A Reflection on Apple's "Is My Generation Lost? - Introspection"

Hi, friends. Since so many (1) of you showed interest in what i have to say, i'll begin posting some ramblings on philosophy, psychology and whatever else i have in mind. As the title suggests, this is a reflection on something another poster wrote.

Essentially, OP was talking about dissatisfaction. A sense that the American Dream he was sold is something he seems incapable of reaching through the sequential milestones he's gone through, which, to him, seems absurd; given that he has put considerable effort into working in tech. Those of you familiar with Lacan may already see where i'm getting at.

Objet a and the master signifier are so on the nose here it seems obscene. The way OP goes about the American Dream makes it fit the meaning of objet petit a: a constantly moving horizon, the peak to a mountain being gazed at from its base. Curiously enough, he also speaks about looking at a house like a child looks at a new video game. OP is not speaking of something he had and lost, he's not gambled away his house nor lost it to a fire; he's using the Dream and the house as metaphors for structural inaccessibility.

American Dream is not something that was taken away, so he is not suffering due to deprivation. He is suffering because the way fulfillment was presented to him is organized around the desire whose object is structurally impossible to obtain. This mountain's peak is not far away because he has not climbed high enough, the distance is the peak. OP's desire is the desire of the Other, and what the Other desires from him is precisely that he keeps desiring.

Then, there's tech as Master Signifier. His relationship to the word "tech" is interesting because it reflects a contrast. late 20th and 21st century capitalist societies have attributed a field of meaning to "tech": disruptive, life-changing, high-paying, meritocratic. Those are not meanings we would find on a dictionary, those are both conscious and subconscious associations of meaning we have collectively attributed to technology as a field of science and a subset of economics. This is where the contrast lives: OP has done everything the symbol seems to say he ought to, but his current reality of paying roughly 70% of his pre-tax income in rent makes it so that the master signifier "tech" cannot bring after-the-fact cohesion to his efforts.

It is the gap between what landing a job in tech was supposed to bring (symbolic payoff) and what it actually brought that causes him to question the truthfulness of what he was sold, and it is its lack of proper answer that causes him to suffer.

Well, this is it for now. Follow if you want more