Jeff Russell

Exactly! Rather than confronting the yawning existential horror that they are wasting their lives on stupid shit and the hard and scary work it would take to make that not true, they settle for trying to convince themselves that activity=value and that title/postition=real importance. Never mind that it's self-defeating, because the only reason they're working so hard to convince themselves is because they really don't buy it.

And huh, thank you, I had not explicitly linked this to JMG's "Reign of Quantity" and the commoditization-of-everything, but that's absolutely right. TLP talks about the "pornographization" of things, where a single piece of a complex whole is picked as a symbol/fetish and then elevated to the only thing that matters (easy example: measuring your worth as a productive human being by the size of your paycheck). That's his preferred way of looking at it, as he is more interested in how the piece can come to unhealthily stand for the whole. With commoditization, on the other hand, the emphasis is on the exchangeability or ability to make money, but I think both takes are getting at the idea of a simplification/reduction of something complex into something that's easier to deal with in the short run, but in the long run erases much of what is true and important about the more complex phenomena so reduced.