The staff meeting is the modern equivalent of a medieval torture chamber: your body locked down in a muscle-wasting, bone-aching chair; your brain washed over by a tyrannical boss barking orders and instructions; your senses dulled by the repetitive shuffling of papers and clearing of throats; and your dignity compromised by the torch-wielding mob of co-workers whose schadenfreude serves to ease their own suffering. (The only thing more insufferable is the committee meeting, uniting irritated employees and oblivious volunteers in mutual after-hours time-wasting.)

Perhaps the most odious aspect of meetings is the groupthink. On juries, during wartime, in politics, groupthink inevitably proves disastrous. In the workplace, it manifests as the aggressive jerk who speaks loudly and frequently; the “big immovable stone” who delegates everything to somebody else; and the cheerful moron whose shiny-happy-fuzzy ideas are the most eagerly embraced, while the best ideas are rejected promptly, or never uttered at all. The process is like having everybody add their urine to a half-empty bottle of champagne, rendering the final mix undrinkable.

Admittedly, most meetings only serve three functions: 1. To spawn more meetings, in the same way that infectious bacteria reproduce ad nauseum until the petri dish implodes. 2. To deflect criticism for one’s personal and/or professional failings by attacking weaker and less attractive colleagues 3. To create more grunt work for employees lowest on the totem pole, an endemic form of workplace bullying. (How many long-suffering secretaries have been given the humiliating task of cold-calling potential new clients? How many idealistic interns have been made to stand on grimy street corners in miserable weather, handing out marketing fliers to disinterested passersby?)

Companies continue to grandstand on the supposed benefits of collaborative processes, while ignoring the unseemly ramifications (i.e. bandwagoning, scapegoating, stereotyping, deindividuation). Just as multitasking remains a much-hyped skill in spite of overwhelming evidence that it reduces productivity, so too the ideal of groupthink lingers in mainstream corporate environments, like the stench of the office refrigerator after the Christmas break, or the desk drawer of a vengeful pink-slipped employee on his last day.

Groupthink, of course, contaminates us outside of the 9-5 grind. It causes us to fritter away our wages on translucent Lululemon pants, so we can then waste more salary on Bikram yoga classes, breathing in the germs and spores perspired by others, and once sick, infecting our colleagues in adjacent cubicles. In the lives of students, groupthink can be blamed for the inexplicable popularity of twerking, the cinnamon challenge and butt chugging. As for adults, groupthink inspired the subprime mortgage “speculative fever” that triggered a twenty-first century Great Depression. (The ultimate consequence of this “race to the bottom” will not merely be the demise of corporations and cultural institutions, but global economic and ecological ruin.)

Ironically most of the antidotes offered for groupthink are rebranded versions of groupthink. Insipid human resources buzzwords like thought diversity, leadership cultivation and attentive decision-making, are ineffectual attempts to circumvent millions of years of evolved collective delusion. Meaningless corporate-speak blinds and binds us to our condition as sheeple – unable to resist, like moths to a blowtorch, compulsive group behavior.

If you are fortunate enough to occupy a leadership position, however, there are simple ways to rout groupthink: Demolish open-concept offices, embracing the privacy and efficiency of doors and walls. Hire more introverts and leave them alone. Enforce zero-tolerance for workplace bullying. Limit meetings to three people and twenty minutes maximum. Implement “meeting-free Mondays” and “work-from-home Wednesdays”. If you are unfortunate enough to occupy a follower position, though, your best strategy is to shut your mouth and find the schadenfreude in the spiral of stupidity.

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Our most established and venerated cultural institutions – galleries, museums, theaters, festivals, symphonies and operas – are facing a mass extinction. Yet like a pack of bloated lumbering dinosaurs, whose stumpy arms blithely grasp and stuff leaves into their mouths, their nugget brains and beady eyes are failing to notice the enormous asteroid burning in the atmosphere above. (Of course in this analogy, the individual artists are the flies and maggots forced to feast on the fetid turds left behind by these beasts.)

Simply put, these organizations are too dependent, too inflexible, too irrelevant, too short-sighted, to weather the current decline and coming collapse. Dependency has come not only from relying on ever-diminishing government grants, but also from chasing the capricious money of big business. Inflexibility runs the gamut: employee numbers inflated through chronic nepotism and elitism; formerly grand venues rotting from an asset into a liability; and accumulation of policy manuals longer and more frightening than Atlas Shrugged. Irrelevancy stems from a refusal to accept that technology has changed the way people now consume content: for free, on tiny screens, at home, drunk, alone, in the nude.

If the first three deficits may be excused by idealism or incompetence, the myopia cannot be so easily forgiven. Our cultural leaders show some glimmer of awareness of the looming crisis when crabbing to the media and politicians, and begging donors for cash. But this whinging is a poor substitute for strategic planning and proactive fat-trimming; it seems more a superficial, desperate stop-gap, akin to a twenty-nine year old exotic dancer spending her shrinking tip money on anal bleaching treatments, instead of on college courses.

The Tyrannosaurus Rex of culture will not be alone in its terminal decline, joined by the Triceratops of academia and the Brontosaurus of recreational sport, among many others. Each will be confronted, and ultimately dismantled, by the slow deterioration of human civilization. As we sink into the dystopian hellscape predicted by climate-change scientists and doomsday preppers, our priorities will inevitably shift from creative, intellectual, and leisure pursuits to basic survival.

In other words, a documentary film or interpretive dance piece on the horrors of war and famine will be unnecessary, when our everyday existence becomes a nightmarish parade of misery and catastrophe on a global scale. We are unlikely to buy tickets to The Marriage of Figaro, when we are busy gorging on our neighbors’ innards for nourishment (and presumably entertainment). We are unlikely to waste our time gazing lovingly at priceless artifacts in the Victoria & Albert, when our time is filled with protecting our organs, and the organs of our loved ones, from ingestion by other cannibals.

The cultural institutions that do survive, assuming anything survives at all, will share three key characteristics: 1. Low Overhead. Those with smaller budgets, minimal staff and rented spaces, without the burdens of a fixed venue and accumulated debt, will be best positioned to thrive. 2. Community-Based. As we revert to a less centralized, more self-sufficient society using simpler technology, the emphasis will be on local work produced with local materials by local artists, and patronized by a local audience. 3. Epicurean. The inherent aesthetic beauty of art (and not its propagandistic or interrogative qualities) will become of primary value, to provide escape from the monotonous bleakness of our lives.

In the intervening years, we will see small and medium-sized organizations merge or dissolve entirely; meanwhile the larger organizations will cling to vestiges of relevance and vitality, like a star gone supernova offering one last pointless blast of hot gas before total gravitational collapse. Over millenniums, the products of our culture will prove to be little more than fossil fuel, relics and wrecks to be dug up by some advanced alien species with better common sense, and hopefully better taste, than ours.

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With the approach of summer, as I stock up on SPF 100, it occurs to me that perhaps no other aspect of human appearance, not even obesity or deformity, generates as much contempt as our skin. From its color or lack thereof, oiliness to dryness, adolescent zits to middle-aged fine lines, this physical attribute we too frequently subject to a literal and emotional pummeling.

At its least malignant, our discomfort in our own skin manifests as a wasting of disposable income on useless beauty products. Your wrinkles, cellulite, stretch marks and scars are going nowhere fast. And you are only going to confuse your poor dermis by smothering it in chemicals to firm, dry, moisturize, tone, cleanse, prime, peel, smooth, slough, shuck. You would be far better off taking fine-grit sandpaper to every reachable inch of your person, and then rolling in a bathtub filled with mayonnaise.

Of course as part of the war on skin, every single follicle of body hair must be violently shaved, ripped, burned or bleached to its root. Your publicly invisible nether regions are even subject to this strict aesthetic, as the scourge of hairy genitals surely threatens to become the leading cause of sexual dissatisfaction in romantic relationships. (Unwanted facial and body hair is presumably responsible for more lost lovers and lost jobs than a horrible personality and the horrible economy combined!)

When over-the-counter remedies fail to scrape and blast your skin and its associated hairs into submission, the logical next step is surgical intervention. Start with simple botox injections, collagen fillers, electrolysis and head-to-toe dermabrasion. From there, no part of your skin cannot be lasered and lifted to give you that perpetually shiny, grimacing and surprised look so en vogue these days! Extraneous pieces of flesh must also be excised, including the bags under your eyes, waddle under your neck, and labia in your knickers. Unless your skin is as cleanly chopped as a Whole Foods beef filet, and stretched tighter than saran wrap over a bowl of fruit salad, then you should feel terrible about yourself.

So conflicted is our relationship with the “largest organ” that we ridicule Tanning Mom and other antique-steamer-trunk faces, and we wonder what made Sammy Sosa turn into a shade of Elmers Glue, all while we secretly covet the rotten-orange spray-tans and bleached anuses of reality television “stars” like Kim Kardashian. So dysfunctional is our relationship with normal human skin that the term tanorexia has entered the popular lexicon, and the new DSM-V acknowledges tanning addiction under body dysmorphic disorder, and dermatillomania under obsessive-compulsive disorders.

It seems we just cannot keep our hands off our skin. And skin is a touchy subject, inextricably linked with cultural ideals of beauty, personal feelings of self-worth, the inexorable march of aging and death, and the marketing machine that chemically peels away our confidence and hard-earned dollars. (Remember how Olay only wanted you to “love the skin you’re in” and how Biore made you suddenly insecure about your giant vomitous pores?) Whether you are a pasty pimply kid or a crispy-bacon-faced geezer, the aspirational fantasy is always the same: the ageless “year-zero face” installed on quasi-youthful quasi-celebrities.

But by focusing on the ice-rink faces we see in promotional campaigns, and the hideously haggard face we see in the mirror, we doom ourselves to end up in a world of battery acid facials, nostril and tongue bleaching, laser nipple resurfacing, cosmetic face transplants and even anti-aging serums and fur lifts for our pets. (We already have prosthetic testicles for neutered dogs!) Ultimately we must put down the lotions and potions, and take up arms – albeit flaky, scaly arms – if we ever hope to set free our sagging skin and sagging self-esteem!

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Yesterday my neighbor decided to remove some trees from his property, using his truck and a chain. The second tree came down an inch away from power lines, nearly electrocuting the man and plunging the entire street into the 1890s. But was it mere stupidity that motivated this fool to risk his life over a few limbs?

Though most improvised landscaping does not merit a Darwin Award, we live in a do-it-yourself society, we hero-worship the cost-cutting idiot who manages to assemble a bookcase or clean his gutters without taking himself out of the gene pool. Certainly companies like Home Depot and IKEA encourage this misplaced pride, to ensure we spend our money on their products, not on the talents of accredited tradespeople. Yet for the average DIYer stockpiling plaster, his independence and industriousness are more show than skill.

Nowhere is this amateurish mixture of pride and incompetence more prevalent than on the internet. Where once we gleaned content from trained journalists and accomplished scholars, now we are subjected to the typo-ridden, grammatically-ignorant, factually-challenged, intellectually-underdeveloped scribblings of various bloggers and forum admins, all convinced of their expertise and wisdom. Any Google search will inevitably reveal an assortment of blogs, listicles, wikiHow pages and Yahoo answers, and precious few of the thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles written by academic researchers.

Thanks to social media, professional photography is in an equally sad state. Now anyone with a Facebook account and a $75 camera fancies themselves the next Annie Leibovitz or Henri Cartier-Bresson. Visit the Louvre or the Guggenheim and you will see hoards of tourists snapping photos of paintings; these dullards seem to think that a low-resolution digital file, taken with a point-and-shoot camera and unsteady hands, can capture the richness of a Van Gogh masterpiece.

Reality television is also to blame, with talent competitions promoting the myth that an inept couch potato can transform into a pop star / master chef / haute couture designer. (The slash/ is a common affectation amongst those aspiring to be a bunch of famous things, a symbol of their inexperience and mediocrity, not versatility and competence.) Scripted shows seem less prone to inspiring such delusions; presumably no one watching an episode of Grey’s Anatomy would think themselves capable of performing cranial surgery.

Through our television sets and computers, the DIY ethic intrudes into every aspect of our private lives, even our bedrooms. Download a pole dancing instructional video, use an at-home anal waxing and bleaching kit, and then grab your camera phone, because you too can be a porn star! The “amateur” sex tapes of dubious celebrities are solid proof that you really don’t have to be good at anything these days.

And so we can add pornographic film actor to the list of dying occupations; much like exotic dancer, letter carrier, journalist and graphic designer, the adult entertainment industry has become a casualty of the “anyone can do it” and “why buy the cow” mentalities of the twenty-first century.

Clearly the glut of free content and user-friendly products has hammered into sawdust the boundary between amateur and professional. (One easy clue to tell the difference: if you have a degree in it and you get paid to do it, then you are a professional, congratulations!) But there are ways to repulse our self-proclaiming, self-styled culture which prizes quantity over quality, access over excellence, a little knowledge over a little common sense…

Get your news only from reputable, credible, established sources; hire local craftspeople for your home renovation projects; dedicate yourself to becoming proficient at one thing that you feel passionate about; learn how to correctly string a sentence together, including the proper use of colons and semi-colons; put away your camera next time you visit an art gallery or hit the sheets; and have enough brains to pay an arborist to take out your trees.

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