America is obsessed with work.
On average, Americans work longer hours than other developed countries, have shorter vacations,
get less in benefits, and retire later.
This has little to do with needing to be productive, but with America’s weird views about the
need to work in and of itself. The poor have to work for survival.
Contrary to most other societies, the rich in America actually work the longest average
workweek.
These are people who choose to work when they have the privilege of taking more leisure
time, but many of these people either derive their sense of identity exclusively from work,
or are in such competitive environments that they work longer just to stay on top.
But the fixation on work, and on valorizing overworking, is present across the socio-economic
spectrum in America, despite it not making people happier, and leading to stress, fatigue,
and mental illness.
Americans are obsessed with work, and their addiction is killing them.
In the 1930s, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that advancements in technology
would mean that, by the time his grandchildren entered the workforce, they would only have
to work a 15 hour work week.
As more and more of the tasks needed for humanity’s survival became automated, he predicted that
we’d shorten the work week to accommodate for this until nobody had to work at all.
So why didn’t it turn out this way?
Why is America a place that’s obsessed with working long, hard hours, despite the fact
that it has more than enough to ensure everyone’s basic necessities?
Part One: Limitless The 2011 Bradley Cooper film Limitless is
the purest expression of America’s fixation with work.
It is… in some ways… a completely forgotten film — there are no hardcore Limitless fans
out there, except in one specific way we’ll get to.
But the film is also the most widely-known entry in a franchise that is two decades old,
which is in constant contradiction with itself.
I’ll just be scratching the surface of the franchise in this video, and getting into
the rest of it in my next one.
The premise of the movie, if you’re unaware, is as follows.
Eddie Morra is a single unsuccessful writer living in New York.
Only a writer.
He loses his girlfriend because he’s not bringing in enough money.
He’s suffering from writer’s block, and he’s behind on the rent.
Then he runs into an old friend who gives him a drug called NZT.
NZT is a smart pill that will radically improve his intellect.
On the drug, Eddie is able to do everything he wants.
He’s able to finish his novel in a matter of days, he becomes charismatic and well-liked,
learns languages easily, becomes an expert on any subject.
In a way, the premise is very similar to a superhero film.
Introduce a human character.
Give them a special ability.
Let the audience fantasize about what it would be like to have that power.
But superhero stories are also usually basic morality tales.
Spider-Man’s famous phrase summarizes the entire genre.
“With great power, comes great responsibility.”
The hero, if they are a hero, must use their power to do good in the world.
Whatever they do tells the audience what the movie believes is moral.
So what does Eddie Morra do when given the ability to do anything?
He tries to get rich on the stock market.
Part Two: Neoliberalism
The story of Eddie Morra is the ultimate fantasy of a Neoliberal society.
Neoliberalism is an ideology that took over western economies in the 1980s.
The idea is that government should stay out of the marketplace as much as possible.
It should be a “free” market with very little regulations.
Thus, every individual is free to rise or fall within the system according to their
merits.
That’s the sales-pitch for the ideology anyway: it hasn’t really worked out like
that.
Turns out that if you remove government regulations, then larger corporations have a greater ability
to exploit people in precarious positions, so when people in those positions don’t
quote-unquote “succeed,” it’s not really their fault is it?
They didn’t have a fair chance.
But, you see, Neoliberalism presents itself as a moral system.
It has it’s roots deeply embedded in the Protestant Work Ethic, which believes that
there is inherent virtue in working hard.
If you work hard, you will get into heaven.
Neoliberalism doesn’t have a religious quality to it, at least not explicitly, but it’s
a clear assumption in the ideology: the good, hardworking people will be rewarded, while
those who fail only have themselves to blame.
In this ideological framework, the person everyone wants to be is Eddie Morra.
At the beginning of the movie, Eddie is poor, and there’s this sense that he hasn’t
fulfilled his potential.
He believes that he is unjustly on the bottom of society, and that he should be in a better
place.
Then that belief is validated by taking the pill.
He becomes the person with the most merit in a system that markets itself on being a
meritocracy.
And in the movie, the system works.
It rewards smart people.
You’re wrong to feel that your place in life is unjust because clearly it would reward
you if you had a 4-digit IQ too.
It’s reasonable to come away from the film with this idea because Eddie is never punished
by the story.
Early on in the film, when on NZT, Eddie rattles off an analogy which seems to predict his
own eventual downfall:
“No because there are safeguards.”
“Against aggressive over-expansion?
There aren’t.
There are no safeguards against human nature.
We’re wired to overreach.
Look at history, every country that ruled the worlds.
Portugal.
All it has now are salt cold and cheap condos.
The Brits?
They’re just sitting on their dank little island fussing over their suits.
No one ever thinks… lets live off the interest.”
So okay.
It’s human nature to be reckless and expansionistic, which leads to bad outcomes.
That’s what the movie says….
…but then in the story, he just.
Keeps.
Winning.
At the climax, he’s attacked by the Russian Mob who are also after the pill, and he kills
all of his attackers.
Then in an epilogue, everything has worked out for him.
He’s become an author.
He’s rich.
He’s running for office.
He’s getting all the benefits of the drug with no side-effects anymore.
He’s with his girlfriend again.
There’s a little bit of a stand off with Robert de Niro’s character, Carl Van Loon,
but it falls flat.
His conflict with Van Loon should have been the focus of the story, rather than the silly
Russian mob subplot.
So having them argue here just feels like they are describing what would have happened
if the movie had… decided to have
a third act.
Now, to be clear, whether this movie is well-written or not literally does not matter.
Like at all.
What matters is that the story presented in the film is really useful to observe.
It’s a fever dream we all share.
With the help of the pill, Morra wins at capitalism.
Neoliberalism just works out.
He achieves the American Dream, and his success confirms that other people of merit can win
as well, thereby perpetuating the system.
This is pretty surprising given that the book Limitless is based has a very different ending.
Part Three: Limitless 2001
The film Limitless is a somewhat faithful adaptation when it comes to the superficial
details of the plot.
In both, a man named Eddie — Eddie Spinola in the book — is an unsuccessful writer,
who gets the drug, becomes a millionaire on the stock market, and briefly runs afoul of
the Russian mob.
But when it comes to the substance of the story, they couldn’t be more different.
The book, which was originally called The Dark Fields but rebranded to coincide with
the film, is intricately tied to the era it was written.
Published just one year after the Dot Com crash, the story explicitly takes place in
the lead up to and fallout of the crash.
Eddie even loses most of his recently acquired millions when he buys tech stocks that instantly
become worthless.
In contrast, the film doesn’t really tell you when it takes place other than one reference
to it being “a down market.”
QUOTE: Nobody was making money in a down market.
Given that the film was made in 2011, it’s extremely suspicious that the 2008 stock market
crash isn’t substituted in as a replacement for the plot function the Dot Com crash served
in the book.
But doing so would mean punishing Eddie, while also showing some kind of skepticism about
the stock market as an institution: which is what the book does.
In the book, Eddie Spinola often comments on how absurd the amounts of money he’s
dealing with in the stock market are compared to his previous employment.
And how the recklessness in the trading world is helped by the “artificial, game-like
nature of electronic trading” which creates the “dangerous sense I increasingly had
that the money involved wasn’t real.”
Of course the money is — in a sense — real, and a crash means millions of people losing
their livelihoods.
As he continues to trade though, Eddie begins to see the stock market “not as just a market
for stocks” but as something much greater.
He calls it a “template for human consciousness,” a “collective nervous system.”
He describes this as if he has seen the Matrix, seen God.
But then the air is taken out of this statement by the voice of reason in the book, Carl Van
Loon’s teenage daughter, who argues that Eddie is deluding himself by seeing the market
this way, and that it’s just a casino that tricks innocent people into thinking they
can be successful.
When the market is booming, Eddie ascribes a higher moral value to it, but the truth
of the matter is that he doesn’t really care about any of that.
He only cares about making more and more money.
The main difference between the book and the film is the ending.
In the book, Eddie Spinola continues to indulge his greed, and then he burns out, and loses
most of what he’s gained before the side-effects of the drug take their toll on him, leading
to his death.
All of this makes the book a cautionary tale, and the social critiques of the story are
clear:
In the modern era, many of us feel disconnected and disillusioned with capitalism and our
inability to escape it or find a meaningful place within it.
We fantasize about having more resources so that we can take control of our lives.
In free-market economies, the purported idea is that the smartest people will rise to the
top.
This book explores if that were true, if you could actually be smart enough to outwit everyone
else and make as much money as you like.
And then it concludes with the idea that doing so is self-destructive, that greed will backfire
on you, and that society’s obsession with money a kind of collective insanity that is
reckless and harmful.
But the book was not a best-seller.
The film on the other hand, made 161 million dollars at the Box office off of a 27 million
dollar budget.
It’s orders of magnitude more successful, and influential and I think that’s because
it tells a more comforting story.
Not a critique of neoliberal policy, but an argument for it.
It’s no wonder so many people walked away from the movie thinking, “I’d like to
be like that Eddie Morra guy.
I wonder if there’s a real pill like the one in the movie?”
Part Four: Nootropics …
Nootropics is a blanket term for drugs which CLAIM… (pause.
text on screen)… to improve cognitive function.
Limitless did not invent these kinds of drugs.
They’ve existed for a long time, and there’s even a joke in the book about their prevalence.
But the film version of Limitless helped ignite more interest in the idea of a real drug like
the one seen in the movie, or at least, the movie provided a convenient way for these
supplements to market themselves.
Today, the Nootropics industry is worth $5 billion dollars in the states and is estimated
to reach 10.7 billion by 2025.
They’re sold mostly as supplements, which means they are not heavily regulated.
While “the FDA requires that all pharmaceuticals be thoroughly tested in humans, that they
contain whatever ingredients are listed on the label, and that they have evidence to
back their marketing claims…
Unfortunately, the same isn’t true for dietary supplements.”
Nootropics can be sold without having to prove that they are effective or that they are safe.
And for most of them, there “just isn’t much compelling evidence” to support the
claims that Nootropics can improve memory, focus or other aspects of cognition.
That’s not even getting into the potential side effects of these drugs or the fact that
experts suggest that the safest way to improve memory and cognitive decline is to just get
some exercise.
But the mere existence and popularity of drugs like this is just another symptom of America’s
work obsession.
So of course, in a society so obsessed with work, Nootropics are a thriving industry.
No one is taking them because they just want to get some more summer reading done.
They’re taking them to be more productive, so they can make more money.
The consumer considers it an investment.
In the year Limitless the film came out, two Alzheimer’s researchers criticized the booming
nootropics industry, blaming the popularity of the drugs on neoliberal political systems
which “foster the concept of the atomistic individual within the marketplace who makes
himself whole.”
Whereas previous economic systems fostered community, now we’re told that it is up
to the individual to make themselves into something, and the pressure of that causes
many to reach out to solutions of dubious merits.
Our obsession with becoming someone like Eddie Morra is the fuel that leads to overwork,
burnout, and in the case of nootropics, any number of health problems.
Today, this compulsion to stay productive at all times is literally getting thousands
of American’s killed.
It’s a critical piece of an ideology that has led to insane decision making from the
Trump Administration and republicans across the country.
It’s an ideology that demands people put themselves in harms way during a global pandemic
in order to somehow earn the right to deserve the resources to live.
America could have instituted a real lockdown to get the virus under control, but doing
so would mean abandoning the way the country views work.
It’d mean abandoning neoliberalism.
I think the numbers speak for themselves on what America should have done.
You shouldn’t have to take a smart pill to be able to survive, and you shouldn’t
have to work in a pandemic to be able to survive.
So what can fix this?
A lot of rich people see the problems with the system, and think of themselves as the
potential solutions to the problem.
We’ll take a look at… that… next time.
So I just watched a movie called Wonders in the Suburbs, which is sorta the opposite of
Limitless.
It’s an absurdist french comedy from last year about the lefty mayor of a small town
who tries to implement a bunch of off the wall ideas, like nap time for adults.
Hmm.
Wouldn’t that be nice?
If you want to check it out, you can do so on MUBI, the sponsor of this video.
MUBI is a great streaming service that focuses on independent and international films, the
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Films are often chosen as part of a themed group, or specials, like the current one on
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Speaking of film festivals, MUBI has exclusive online premieres of new releases straight
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You can get a one month subscription to MUBI for free when you go to mubi.com/justwrite.
So why not liven up your quarantine with some great independent films?
Let me know what you watch in the comments.
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Keep writing everyone.