Fight Club - Why Tyler Durden Still Resonates Today

I want you to hit me as hard as you can let me tell you a little bit about Tyler Durden Fight Club was released in 1999 functioning as a dark satire of masculinity and consumerism yes 24 years later its depictions of a spiritually Lost Generation of men searching for meaning resonates more than ever the movie has achieved cult status due to its harsh critiques about the emptiness of corporate life while simultaneously questioning man's role in a society that's designed to restrain their worst Primal instincts it's an unflinching examination of the internal battle that exists somewhere within each man the instinct to join society and to live constructively versus the instincts to reject society and live destructively exploring the downsides of both possibilities when pushed to their most extreme wanted to write a book specifically for man that speaks to the Quest for meaning in their lives my classic thing is that there are so few social model novels or stories for men you've got either fight club or you have the Dead Poet Society where you realize you have to become a being living towards death you're not going to live forever and you've got to give your life to something but the modern world's answer to meaning is commercialized you're encouraged to artificially construct a personality as with the products you buy the books you read the celebrities you watch and the clothes you wear as long as your focus is dedicated to expressing your identity in this specific way then you have no other choice than to buy into society and dedicate your life to the workforce so that you're able to afford them as without these materialist rewards you have no value and therefore your life has no meaning advertising hesitation cards and clothes working jobs we hate so we can buy [ __ ] we don't need [Music] but fight club's Tyler Durden represents the antithesis of this value system viewing the idea of working for someone else as consensual slavery instead choosing a minimalist lifestyle as without any attachment to material things you aren't weighed down by externalities and thus gain complete and total freedom it's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything but this world view inevitably spins out of control as humans are naturally social creatures this crave purpose so even if you reject Conformity and adopt nihilistic views you'll gravitate towards a group that share those same traits and collectively begin to inflict those views onto the rest of society to give your life meaning whether it's material spiritual or political as palanic pointed out we have to dedicate Our Lives to something and our life circumstance directs us down whatever path speaks to our internal needs the loudest fast forward to today and we see the same patterns repeating although manifesting in different ways as certain situations get worse the cultural conversation around men in the media tends to focus on two models the violent criminal who needs to be stopped or the powerful CEO who needs to be restrained ignoring the overwhelming majority of men who hold no major power and pose no major threat they do their duties and follow the rules and are rewarded for being part of the collective good by living mostly on remarkable lives just like fight club's isolated narrator who's sleepwalking through his forgettable existence as if his life path was spat out of a photocopier feeling like a copy of a copy of a copy back in 1999 this lonely template of boring office life seemed like an easy goal to achieve so much so that it was relatable in its mundanity but in the modern world the dynamic has changed and even getting into these positions is a battle in itself with an increasingly educated Workforce largely saddled in debt from getting their degree so that they're not just filtered out by the automated screening process employers now have their pick of the litter and similar to how Tyler makes prospective candidates for a Project Mayhem stand on his porch for three days straight with no food water or encouragement employers can now make potential candidates jump through hoops having to prepare for and endure multiple rounds of interviews to even have a chance of earning a middling position this makes the candidate value the job more once they finally qualify and makes them easier to mold into whatever is most expedient for the cause like a monkey ready to be shot into space on top of that the promise of if you work hard and follow the rules you'll get to own your own home is a decreasing possibility as house prices are soaring while wages stagnate and inflation increases so even if you could get the position the narrator has it wouldn't even afford you the same Rewards or lifestyle this makes the prospect of getting a normal job less and less appealing but with fewer and fewer Men actually finishing higher education these days it's still a coveted position as most people don't have any better options meanwhile no matter what happens it seems as if the rich keep getting richer and thanks to social media we get images of how the other half live shoved in our face all the time to the point where watching billionaires competitively catapulting themselves into space and Landing rockets on Mars when deep space exploration ramps up it'll be the corporations that name everything the IBM IBM Stellar sphere it seems like it's just a matter of time before one of them physically gets to new land first so they can declare it as theirs so modern audiences can relate to the narrator feeling like he's wasting his life for a corporation as they feel just as spiritually deprived but far more financially insecure [Music] at some point reality sets in for every man they realize that unlike what they were sold their life isn't going to look feel or be like something out of a magazine under these hopeless conditions the narrator begins attending support groups for people genuinely suffering but he can identify with their pain as he spiritually deteriorating the same way they're physically dying and it's here he discovers the merits of identifying as a victim when people think you're dying man they really really listen to you instead of just instead of just waiting for their turn to speak we see similar patterns happening today and just like the narrator of fakes being sick to benefit from his victim status Bad actors pretend to have suffered to elevate themselves but hysterically man was not built to sit in an office staring at a computer screen and 24 years later our lives are even more stationary spending the largest portions of our day looking at screens for both work and Recreation which makes us more like passive Spectators of life but not active participants so while receiving reminders of how well the men at the top are doing and how awful the man at the very bottom can become young men feel increasingly isolated lost and lacking any sense of purpose so they'll naturally gravitate towards the voices that validate their pain and gives them the space to express it and by giving them just the slightest bit of encouragement and making them believe that they have real potential that's being squandered these figures become elevated to the status of role model expected to teach their followers how this harsh worlds really works there needs to be a secondary father in men's lives that you're born if you're lucky with a biological father that you do not choose that you eventually kind of have to reject but in doing so you have to choose a new father and you kind of put yourself in apprenticeship to the secondary father and you have to sort of consign your life to the secondary father although they differ in their attitudes towards materialism just like Tyler wants men to physically fight so they can feel alive by experiencing real pain these voices advocate for embracing suffering as a token of their masculinity the only man who's a good man is a man who's been through it we need to suffer life is suffering yes they then redirect that pain towards a higher purpose whether that be something traditional like starting a family or something superficial like buying a car to attract women but whatever the new value system is it's not enough to just direct you towards something it has to direct you away from something else so the follower is always given an enemy to constantly fight in the process an opponent to Define themselves against the Matrix is trying to control your mind they're very good at it this helps the individual Find meaning and now that they have an adversary to defeat rather than feeling vast and forgotten on their own they now serve a higher Purpose with a whole community of like-minded people to support them but just like a corporation the movement always needs to expand so when Tyler wants to spread his message he tells each member to go and start a physical fight with an innocent stranger and intentionally lose because by letting them experience the natural high from winning it will invoke A Spiritual Awakening and thus open the mental door to the true joys of combat fast forward to today and we have social media platforms algorithmically encouraging us to battle it out over every minor infraction to keep us engaged and addicted to conflict they'll intentionally show us inflammatory headlines partisan narratives and divisive rhetoric so that we can't look away ratcheting up the tension between groups until we no longer view these differences as just differences but incompatibilities and every day as we scroll through our timelines we're exposed to more and more real-life violence taking place somewhere in the world warping our minds to feel like physical danger is a local everyday occurrence meanwhile mixed martial arts becomes the fastest growing sport in the world further feeding our insatiable lust for conflict and allowing us to openly cheer for one side to destroy the other as in a professional fight we get to celebrate our most Primal Instinct and watch it demonstrates that the destruction of one leads to the elevation of the other Fight Club consistently brings last man together allowing Tyler to build himself an army and once these wounded individuals spend enough time around like-minded thinkers they begin to feel strong as a collective and want to use that Newfound power till that shows that those responsible for the pain that brought them all together in the first place so just like Tyler durden's starts Project Mayhem to disrupt order and create chaos we see our own Society splintering into interest groups all feeling justified in their own methods as long as it draws attention to their specific grievance prepare to retaliate against anyone and anything that gets in their way you're running around in schemas trying to blow things up what did you think was gonna happen Tyler's grand plan is to blow up the credit card buildings so that everyone's debt is erased and we all go back to zero meanwhile today we see groups taking every opportunity to circumvent the current Financial system so that they can start over from an advantageous position or enact their own revenge on the system for their past transgressions a new generation of investors using their phones and communicating on Reddit are creating Chaos on Wall Street and also exposing potential flaws in our financial system this is the public base of anonymous the shadowy group behind the hacking attack on the Federal Reserve this destructive impulse to tear it all down by any means necessary manifest throughout our society in different forms always under the cloak of a greater good [Music] there's a Tyler Durden inside all of us a rebellious Instinct that refuses to take orders that just wants to see the world burn and live freely in the Here and Now but there's also this other side to us that genuinely wants order peace and security to build a brighter future so as our own certain worlds keeps getting out of control and people get more desperate as society's basic promises aren't kept while our addiction to conflict is algorithmically ratcheted up Notch by notch don't be surprised that the most isolated and disaffected continue to search for Solutions outside the normal paradigm but the answers they find and the groups they fall into may not always influence them to follow their most constructive instincts but the kind of actions Tyler Durden would be proud of as Fight Club isn't just showing us the dark underbelly of the male psyche but the necessary conditions to aggravate it foreign now if you made it this far firstly thank you for watching but I need you to give the video a like perhaps even drop a comment depending on your mood and definitely subscribe so the algorithm will do its thing and if you want to support the channel personally you can check out my patreon

Channel: Just an Observation

Views: 78,123

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Id: ST6YJlLYRVQ

Length: 13min 27sec (807 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 22 2023