Seinfeld Finale Syndrome

The Overt Art of Not Giving a F*ck

For those of you too young to remember, Seinfeld was a very popular sitcom in the late 90s. It starred that guy from the Amex commercials who also did one of the voices in that Bee movie.

Anyways, (as you obviously know) the show took place in NYC and the characters all had a certain penchant for narcissism. It’s genius was that it held a mirror up to all of us and all the little things we hate about ourselves (or other people). Like Man Hands, or eating peas one at a time. Living in a city exposes you to a lot of people, and generally contributes to a overarching irreverence of its inhabitants. It’s hard to avoid. Imagine having an unwavering compassion for the hundreds or thousands of anonymous people that you see walking down the street each day…

In the Seinfeld Series Finale, the main characters end up in a small town in Massachusetts and witness a carjacking, a common occurrence in NYC. Instead of calling for help, they casually make fun of the victim. In the ultimate irony, the squad gets arrested for violating the Good Samaritan law and the entire show comes to a conclusion as they get sentenced to prison.

What does this random TV episode from 25 years ago have to do with anything? Well, since the airing (coincidentally 7 days away from the 25 year anniversary date) the world has become increasingly globalized. Population density in cities has gone up. People have become more disconnected to the present and more connected to their phones. In fact, the word “connected” now has more relevance in the digital space than the physical space. Social media has changed the way young people think about themselves and others. Homelessness is at all time highs in many cities. Drug overdoses continue to increase exponentially, first via US sanctioned Purdue opioids, and now with Chinese supplied synthetic fentanyl.

Fuck, that’s pretty dystopian isn’t it? If you could plot narcissism it would probably follow the same trendline as above. Now throw AI doomerism into the mix and we might as well just submit our bodies for the machines to use as energy right now..

However, history is heliocentric, not immutable. Covid exposed our lack of resilience in the global supply chain so now most countries are onshoring as much as possible. Distributed work is getting rolled back in the most competitive jobs. ZIRPs have dried up, which means fake companies are no longer getting funded, and real actual work has to get done to create value. AI agents can align closer with businesses than extractive human ones, so fake jobs are going away. Trust in nameless, faceless institutions is waning as people value authenticity, and look to transparent individual contributors for truth.

It’s trite to sit back and say, “big changes are coming, just watch” because people say that shit every day and nothing happens. Economists have predicted 9 of the last 4 recessions. Big changes happen slowly over time. Seinfeld Finale Syndrome didn’t begin 25 years ago, and I am not saying that it has peaked today. However, when they held the mirror up to our faces 25 years ago, we laughed. Now we have Black Mirror reflecting our reality back to us and it’s not as funny.

To be clear, I am a big Seinfeld fan, and a fan of comedy in general. If someone falls down on the sidewalk in front of me, I will almost assuredly laugh before I help them up. Laughing at others will not cease to be funny until we reach at least 3 more notches in our evolution of consciousness, which we are probably centuries away from.

Art imitates life and life imitates art. Psychological shelling points emerge and group think sets in. Jordan 1 lows became popular with Gen Z because Gen X originally mocked them. Trends change not because trends change but because someone said the trends changed. Societal changes will happen not because of underlying deterministic factors, but because a few Key Opinion Leaders start to spew ideology that resonates with a small group and then grows.

Does this mean that we solve our problems at home? We fix homelessness and the endless wars in other countries? No, don’t be silly. There are too many baked in structural issues that probably get worse over the short term. But over the long arc of history, the shift to a new beginning has already occurred. This is due to the sheer fact of our being able to identify and give names to phenomena. Seinfeld Finale Syndrome is a concept you can touch, feel, analogize, and recognize. Things like Effective Altruism start to look like Seinfeld Finale Syndrome. What are we doing paying all this money to help people we’ll never meet, while we sidestep the homeless person sleeping outside the coffee shop? Ethics by spreadsheet dictates that $1 can help more people abroad than it can domestically. But the unconsidered factor is that you don’t get to witness the actual effect. It’s Schrödinger's altruism. Your donation both reaches, and does not reach, the intended recipient as far as you are concerned. For the observed particles react differently than the unobserved. Recognizing this is the next phase in our evolution. But it’s a reversion to the mean, a bucking of our digital world, a shock to our isolative system. The fat guy getting comically carjacked could be your own mother. Seinfeld died for your sins.