Relaxation, hobbies, raising children or reading a book are dismissed as laziness. That’s how powerful the mythology of work is.It is strange world in which we live; "the nine-to-five feels like a relic of a bygone era."
Life has become so much about work that I feel I have to defend myself when not working, even though the friend assures me that I am all the time "in my head" and that I need to get out of it!
In the bad old days, workers and prisoners were even be chained to their work. In these modern times, we have replaced those physical chains with digital tethers. People work, work, and work all the time through their various digital devices.
And, when they are not working in order to earn for themselves, people are working in order to help gazillionaires make even more money--their interactions via Facebok and WhatsApp and everything else are monetized by the corporations. Remember, you are their raw material that they mine so that you can be entirely replaced by machines!
What most of us do even now is darn useless. Pointless. Bullshit jobs. Which is why we refer to some jobs as "essential services" while most of the rest are, ahem, dispensable to varying degrees.
Soon, there will be such a huge number of useless people that there will be "the useless class. People who are not just unemployed, but unemployable."
The quest for meaning in work, and meaning in life, will become even more urgent than now. Because, when meaning is not to be found, then you can easily imagine any number of things going wrong in a human's life. Dystopia looms large without a sense of meaning.
I need to get out of my head and stop working for a while. Bye for now ;)
2 comments:
"What most of us do is darn useless". That is an incredibly true statement. I know, at least in the corporate world, that most of the 'busy" non stop working executives, are doing utterly pointless tasks. Lots of manufactured work that leads to nothing - meetings, teleconferences, papers written up and down, zillions of emails all fruitless. Business types are terrified of being idle. What they accomplish can easily be done in 1 hour a day !!
I raise serious objections to anybody suggesting that raising children can be equated to laziness. Maybe what you meant is "non productive " work - certainly GDP calculations make that assumption.
Yes, "stay-at-home-mom (dad)" has become so much of a negative these days, as if to have children and to raise them is an utter waste of one's existence itself. When students tell me things like "my mom doesn't work" I immediately correct them. I remind them that they are referring to work for which one gets paid, and that the unpaid work that mothers do is one of the toughest jobs ever.
I tell ya, these too reflect the question that I often raise in this blog: "what does it mean to be a human?" Unfortunately, most people unthinkingly equate humans in terms of the occupations and incomes and status and the "fair skin" and everything but what it really means to be human! Thus, we chase bullshit jobs--even working for the killing industries like cigarette and guns!
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