Infantilized Society
Infantilized Society
I worked as a receptionist at a hotel for a few months in the Fall of 2023. The dollies in the lobby had signs on them listing the “name” of the cart (Bob was one of them) and saying “I am an important part of this hotel please return me when you are done”. I remember seeing this and thinking, Couldn’t have they just written “Please return to lobby”? Why is this contrived, infantalizing language necessary? Why are we assuming that people are so immature that they need to be spoken to like children to execute basic etiquette? Companies evoke this kind of nauseating gimmickiness in the name of “culture”. It is obviously a marketing tool, but the infantilizing language suggests a deeper attitude.
Imagine watching a flying bird. The bird itself is many yards away, but its image – as the light of the sun sears your pupils, touches you directly. A similar sensation of distance is experienced when exploring America’s commercial districts. Only in this case, the alienation originates from the hostile architecture and corporate sensibilities. The highways are lined with big box stores, dying shopping malls, fast-food chains, cheap sit-down restaurants, gas stations, seas of vehicles crammed into gigantic parking lots, and towering street lights dotting the sky. The prioritizing of vehicles in urban planning has created a scene of peculiar awe. It is a sprawl, but a commercial one, not an urban one. While urban sprawl squeezes development into small spaces, commercial sprawl inverts this. The infrastructure, designed to guide cars rather than people, takes up tremendous space. Excess defines the North American capitalist landscape. This spacial commercialization constructs an architecture of infantilization through learned helplessness and control.
I remember visiting malls as a child, when people still went to malls. I visited the Gurnee Mills mall with my parents. I was from the suburbs and I remember them feeling a bit like my first taste of a city, as if a piece of it had been sliced away, crammed into this gigantic box. I thought of the malls, the chains, and the parking lots as trial runs of the city – appetizers. It seems that is the case for certain cities, yet many Americans rely on these areas for necessities and leisure. Commercial sprawl is defined by the commercial theme park, with attractions and experiences pre-packaged to cater to the largest common denominator. People have become accustomed to living in an environment where everything is served to us pre-made because we lack the creative space and resources to create our own communities.
Numbed to a lack of autonomous, free spaces, people seldom create their own. Leisure is a product prior to being an activity, and so adults go about their lives being served food, drinks, goods, and entertainment – much like toddlers eating mashed bananas in highchairs. This creates a kind of learned passivity in which the very appearance and design of our civil spaces imbue a submissive attitude into us by blocking our ability to act upon an environment composed of commercial leviathans. Ironically, these same designs offer the middle class a false sense of superiority over the food and retail workers – giving them the experience of being served as if they were wealthy.
Our reliance on cars and taboos on mingling in the vast majority of commercial spaces routinely prevents us from collaborating with others, the primary thing children are supposed to learn in order to mature. Jane Kay in Asphalt Nation writes,
“Transported every which way from childhood through adoles
cence, young people lose their independence. They fail to expand
their horizons, to see new surroundings, or to acquire independence
and liberty on their own. The outside world dominated by the road
bores, and television or computer games beckon. ”
A demobilization begins in our childhoods, the fact that you cannot do anything without a car is a fact of life learned early. But driving is expensive; cars, their insurance, gas, and repairs make it financially untenable for many people. Indeed, car-centric infrastructure is among the more elaborate forms of class stratification. It alienates us from our communities as it corrals people into their cars, removing any threat of social interaction during outings. Our communities have been built to get people to consume rather than cooperate. On a subconscious level, this atomization has resulted in a greater sense of alienation. Individuals, cut off from others, are left feeling powerless, alone but singled out rather than abandoned. Others may be in their view but they are unmistakably alone and the institutions and businesses they move through extend far beyond their influence. So, rather than participate in their communities, most people (under capitalism) spend their time wallowing in a toxic sea of vapid entertainment. This is not to decry entertainment as something only lazy, stupid people waste time on. There is plenty of intellectually stimulating entertainment to enjoy – most people do not possess the intellectual maturity to enjoy it.
In the 2010s, influential tech firms like Google and Apple popularized an approach to workplace culture that emphasized entertaining amenities. Promotional videos showcased common areas with pool tables, games, relaxation spaces, and coffee bars. Their offices came to resemble the common areas of college dormitories more than the average cubicle design. A new narrative of adulthood emerged, get a college degree and you will work in a place with a pool table. It was obvious from the beginning that these amenities were meant to distract from low pay. Every company wanted to implement a workplace culture that appeased potentially disgruntled employees. Of course, the amenities popularized by Silicon Valley were too expensive for most firms so they made do with pizza parties, stickers, achievement boards, and other juvenile nonsense. It became known as “forced workplace fun”. There exist companies who sell preschool toys marked up by hundreds of dollars for these “team building exercises”. It is an entire industry. This approach fundamentally changed the cultural norms of employment. It cloaked otherwise average jobs in a veil of status as this new culture was juxtaposed against the image of the boring office.
After the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic entry level jobs became more exploitative while the jobs merely branded as entry level began to require years of experience. Workplace fun set the precedent for the current job market because companies could use their office amenities as a sign of exclusivity. The pandemic accelerated what was already occurring, a thinning of the workforce. Workplace fun and amenities could replace the salary as a sign of status, so, capitalists could pretend that certain jobs were worth more. Companies were able to sell people the illusion of advancement without any of the rewarding pay.
Capitalists expect unnecessary effort from workers, one must be engaged and happy in the office, participate in nonsensical, childish “morale building” games. The majority of jobs are useless, filled with nonsense, glorified time wasters. Yet, those who work those jobs are whipped to the bone when their “performance” falters. Adults are no longer adults – not if they are employees anyway. This has contributed to the increasing infantilization present in our society. Being treated like a child every day has some effect on our psyches. Impossible costs of living, particularly the inflation of housing prices, are also a significant factor. In the infantilized society, working class adults find it nearly impossible to move out of their parent’s homes. Emerging adults are then trapped in a state of perpetual late adolescence as they lack the resources to enjoy the freedoms that past generations experienced and are unable to establish themselves in their communities. They are kept under a state of constant micromanagement at work, being perpetually in training for positions that will not pay enough to put an end to their functional adolescence. They are patronized and humiliated by being made to feel as though they are still school children who need to prove that they are taking their positions seriously enough to ruin face for them.
We no longer live in a proper society, that is, our society is not designed for people to do things but for people to spend money. People are no longer given avenues to establish themselves as resources to their communities and with an entire generation of young people too immiserated to contribute, our culture has suffered from a lack of new direction. So, we are left with the shell of a culture we find ourselves in today, an endless self-referential pageant of signs meant to invoke increasingly irrelevant memories as young people are able to afford less and less of what capitalism has to offer.
Today, the novel “experiences” that were, in a time less miserable for young adults, staples of American culture are sold based off of their association with tradition. Theme parks are a perfect example of this – because theme parks have an appeal based in tradition, the tradition of going to theme parks as a child, not based in the attractions offered. This is particularly true of popular franchises but applies to all cultural commodities. Increasingly, cultural products are reliant on the appeal of culture rather than the utility of the product. Capitalism glorifies, codifies, and generates new, inorganic traditions. It creates a pseudoculture while degrading actual culture because the construction is always at least loosely based off of organic culture. Real culture is organic pseudoculture is not. Pseudoculture is generated, produced, contrived.
Pseudoculture involves the propagandization of hyperproductivity. Pop culture has been replaced with pseudoculture, a simulacrum of popularity. Pop music, once criticized for its glorification of hedonism, has been transformed into a collection of capitalist anthems glorifying wealth and productivity. Our culture’s art and music is being increasingly simplified. This process has accelerated as the music industry is being increasingly funded by advertising and disseminated by streaming platforms such as Spotify – where a musician’s success is based on how many times their fans replay their songs. This results in music becoming more simplistic, easier to remember, more earwormy. Our entertainment is unchallenging and we subconsciously lose our intelligence, patience, and taste as a result of it.
Capitalism creates pseudocommunities, communities which are not actual communities but are instead groups based around a single shared interest. These are crudely called communities despite hardly resembling communities at all. Actual communities provide support systems, but when groups begin and end with the niche in question (as they often do online) the members take on a lesser importance. These communities that do not function as support systems can only portray a community, so when people are in need of actual community their own centers are closed off to them. Capitalism generates microcultures based loosely off of association, not the shared vulnerability that drives the communal aspect of a community. Now, people are “members” of many communities but belong truly to none.
Under capitalism, the internet accelerates this tendency and elevates it to the level seen today. As people’s social networks are replaced with pseudocommunities, they will ironically lose their actual communities and as a result lose many of their social skills. They will no longer feel the need to collaborate, to interact with people they don’t want to, or to work through disagreements. As people lose their social skills, particularly their collaborative ones, and lose their sense of empathy they lose their maturity. As our social networks thin, the value of our friends and neighbors vanishes from our memory. People begin to think of each other as products rather than people. This is arguably one of the reasons people are so socially reactionary today. Dating apps are great examples of this phenomena. People’s profiles supposedly act as summaries, a few pictures and a description of themselves provides us with an illusion of information. It fools us into believing that we know enough about the person to make the decision to try to contact them. So, rather than a potential lover’s initial presentation as a mystery a potential lover is presented as an advertisement. Prior to the popularization of dating apps, this objectification still existed it was just enforced more by general misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic attitudes. Now, those same attitudes have been codified via the commercial presentation of human beings as potential products. Human beings are presented in much the same way a fancy dinner is presented as it is placed onto a table.
This marketplace of culture is reflected in our environment, most of what we experience in the average American city is ads. Gimmicks and memes dominate our consciousness, but this problem has been brought up before. This is merely one stop on the inevitable capitalist road to ruin. It is inevitable that a system founded on the expectation of exponential growth would eventually farm and eat its own symbology. A wealth of cultural information and meaning has been gutted, made into a parody of itself. Capitalism presents a vast wasteland (the market is a wasteland as it only generates waste products, the waste of money left over from someone with too much of it) of meaningless symbols, meaningless ideas, and then pretends that this is reality and that reality is meaningless. The average firm is but the product of waste, funded by what was left over after a comfortable income was reached. We are living in rich people’s crap while they audaciously treat us like children being guided through an amusement park.
Most people were bright children, everyone is bright as a child. We speak as if aging is the cause of this dimming of the childish light in adulthood but capitalism is to blame. Childish light is not supposed to stay youthful, it is supposed to mature, it is supposed to become teenage light, then adult light, then elderly light. It is when this light is not permitted to mature that causes it to dim, like a fire whose kindling is not replenished. When a person is never permitted to be in charge of their own life they never develop the skill and perspective that matures a person. They remain children and they grow dim, that is to say, they lose their creativity, their sharpness, their imagination, and eventually their grip on reality. We see this with the mental decay of the elderly, while the mind tends to decline as a person ages, this declining tends to happen much earlier under late capitalism – with people losing their sense of empathy, imagination, and conceptual flexibility nearly as soon as they become accustomed to adult life. Childhood is valorized as the best era of a person’s life (because they do not yet have to work) and adulthood is immediately associated with aging, with being unable to enjoy the freedoms of childhood. Adulthood is equated to the death of fun, of joy, of creativity, and imagination precisely because a culture that valued these things would not look favorably upon capitalism. Adults are expected to put their needs aside for the needs of their company, they are no longer truly people.
This is not what adulthood is supposed to be, adulthood is, like childhood, still a journey of discovery but when a person loses the spark of joy that comes with discovery and spontaneity they cease to develop. This is why so many adults today are better described as adult-children. When people are no longer able to explore, when their lives are no longer enriched with novelty, all they can do is wallow in the memories of past novel experiences. Adults obsessed with Disney, superheros, toys, and “nostalgia”, are clinging to the sense of discovery they experienced as children. Many adults have it even worse, losing their interests and hobbies altogether. People lose their sense of curiosity because what do you have to be curious about when your life is inescapably predictable? When you don’t need to be curious because all the information and direction you need comes from your superiors?
It is important that we maintain an opposition to complacency. We should acknowledge that this way of life is unacceptable and unsustainable. We deserve to be adults. We deserve to live lives full of color and rich in experiences, to be in charge of our own lives.
People can only mature when they are able to experience autonomy and face the challenges that come with it. A person who is treated like a child will never mature because they are never given the space and opportunity to do so. I worry that we are underestimating how severe the consequences of an infantile population are by merely calling them infantile. It is more than mere childishness, it is a degradation of the human capacity for intelligence, empathy, and creativity. It destroys the spirit and undercuts the achievements of societies. Only in a society where people are allowed to occupy themselves autonomously, spending their time according to their wishes and managing their own productivity can people reach their full potential. A society like capitalism, where people are robbed of their time and agency for the majority of their adult lives, will inevitably degrade its people.
