Surrogate Activities

Written by Chess

A surrogate activity is a goal that people set for themselves solely for the sake of attaining personal fulfillment. A rule of thumb in identifying surrogate activities is to ask yourself: "Given a goal X, and if you had to devote most of your resources into procuring the physical necessities of life, and this had to be done in a varied and interesting way, would you feel significantly deprived if you could not instead work towards goal X?” If the answer is no, then the activity you are engaged in is a surrogate activity.

One common misconception regarding surrogate activities among Kaczynski's readers is that a surrogate activity is simply any activity that does not directly involve satisfying one's biological/physiological requirements. The key word to pay attention to in the definition of a surrogate activity is the word "goal." Examples of surrogate activities include: climbing the corporate ladder, traveling, free solo climbing, social activism, obtaining world records, excessive bodybuilding, competitive sports, competitive gaming, accomplishing exceptional feats of human prowess, etc. Not all surrogate activities are "pure" surrogate activities as some people may be more motivated by the need to express feelings (art) or to gain respect from other individuals in their personal circles (scientific work) rather than the need for fulfillment. Surrogate activities have played a role in the healthy lives of people since the dawn of time, but in the modern world they have taken on a extremely disproportionate and excessive focus in people’s lives. To a large extent, this preponderance of surrogate activities in the modern world can be roughly thought of as a "cope", in the sense that it serves as a coping mechanism for bearing the conditions of modern society. Essentially, people who pursue surrogate activities are as if they were a gerbil on a wheel, often unaware that their actions are entirely meaningless.

Most people feel a lack of control over their circumstances (or a lack of autonomy) since most aspects of modern society are influenced and regulated by large organizations. These organizations require a strict conformity of behavior by means of laws and social standards. Having a sense of self-direction via a surrogate activity helps people "regain" some of their perceived lack of autonomy. In Martin Seligman's book on learned helplessness, he found a laboratory experiment on rats that showed the difference in behavior of two types of rats when they were struggling to survive underwater; those who were able to escape more frequently from the experimenter's hand attempted to swim for survival much longer than the others.[1] Seligman's description of this experiment implies that animals may have an innate need to achieve a reasonable amount of success, otherwise they would suffer from defeatism and depression. Just as rats feel more motivated to succeed with the help of the experimenters, surrogate activities offered by society may serve a similar purpose for human beings as well because they have a more reasonable chance of success in accomplishing them. The system promotes the pursuit of surrogate activities since they deflect attention away from the root cause of one's lack of fulfillment towards a harmless hobby accepted by society. Surrogate activities also function as a “relief valve” by channeling human impulses and energies in directions that are not only unthreatening to the technological system, but often aid its development (e.g., conspicuous consumption, scientific work).

Surrogate activities aren't inherently morally bad in and of themselves; they can still be a part of a free and healthy life outside of the technological system. Even some primitive people engage in surrogate activities from time to time; consider the Hadza tribe risking undergoing anaphylactic shock or falling from trees to acquire honey for consumption when they can more safely gather fruits to substitute their daily source of carbs.[2] Additionally, Hadza men have been observed to gamble for arrows in a game called "lukuchuko", in which they toss pieces of bark against a tree and see where they land during the ripe season of undushipi berries since they have more spare time and feel less need to actively forage.[3] However, in modernity, surrogate activities have taken on such an obsessive, all-encompassing role in people's lives that they have risen to the level of addictions, if not insanities.

When people must fight for their lives, it shows that their lives cannot be taken for granted, which gives their life meaning. However, modern society has taken away almost all sense of danger and urgency by displacing humans from their natural milieu. As a result, most people have forgotten that there are even more primal and fulfilling activities, such as foraging and hunting for food and building shelter through their own autonomous effort. Even worse, there are a handful of people who even vehemently protest against those activities, such as the antinatalists who want people to stop having children. Most modern people are unaware that the fulfillment from the surrogate activities they participate in pale drastically in comparison to the fulfillment from primal life-and-death activities, which is the ultimate form of fulfillment because the reward for those activities is life itself.

This observation is not entirely unique to Ted Kaczynski's manifesto. In Desmond Morris's book, The Human Zoo, Morris correctly points out that in primitive life, there were practically no choices people could make besides survival. In comparison, modern people have many choices and thus, had many activities to choose from, most of which were meaningless. Morris uses the phrase "substitute activities'' which is semantically equivalent to "surrogate activities". Morris asks the reader "[w]hat is the point of rearranging the furniture, or collecting postage stamps, or entering the dog for another dog-show? What does it prove? What does it achieve?" He elaborates further, stating that "[s]ubstitutes for real survival activity remain substitutes, no matter how you look at them."[4]

The existence of countless surrogate activities indicates that many people feel unsatisfied with their normal day-to-day lives, but still have an innate drive for fulfillment, which prompts them to pursue other activities outside of their daily routines. Moreover, surrogate activities provide less than satisfactory fulfillment, indicated by the restlessness of those who pursue them: The money-maker always seeks to gain more money, the scientist moves onto the next problem as soon as he solves the previous, and so on. Having awareness of this concept allows one to reach the conclusion that surrogate activities are less fulfilling than real goals (such as satisfying one's physical needs through effort and raising children), that it would be undignifying to spend one's entire life on surrogate activities, and that the pursuit of real goals should be undertaken to truly achieve fulfillment.

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NOTES:

[1] Seligman, Martin, Learned Helplessness. Oxford University, 1993

[2] Marlowe, Frank, The Hadza: Hunter-gatherers of Tanzania. University of California Press, 2010, p. 160

[3] Marlowe, Frank, The Hadza: Hunter-gatherers of Tanzania. University of California Press, 2010, p. 66

[4] Morris, Desmond, The Human Zoo. McGraw Hill, 1969, p. 188-189