This feels like a decent explanation for a few related psychological behaviors.
Part III has some specific claims, which I haven't thought that much about, but I like that in addition to spelling out a simple model J Bostock shows how it applies at various scales, including little wrinkly details (i.e. "people don't understand nominal inflation").
I really like the idea, but wish you had some examples/applications. The obvious ones are to companies, but a lot of those have already been done. Instead I wonder: suppose I was designing a society, or a subculture, or got a couple friends to do cool projects with every week. How do I keep up morale? Likewise, how do I improve my own morale?
I also think that some people naturally have more morale & less morale. Not sure if genetic or environment, but some people can just suffer through defeat upon defeat, others break down on the smallest hurdle.
This is closely related to the cognitive psychology concept of "agency". CBT and its variants are essentially agency-training programs — they teach people to notice where they're treating controllable things as uncontrollable, and to act differently. The efficacy data for these is solid and the effects persist. What you need to develop agency (morale) is to simply put work in something that turns into a success. That first win doesn't have to be big, it just has to be real and self-attributed (not luck, not someone else doing it for them). That's basically the whole mechanism behind behavioral activation in depression treatment — you don't wait for motivation, you engineer small achievable actions and let the feedback loop rebuild itself.
And I do think something I'm updating on is how much bad jobs fuck you up. Like a friend of mine is in a weird situation where he gets less than 20 hours of work a week (this is a fulltime position) and even that work seems very pointless. He claims it's a great deal because he can just watch tv in his off time... but he doesn't actually seem happy. And I think having a lack of "wins" probably has something to do with that. It's also hard because at this point, I'm not sure how realistic finding a different job is for him. He can't really point to skills gained or accomplishments at his current job and he's depressed and doesn't really have the confidence to sell himself in an interview. So...
He needs a better hobby than TV.
Unfortunately it's very difficult to make skills learned from hobbies legible to potential employers.
This usefully explains why getting through my Anki stack early each day provides a morale boost, though maybe signals of actual quality are less important than the feeling of being active. This is absolutely my experience with food - I experience morale boosts from making my own food, but I have extremely philistine taste in it; a peanut butter sandwich tastes about 90% as good as the tastiest food I have ever had. The fact that eating a peanut butter sandwich I made myself is more rewarding than (arbitrarily good thing someone else made) means the effort-reward relationship must be *more* direct than one mediated by quality, since all food is basically just calories to me.
I suspect most people really overindex on signals from others, which are very lossy. When you're playing the oboe, you can see both your effort inputs and how we'll you're doing. When you work on alignment, you can see your effort inputs. If someone else is playing the oboe you can see their performance outputs. If someone else is working on alignment you can't see either.
There might be a narrow strip of sensitivity/taste here that is ideal and motivating and also guides towards greater quality. I strum around a little bit on the acoustic guitar, because all strumming on an acoustic guitar sounds beautiful to me, but for the same reason my brain will never gradient descend towards better guitar playing; as with cooking I will always remain, in delighted incompetence, at the peanut butter sandwich level. I'm much more sensitive to prose quality, but for the same reason it's quite painful to really deliberately practice my own prose, so I don't improve at that either. Same applies to social skills.
It's a truism that the most effective way to kill morale is to reward lazy or incompetent employees. You can do one better if you reward active sabotage.
If active sabotage harms morale (in the more general sense), that's a different mechanism than the one you're identifying - active sabotage by definition involves more effort than laziness.
A reason lazy or incompetent people often do get rewarded:
The Inverse Peter Principle: instead of being promoted, the best employees become irreplaceable and become stuck at their current level forever. The only people who are promoted are those who are too incompetent to be allowed to stay in their position but not incompetent enough to outright fire.
I want to add that helping out someone with low morale seems like a very high impact intervention to me, if you are in a good position to help! Low morale predicts even lower morale, both because there is likely something in the environment causing it, and because you have less desire to act or contribute effort, which starves you of positive rewards. In that regard, it is similar to depression, but far more people are in position to help someone with morale rather than with treating depression, by rewarding someone neglected fairly for their contributions.
John Wentworth has written about a minor depression presenting as extremely low morale amongst rationalist types.
Would appreciate if anyone could send me a link (or links) to John's writing on this.
Love this type of post as I think (at scale) these kind of topics around mindset can have extremely high impact. Wanted to point out some good (and medium) resources that discuss this topic:
- For point II: The Progress Principle talks about how taking the time to recognize progress - how far you've come due to your efforts has evidence for sustaining/increasing motivation (and morale) substantially. In my experience of managing people in the private sector, I can anecdotally attest.
- Contrary to this post, I argue in my series on Rational Enlightenment that you don't need anything to be motivated. And that you may be able to push through the largest obstacles you face, paradoxically, when you know that you don't have to - when there's no external (or self) coercion. In addition to this, I claim complete fulfilment/happiness are immediately available. Yes, immediately 🙂
- For point III around economic growth/inflation: Behavioral Economics and Prospect Theory from Daniel Kahneman lays out an explanation for this very nicely that basically shows how humans weight losses more heavily than an equally sized gain. So, it can make sense how a pay rise that matches inflation in prices hurts rather than feeling neutral.
Morale comes from having the nice things in your life correlated with effort. Cooking your own dinner is basically microdosing returns to investing effort: if you put in effort, you eat steak frites with peppercorn sauce. If you don't, you get eat chicken and rice.
Sounds a lot to me like “Selbstwirksamkeit” (German, ≈self-efficacy): The feeling you have when you experience having a (positive) impact on your life/the world after having given an effort.
Pertaining specifically to the case (make sure everyone doesn’t die), there’s an interesting question regarding rewards: as long as the catastrophe hasn’t occurred, are we awaiting an extremely sparse negative reward, or a continuous positive reward? Both cases would not be useful for adjusting morale.
Of course, this ignores small intermediate wins (like gaining information), but such subgoals I think largely rely on intrinsic satisfaction of doing the task instead of their (unquantifiable) attribution to the end goal.
Definitely, what you define as morale can have a big impact. You are pointing out a central issue: the belief that you have impact on improving your conditions is paramount to this.
However, if you perceive a fast-changing global society, instead of a slow-moving local society, it is only logical to conclude that your own actions have almost no effect on your outcomes, especially if projected over a longer timespan.
I told my teacher friend yesterday that what she is teaching her pupils (5-12) will be largely useless to their actual functioning 15 years from now. School is generally a very conservative institution led by conservative people who, by and large, are still preparing kids for traditional jobs. Things are changing way to fast to expect to have a create a curriculum that spans 10-15 years and that you expect to last say, for 20 years. Those are the timescales schoold operate upon, but that doesn't match reality.
I think if you are young and thinking about your future, you are lacking both clear direction (values have become diffuse and not shared) and the world is telling you things way outside of your influence are changing so rapidly that making a long term plan is useless anyway. In short, people are put into survival mode, and research has shown clearly what happens when that is the case: you focusing on short-term gains and personal pleasures.
Playing computer RPG games is nice because you have the experience points and you level up, so you are rewarded for whatever you do. Perhaps you were fighting monsters on the wrong part of the map, but still the experience made you a little stronger, which will be useful when you come to the right part of the map.
Learning sometimes feels that way, too. Maybe the thing I've just learned is not useful immediately, but it is going to be useful in some way one day.
But sometimes learning feels bad, for example learning yet another programming framework that you suspect will be thrown away a few years later. That way, you kinda don't learn to become better, only to remain as good as you were. (Depends on the perspective: yes, now you know N+1 frameworks which is more than N; but only the latest framework matters on the job market.)
It seems to me that people in relationships sometimes do the thing that when one partner starts doing more X, the other partner instinctively compensates by doing less X. Which is demoralizing for the former, because doing more X does not lead to actually having more X. (The former wants more X, for the latter the current X is enough.)
In traditional cultures, greater age = higher status. Your status increases automatically, which probably makes you happy with the way the society is organized. (Being young sucks, but even then you have the vision of continuous improvement.)
"If the price goes up a bit (even if their wages more than match it) the price increase just feels like a random, unfair, morale-reducing loss. " I do agree that some people will perceive this as a loss even if they have more purchasing power at the end. However, if average prices go up by say 5% and average wages go up by 6%, there will probably be a fair number of people who's wages went up less then the prices they were paying (normal distribution curves being what they).
It doesn't have to be cooking, basically any hobby works like this, as long as you get returns to effort. It might be art, or weightlifting, or whatever. You just need to keep reminding your brain that effort has a purpose.
When I was a young precocious type, nothing I did in traditional academic areas seemed to reflect a return on effort, because I was one of those breeze-through-it-upside-down types working at too low of a difficulty level. Later in life, I did need to pursue academics in ways that required a lot of effort. I have always believed that this was only possible for me because as a child I was also studying classical piano, where I learned how it felt for grinding away to lead to clear improvement.
At the same time, it's definitely been the case at various times in my life that I have had an inappropriately internal locus of control. Believing that one's own agency can accomplish things that it can't can be pernicious too – at least for individual mental health.
I think you are right — for most people.
But let us also remember that some people are not driven by outcomes but by the work itself. The craftsman and the artist. I’ve worked with people who just love the work itself so much that they need no external motivation.
I wonder if a better formulation is that morale is roughly, "the belief that you are winning for a reason" with a boost from (1) contributing and (2) effort.
I prefer this for a few reasons:
- 'Winning' incorporates both the societal and the individual and folds in cases where you might achieve some goals but not see material change in your conditions. Plus, it incorporates in-group biases and the shared sense of victory when you support a team. For example, when you support a sports team and you win, you feel high morale even though your condition has likely not actually improved as a result.
- 'Winning' also incorporates the importance of mission alignment. Your condition might get better from effort, but you might still not feel a morale boost unless your effort and condition are correlated with what you believe in. You might work 80 hour weeks in a bank and make a bigger bonus, or fly an extra mission and get closer to being discharged, but feel absolutely demoralised because you don't believe that the effort you are doing gets you to 'winning'. 'Winning' is more than improved conditions. Literature around morale suggests that this kind of mission alignment is pretty important.
- 'Contributing' and 'effort' both seem meaningful but distinct additions to morale. The boost from 'I was the taxi driver for the lead player of the team I support and they won because I got him there on time' is more contribution oriented. The boost from 'I have been supporting this team and going to their games for twenty years, and this is the first time they won' is effort oriented. Both may see huge morale boosts, but don't involve similar levels of contribution / effort.
I am curious about how morale interacts with purpose. Whatever a person experiences as a purpose in their life determines *what* they find valuable, and thus morale depends not only on material conditions but also perception of return on effort through lens of purpose.
Perhaps that is why people who appreciate the process regardless of outcomes experience more positive emotions than those who are after the result - their morale is perpetually rising once their mind finds the act of doing itself enjoyable.
On the other hand, I am also curious about how the act of scrolling social media fits into the post and comment. Obviously, for the vast majority of people, there is no (conscieous) purpose to what they are doing, and therefore the post implies they should naturally cease with the behavior. Hidden purpose of scrolling is delaying pain or certain emotions, so that is the drive behind scrolling, lining up nicely with theories predicting that once underlying problem is solved, a person can shake off any addiction much easier.
Now that I think about it, both the commend and the post remind me of the way of thinking from biology and psychology that almost all traits have (had) the adaptive value in a given environment, and that's why they persist.
Morale comes from having the nice things in your life correlated with effort. Cooking your own dinner is basically microdosing returns to investing effort: if you put in effort, you eat steak frites with peppercorn sauce. If you don't, you get eat chicken and rice.
Thank you so much for articulating this!
I got into an argument with people at a rationalist flophouse over their consumption of Huel. My argument was basically "I don't care how nutritive it is, you lose some kind of sovereignty over your own life if you eat nothing but liquid food pre-processed in some factory somewhere." Someone else asked "But what if I know exactly the list of ingredients and how it's made? Then I still control what ends up in my body?" and I couldn't articulate why I disagreed.
I think it does something profound to your agency to have physical control over the basic inputs of your life. Stuff like getting food delivered at home, eating only pre-cooked meals, getting driven around everywhere as a kid (or an adult!), are things that I'm pretty sure erode your agency way more than we realize.
Morale is a group thing. Humans are a social animal. Low morale implies that there is either something wrong with the group or something wrong with me. Either would be an existential threat in the ancestral environment. If there's something wrong with me then low morale should incentivise me to change just as pain incentivises me to stop doing whatever I am are doing that causes me pain. If there's something wrong with the group then, in the ancestral environment, I'm in deep s**t and there's not much I can do about it apart from leave the group and set out on my own, which is almost certainly fatal. This may well be the cause of people sinking into low morale apathy - the equivalent of a sick animal wandering off to die.
I felt this article conveyed over-simplified Rand-ian leanings as a basis for defining morale: Working Hard = High Morale, Receiving Charity = Low Morale. I can't disagree more. I think NickH hit on what I was thinking as I read the article, which is much more situational and nuanced.
I agree that morale is primarily a group mechanism, and while it can be experienced separately (and differently) by a single member of a group, it affects the culture and cohesion of a team in a contagious fashion. Good team morale boosts everyone -- even the low-performers (or those with personally lower morale, to a lesser degree) -- while bad team morale can bring down even the cheeriest of cheery team members.
Additionally, I believe morale is more a gauge of personal perception of equity than simply the results of "hard work", especially since the definition of the "hard work" is incredibly subjective. Two different people can put in "hard work" and achieve very different levels of productivity. Additionally, both people can experience very different feelings of "accomplishment" independent of actual output. However, if they are both being compensated the same for the same task, feelings of inequity breed poor morale.
In group dynamics that include differing levels of authority or power, such as the standard workplace, it's lack of proper recognition of results and improper compensation that breeds poor morale, even though the final product for both workers may ultimately yield the same results, but in different timeframes.
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Lastly, the crux of the current decline in American morale involves these statements:
- You can do one better if you reward active sabotage.
- There should be a hack for societal morale, though, and it's economic growth.
I would argue that lack of true accountability for active sabotage, once discovered, is far more damaging to morale than the sabotage itself, and is in itself a type of reward for the saboteur. As for economic growth being a hack for societal morale, when general economic growth is being generated by the same untouchable saboteurs, does it really fix morale? I would say it does not, especially since the growth is so often lopsided in its distribution.
There's been a lot of people trying to understand the "American Vibecession" through many different lenses. I find it very interesting to read about. I've found some great ideas on this from Peter Turchin, a US professor that studies history through datasets
His data-driven proxy for immiseration is height, which is lower for a malnourished population. He also uses life expectancy when the data is available (modern times). In America, life expectancy has been turning down since ~2017. This coincides with a jump in "deaths of dispair", things like suicide and drug overdoses. I think this strongly points to a Vibecession with data
The vibecession is also about the shift from robust to vulnerable forms of fulfillment of minimum basket of goods (random combining an obscure concept from Sklansky's No Limit Hold 'em Theory and Practice and a general economic concept, but no, these are meaningful formalisms and they do go together). I get just in time paychecks to pay monthly rent from my several gig jobs that could cease being tenable if the price of gas varies too much, or my seventh one-year-long tech startup job or whatever. This may be an issue of the semantics of precarity becoming visible because the actual fundamentals of finances are unobfuscated and not there actually being more precarity. But a second thing also happens: slightly smarter people become aware that different forms of financialization can confuse the semantics of different people and obfuscate fundamentals. And this thought process can be further generalized. And then people start seeing demons everywhere.
One particularly pernicious condition is low morale. Morale is, roughly, "the belief that if you work hard, your conditions will improve." If your morale is low, you can't push through adversity. It's also very easy to accidentally drop your morale through standard rationalist life-optimization.
It's easy to optimize for wellbeing and miss out on the factors which affect morale, especially if you're working on something important, like not having everyone die. One example is working at an office that feeds you three meals per day. This seems optimal: eating is nice, and cooking is effort. Obvious choice.
Example
But morale doesn't come from having nice things. Consider a rich teenager. He gets basically every material need satisfied: maids clean, chefs cook, his family takes him on holiday four times a year. What happens when this kid comes up against something really difficult in school? He probably doesn't push through.
"Aha", I hear you say. "That kid has never faced adversity. Of course he's not going to handle it well." Ok, suppose he gets kicked in the shins every day and called a posh twat by some local youths, but still goes into school. That's adversity, will that work? Will he have higher morale now? I don't think so.
Now, what about if he plays the cello in the school orchestra. Or he plays for the school football team. I think that might work, even if he's not the best kid in the school at either of those things. It's not about having nice things or having bad things, it's about something else
II
Morale comes from having the nice things in your life correlated with effort. Cooking your own dinner is basically microdosing returns to investing effort: if you put in effort, you eat steak frites with peppercorn sauce. If you don't, you get eat chicken and rice.
It doesn't have to be cooking, basically any hobby works like this, as long as you get returns to effort. It might be art, or weightlifting, or whatever. You just need to keep reminding your brain that effort has a purpose.
This is especially important when you work in an area (like not having everyone die) where the returns on effort are hard to come by. Good software engineering looks like solving a PR in a day or so (or whatever you people do). Good alignment research might mean chasing a concept for weeks, only to have it fail.
The early stages of dating can also induce low morale. Sometimes, things just fall apart due to random incompatibilities which aren't your fault. Long-term relationships are much less like this: you can just do things (plan dates with your partner and enjoy their company).
John Wentworth has written about a minor depression presenting as extremely low morale amongst rationalist types. I don't think you should wait until it gets that bad before you improve your morale. I think you should think about it now.
III
Morale doesn't just matter on an individual level, it also matters on the scale of whole societies. In this case, it doesn't just matter whether an individual gets rewarded for effort, it matters whether they see others rewarded for effort---and whether or not they see others punished for a lack of effort.
It's a truism that the most effective way to kill morale is to reward lazy or incompetent employees. You can do one better if you reward active sabotage. The harm of small but visible crimes (like fare-dodging on public transport) is, in part, the damage to the morale of everyone around.
There should be a hack for societal morale, though, and it's economic growth. People generally put some amount of effort into their work. If they can afford a better car each year, they'll attribute that to their own grit, and not an increase in the productivity of a Chinese factory.
Unfortunately, there's a twist in the twist. People are really awful at understanding nominal inflation. If the price goes up a bit (even if their wages more than match it) the price increase just feels like a random, unfair, morale-reducing loss. I conjecture this is a big contributor to the American Vibecession.