Earlier this year, a trend arose on social media making fun of the “sigma male,” the archetypal ambitious young professional man who must “grind” to get ahead in a cutthroat world. He is defined by his routine, the “grindset,” which sees him wake up early, take cold showers, work out religiously, eat austerely, and dedicate the rest of his energies to a monotonous but lucrative job, usually in finance or tech.
The sigma male may or may not apply an elaborate skincare routine to his face a la American Pyscho’s Patrick Bateman, who may or may not be viewed unironically as a role model by these young men. On top of all this “optimisation,” the grindset displaces all the other pursuits and pleasures, including romantic, sexual, and social life — as well as the whole concept of open-ended leisure. These other activities are generally derided as superfluous, if not dangerous, diversions from the only thing that should matter to any serious individual: his work.
At the dawn of the last century, the German sociologist Max Weber drew a connection between the “worldly asceticism” of Calvinist theology and the rising bourgeois classes of Northern Europe. Weber contended that this Protestant ethic was the animating force — the “spirit” — behind industrial capitalism. And while the face of bourgeois morality would change dramatically in the consumerist turn of the postwar decades, recent years have seen the return of the old Weberian type; it seems as if capitalism, now in a decaying post-industrial state, is harking back to its Puritan roots.
The grindset lifestyle is easy enough to lambaste. Indeed, it has invited ridicule not just from social-media users but from major publications. In an Atlantic essay, “The Anti-Social Century,” the writer Derek Thompson points to the grindset and its “secular monks” as one more disheartening expression of the atomising tendences of our status quo. Thompson observes that “what is most striking about [grindset] videos … is the element they typically lack: other people.” The protagonist typically wakes up alone, stays that way through his day, and goes to bed alone. In The New York Times, meanwhile, Jessica Roy pokes fun at the “lion meme,” another trope that illustrates the sociopathic lack of regard for others valorised by sigmas, who compare themselves to “a lion,” who “does not concern himself with the opinion of … sheep.”
For Thompson and Roy, this aesthetic is Right-wing-coded, spreading outward from “the ‘manosphere,’ a corner of the internet … that frequently promotes anti-feminist and misogynistic rhetoric,” as the latter notes. They are not wrong. But what they miss is how many of its essential elements are just as present on the other side of the ideological spectrum: from the total immersion in (and uncritical celebration of) the ultra-competitive ethos of the work society to a hostility toward the purely social and non-utilitarian dimensions of human existence.
The same sensibilities can be found in the liberal meritocracy culture prized by the American metropolitan upper middle class and its college-bound scions, prepped from birth to partake in the cursus honorum of the best schools (from pre-K onward); the best internships; and the best extracurricular involvements — which are, of course, never undertaken for their own sake, but for padding college admissions applications.
It follows that friendships and relationships are not to be spared from this calculus and may be dispensed with if not fit for use. Though the adherents of this genteel version of the grindset may not spout the same cold Darwinian and Nietzschean slogans as their sigma counterparts, they are functionally bound to the same ruthless mentality that sees other people as either instruments or obstacles in the ruthless race to the top.
But in such a world of declining consciousness and community, and of rising neuroticism and extreme introversion, it is hard to see the grindset as just another online subculture limited to angry, alienated young men of a certain reactionary disposition, to be easily singled out for mockery. After all, anyone who must inhabit today’s corporate and bureaucratic institutions is forced to accept its imperatives as his own, whether or not he consciously subscribes to either the Right-wing sigma worldview or the liberal meritocracy code.
We are better off, then, viewing grindset and its associated outlooks as only the most pointed distillation of a much broader sociological reality, one that results from the technologies and market arrangements that mark the present moment — but also one with much deeper origins in our culture.
After all, the impulses Weber identified were already old when he wrote The Protestant Ethic at the height of the Second Industrial Revolution. To understand just how embedded these qualities are in the emergence of modernity itself, we may look even further back to the original Puritans of the 17th century, whose enduring contributions to the modern mind are often overlooked. For this, Michael Walzer’s intellectual history, The Revolution of the Saints (1965), is indispensable.
Walzer took note of just how radical the Puritan break with traditional society had been, arguing that they prefigured the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks as the world’s first true revolutionary force. The Puritans applied their militant attitude not just to theology or high politics, but the performance of secular work, believing it to be a field of spiritual battle and as well as an avenue for personal salvation and moral self-making. All this would have baffled a medieval peasant. Writes Walzer, “The saints were distinguished from the disorderly mob of worldlings by their industry and diligence: their industry revealed their saintliness — to themselves as well to their fellows. The old Catholic theory of good works was here transformed into a Protestant theory of good work.”
This novel stance was naturally accompanied by an attack on leisure and spontaneity; the Puritan citizen “worried over his occasional afternoon naps and worried most of all because they came at ‘unaccustomed times’ — they were unplanned.” Just as significant was how the Puritan design extended to family relations, which had to be consciously refashioned away from the premodern feudal paradigm of sprawling kinship networks and communal obligations; the Puritans were encouraged to winnow down their personal loyalties to the marital union and the nuclear family as a more manageable unit of social organisation: “Puritanism heralds the shift from the patriarchal to the conjugal family,” through which the religious and economic dictums of the faith could be better enforced. (The grindset, it would appear, takes this process of social delimitation several steps further, heralding a shift from the family to the lone individual.)
Together, these historic changes had an ideological legitimating effect, which produced people who could both construct and functionally inhabit capitalism’s new social world. The Puritan mentality made it possible for people to think of themselves primarily as free individuals and mobile economic actors and so paved the way for the transition from feudalism to a society governed by markets and contracts. Likewise, the mass consumerist revolution of the 20th century created new appetites for household affluence and personal recreation that, in turn, fuelled the demand for the industrial growth engines of the postwar age.
But those earlier phases of capitalism were accompanied by rising living standards for the masses. The entrenchment of the grindset today suggests the opposite trend: the development of subjects who would be content to live and toil in a world of diminishing material standards. Hence, their embrace of asceticism over visions of plenty and their scorn for family formation and communal belonging as decadent indulgences that can no longer be supported. In other words, the grindset is a way to legitimate the stagnant, de-socialized epoch we already live in.
“The grindset is a way to legitimate the de-socialised epoch we already live in.”
The original Puritans grasped at the nascent modern notion of the individual through a theological lens — they saw him as an instrument of a providential plan. But they still retained social and civic ideals, centred around the building of a “godly commonwealth.” By contrast, the pull of secularism and today’s technological environment has made it possible to dwell in a society without either religious community or human companionship, thus the deracinated Calvinism in which the individual is left alone with only his work to preoccupy him, with neither a God to sanctify his labor nor a family to consume its fruits.
Against this grim vision of a life of constricted possibilities, what recourse remains to those of us who want to remain social beings? The answer may be to try to retrieve the dimensions of human life that have been surpressed, if not erased, by the post-Puritan march toward unrestrained individualism and the unexamined worship of work. It would call for new efforts to revalorise sociability and leisure as unqualified goods in themselves, even extending to the right to be idle and aimless at times. After all, it is when the mind is allowed to wander that alternative visions for society reveal themselves, and it is when individuals are allowed to commune in casual ways that they can discover common cause.
As the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson has recently argued, the Puritans themselves were able to ground their individualist struggles in a greater redemptive ideal, “to be as a city upon a hill,” which continues to inform American political culture down to our time. What’s missing today is an equivalent ideal to leaven and humanise our labours and to anchor them in a more hopeful future; barring that, we shall continue to be, as Weber wrote, “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.”
