Mo(u)rning Routines and Manic Defenses
Striving for the impossible every morning
Cruel Optimism
Our cultural obsession with morning routines is rooted in a general dissatisfaction with being a human subject under our current sociopolitical structure.
Morning routines are all over YouTube, self-help websites, and blogs. They seem innocent, positive even. They promise to contribute to our lives in a way that we can meaningfully achieve our goals and increase our self-selected ideals. They promise to make us more productive, more efficient, more intelligent and beautiful. What can be insidious about a morning routine?
Mari Ruti, in her book Penis Envy and Other bad Feelings, presents an argument against our neoliberal culture of positivity and, in her words, ‘cruel optimism’ which centers on the basic idea that a culture which prizes and prioritizes efficiency and productivity above all else is apt to reward repressing bad feelings, like depression or anxiety. (In fact, in a Freudian twist, we have comedians and memes to displace these feelings onto.)
A Gallup poll showed that most Americans work at least (and many Americans go beyond) 40 hours per week — and don’t forget commutes. This was polled in 2014. We work this much because our bosses tell us to. There’s no inherent reason why we need to work this much, and yet this irrational rationality bends and erodes the emotional, psychic, and spiritual lives of millions of people.
Most people simply don’t have time to be sad, to be depressed, to be anxious. If they spend too long feeling these bad feelings, their productivity will suffer. [1]
Ruti believes that this persistent repression of these bad feelings leads to an erosion of inwardness, of fullness of life, and of living in the present. It creates blockages to living and doing creative things. And we are subjected to it by (un)necessity: unnecessary because it adds sociopolitical discomfort on top of our shared ontological discomfort which is unique to our current political structure; necessary because we need to do it to ‘function’ in this structure.
To function in this structure properly, we have to ignore some aspects of being a human while celebrating others; it’s a process of selective attention that we are trained for early on in various ways [2]. Of course, there is the ubiquitous socialization that is required of any and all human subjects — the kind elucidated by Freud and expanded upon by Lacan. These ontological-psychic requirements constrain our subjective experience and enjoyment and create a constitutive lack, or hole, at the center of our personal experience.
There are, however, other ways in which functioning in neoliberal culture requires us to renounce additional parts of our experience. These renunciations go beyond the constitutive requirement of society. To comprehend is what is repressed, we must look at what is heightened.
Efficiency; success (emotional, mental, and material); productivity; mastering and control; focus; happiness; cleanliness; intentionality; to name a few.
Penis Envy: Wanting What You Don’t Lack
Ruti opens her critique with the concept of penis envy:
[I]n a society that rewards the possessor of the penis with obvious political, economic, and cultural benefits, women would have to be a little obtuse not to envy it; they would have to be a little obtuse not to want the social advantages that automatically accrue to the possessor of the penis, particularly if he happens to be white. [3]
She, however, recognizes that this concept is not only applicable from a strictly feminist perspective, but also as a wholesale statement of modern subjectivity: anyone who is not in power will envy and resent those that are in power. What’s more: those who are in power think they have some kind of actual power, when they do not. This is what makes George R. R. Martin’s King Joffrey so frustrating of a character. He claims to have rightful heir to the throne and behaves without concern for other people — yet his very biological origin undermines his actual political position. (He was born to the Lannisters, not the Baratheon line.) Joffrey thinks that being king actually means something about being itself.
In this way, Joffrey is the perfect manic character: to erect a grandiose pillar of himself predicated on a fundamentally lacking subjective position in order to override this actual position. Ruti finds this psychic maneuver quite common — in fact, it is required — in those qualities which are heightened in our society (above).
To achieve those things which are (un)necessary to function at least somewhat well in our society, we simply cannot be their opposites: lazy; depressed; anxious; mourning; and so on. Together, and in unique proportions depending on many things, these qualities constitute the phallus that we all envy, that we all want to be. They are, basically, the Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. [4]
Even without the biopoliticization and economizing of human subjectivity in our current social order, something will be renounced, as mentioned above. Ruti claims that the inherent negativity or lack at the center of our experience is not uniquely capitalist or neoliberal. We will never, and we have never been, ‘complete’, Whole, utopian. There is no Absolute Personhood because we are always searching for what we’ve never had (at the psychic level, this striving is put into operation developmentally apropos Lacan; on the ontological level, it is built into human subjectivity apropos Sartre and/or the Christian doctrine of the fall).
So if there never any completion to our being and we are always in relation to our desire for completion, is there any ‘surplus’ harm that consumerist-patriarchal-imperialist society is inflicting?
Mari Ruti claims that our society is structured to prioritize certain identities — or more accurately, positions. These positions afford more satisfaction and less inhibitions. It is a matter of quantity here, not quality. Fundamentally, the powerful white men billionaires and the poor working class single mother are both ‘castrated’; it’s just that one of these positions afford infinitely more material and political comforts than the other.
Everyone suffers from penis envy: everyone experiences lack as desire at the social level. But this — contra to people like Jordan Peterson who justify patriarchy by saying “Everyone suffers” — does not mean that there are arbitrary positions which conveniently lack less. And this is not a ‘mindset’ to ‘work through’ individually; this is a political project, one that requires the collective action of many people.
Mo(u)rning Routine Videos
And what else do morning routine videos do on a structural level but provide individual solace to a collective ailment?
Do we really need to stretch the working day to 6 or 5 o’clock in the morning? Healthy habits and a clear, productive mind in the morning seems harmless, even progressive/good for everyone. And there is no denying that practicing healthy habits is a bad thing. But there is also a story that is being told in these videos and our collective obsession with them.
What these videos have in common is a commitment to self-improvement, productivity, maximizing time in the day, increasing competition (indeed, some titles will suggest that doing the habits will increase testosterone), and, in short, having a penis.
Doing this or that in the morning will make you a better and more productive neoliberal subject; that is, you are more marketable if you’re fit, healthy, intelligent (in the right areas). This is, in Foucauldian terms, the economizing of the human subject, the biopoliticizing of human aims and projects.
Instead of waking up early because of a commitment to one’s life project — say, writing, painting, etc. — we promote waking up early to fill our morning with as many healthy habits as possible. Rather than staying up late working on something you’re passionate about, you have to be in bed by 9pm to get the recommended amount of sleep before waking at 5am. There is a promise in these videos that ‘If you do what I do, you will have what I have.’
And what do ‘they’ have? They have all the qualities organized around the penis envy of patriarchal and consumerist cultures: health, efficiency, hard-work, and self-improvement. In short — they have a great work ethic, and they’re great workers.
Instead of deepening our relationship to ourselves as subjects (not as selves) and other subjects in collective political actions, we manically fill our day with nonstop non-projects to be better than the next guy. Now, instead of having a self-aware society of political change, we have a ton of really busy and productive and efficient and healthy and beautiful individuals inventing more and more creative and enticing mo(u)rning routines to make up for the busy-ness of everyday life.
In “Mourning and Melancholia”, Freud states that mourning arises when we lose an object in the world and something is wrong with the world. The lost object of the morning routine videos is vague and not well defined, but it probably looks something like penis envy.
[1] Thanks to those glorious and beneficent companies who have the infinite grace to give their employees one or two ‘wellness days’ per year to manage poorly timed depression or mourning.
[2] While Ruti uses the term ‘pragmatism’, I will use terms such as ‘functionalism’ and ‘productivity’ because of the former’s long history in philosophical thought which is not restricted to the current social critique. For instance, William James.
[3] M. Ruti, Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings. (2018), p IX.
[4] Of course, we know that, in order to achieve the ego ideal of Patrick Bateman, he must perform horrifyingly violent acts of sadism in his meantime; something is always sacrificed.
