[372] Bang On The Drum All Day (Don't Wanna Work)

I can't tell if my headache is from too much on my mind or from eye strain, so if you see this, it means I didn't write several pages only to immediately delete it.

I keep thinking about the nature and utility of work. As the articles I've recently been reading keep reminding me, work has meant a great many things to many people depending on how it was marketed. The 8 hour work day was considered a step up. As early as the 10's to 20's one economist notes a shirt that campaigned for the 4 hour work day. Work is said to create "value" in that it contributes to the motor of society. It allows you to buy things and keep up with the Jones's. It allows you to provide for your family.

As the same piece pointed out, work is also about caring for people. Nurturing children or taking care of the sick aren't necessarily backbreaking, but arguably, no less mentally intense or laborious. We consider academic work pivotal to protecting and growing our databases of knowledge and to further technology. We respect artists and musicians who perform at levels so high if they were making mistakes the entire time, they'd be lucky to be in the same room with someone who could point it out.

But work is changing. Gone are the industrial jobs thanks to globalization. If you can get a car made by a machine, or modern day slave, you're not going to pay union worker. This article I read about lawyers losing out to new technology that can sort through and refer legal precedent in seconds as opposed to taking weeks with a team of associates. Soon our phones will be predicting when we're at risk for diabetes or blood diseases. While it will be a "slow" transition, so to speak, in the midst of an outcry about "jobs jobs jobs, we need to create more jobs!" It seems we don't really have a plan for what those jobs may look like, if they're worthwhile, or whether people will be capable of doing them.

What happens when McDonald's goes fully automated? There's one guy in charge to maybe restock the buns assuming there isn't some great technical leap that allows delivery trucks to automatically unload and stock. What happens when big box stores realize that aisles and aisles of clothes no one is wearing aren't worth the price of rent and the number of "service jobs" starts to plummet?

I'm more concerned with what we think of ourselves. I'm of the view that certain things should be considered "rights." Things like eating, having a place to stay, an education, or maybe the right to a fucking planet... etc. This especially because we have an overabundance that's poorly allocated. What happens when you don't need to work to eat? What happens when you can choose to interface with any subject, or perhaps physically plug into a computer with nano brain bots? Given how many people hate their jobs, I don't think it will be all that bad of a thing. It's the transition that's a problem. It's the poorly understood road to getting there that will make the future bleak regardless of what we've made available.

I think about this in the context of what I'm doing with my time. I don't give two shits about coffee, but rich people buy it. I've worked hard. I've played by the rules. I maintain my propensity to read things until I go cross-eyed despite my many attempts to shut off from the world. I'm one of the few "entitled" millennials who really does think he's done enough and should be seeing some form of dividends paying out for his effort. This in no way is an attempt to diminish the help I've had or to try and mock up my effort or work against someone else's. My dad's an iron worker after all. I haven't nearly died to take care of anyone. But, he didn't want me or my brother to have to be iron workers.

For as long-term as a lot of the problems we face as a country or, as I tend to go with, species, I think none more lasting than the impact of how we discuss and understand our circumstances. I've done such a good job with my language I get away with acting in seemingly sheer contradiction, at least for a time, with less angst ridden emotional scenes than I may let on. Also, I'm not even positive how much of it is "stuck" as a conversation amongst the masses while the general business as usual remains just that. I can be sure, it'll be a dumb conversation regardless, where I'll play the cynic messing with everyone's good vibes.

It's just that, I find myself sounding defeated about everything I do. "Was dinner fun?" Eh, we ate. "How was the pool?" The water was wet, cold, and we got kicked out of the first warmer wet bowl of water. "How's the van?" Paid for. The work I could do, can do, or contribute towards kind of means nothing outside of a lofty dream way down the line. And circumstances that I fully appreciate are well-beyond my control could dictate whether or not I'm ever able to even get realistically started on that goal. It's almost too sobering. For all my enthusiasm, effort, budgeting, and lack of sleep, I still feel the long dick of Simon Property Management and that lying bitch Terry fucking my will to keep trying. It's not even that it's hard, it's that it's stupid, petty, and you feel like you're shitting on yourself daily by playing along.

From my profile, way back when I read The Fountainhead:

"If I found a job, a project, an idea or a person I wanted---I'd have to depend on the whole world. Everything has strings leading to everything else. We're all so tied together. We're all in a net, the net is waiting, and we're pushed into it by one single desire. You want a thing and it's precious to you. Do you know who is standing ready to tear it out of your hands? You can't know, it may be so involved and so far away, but someone is ready, and you're afraid of them all. And you cringe and you crawl and you beg and you accept them---just so they'll let you keep it. And look at whom you come to accept."

The "adult" professional world certainly doesn't give a shit about you. Whether you learn that by trying to pay back debt with your degree in hand and minimum wage job, or in your future and health being squandered. What is the work for? What is the struggle about? You know you're not creating value. There's nothing valuable by rushing people's hot drinks to their desk. Not with the backdrop of what's going on at least. If the 1% employs us all to dust their furniture, will we be happier? Will it feel like we're existing for any sort of point or helping anything?

This is part of the reason the haunting silence is so hard to deal with. I don't want you to get unduly excited about something stupid because it's the only thing you've "really" done in months. I don't want you to have a positive outlook about something that's...even...at best. Every time it happens it just reinforces that status quo. It gives the green light for someone next to you to accept their circumstances or meekly justify their existence. Arguably, I don't want you to get as bad as me, but I digress... It's just sad that we can collectively get behind wiping out other nations, but not empowering people to be caregivers of each other.

It's just weird to think that people envy the idea of living at the beach and maybe being stoned all day. I've been on a proverbial beach for a really long time, and maybe I just fuck it up by reading all the time, but it really just leaves you with too much time to reflect. My "work" reduced to finding distractions until people get off work or the weekend hits. But who's going to blame me? I'm going to limp into getting the van going, because, even with everything paid for, nothing is ever fully paid for. (ooo cryptic) All the while dipping into money that could reliably pay my bills for the next 7 months. If you had your rent paid for the next 7 months, where are you spending that money so that's no longer true? For me, it's paying kids to advertise.

I guess I'm as decompressed as I'm going to get right now. What a shitty ending lol.

[371] We Don't Care

“We don't care” seems to cover the hundreds of different “bad things” I could point to that undermine any hope I have for the future. Professor X believes we need to believe in and ignite the hope that can forever invigorate the human spirit. Of course, when that hope leads to the end of most life on the planet, he gets to go back in time and try something else.

VICE is always a huge impact on my thoughts. It's just the worst examples we as a species set in life and how explicitly bad we are at even admitting to them, let alone pretending to fix them. “Mini” disasters all over the globe that span across every level of humanity. In some regard, to even report on these issues, and to feel an empathetic sickness in watching it, we're stuck “caring.” But, what it seems to do for me more is justify a very George Carlin-esc fuck it all it doesn't matter kind of sense.

We pretend radiation isn't a thing. We pretend we have more than one planet. We pretend that cultures are equal morally. We pretend to care about sacrifice or health. We pretend to care about war. We pretend to care about kids getting educated or honesty in reporting. We pretend to be outraged by scandals and racism.

Of course, when I say “we,” I mean progressive moral elites, and from my small window of the U.S. Bill Maher recently stated that you can't really be upset that someone didn't evolve on the same moral time line in the way you have. If they want to be racist or homophobic, that's just their opinion you have to choke down if you believe in free speech. We slut-shame people like that by every once in a while fining them or giving them a bad name in the press. We write about their toxic influence on modernity in books they'll never read. We mock them on shows they don't watch. We pretend that it's a worthwhile opinion nonetheless because we refuse the factual fuck-ups they're allowed to make in service to that opinion.

And it's because we don't care. We have our own lives. We need to take care of our kids. We need to stimulate our expansive and impressive knowledge banks. I'm not on the shores of where the next super storm hits because of course, I already knew that when you fuck with the planet it fucks back. They kind of got what they deserved. The VA can't get through records? Haven't you heard how abysmally wrong war is? What do I care if you blew your legs off and now struggle to get help for PTSD? What are you, an idiot? Shit blows up over there! Or did you hear the ocean is running out of fish? Ahh, I never liked sushi anyway and I have big plans for my porch garden.

I can't imagine what other kind of internal dialogue these people could be having. If it was “I need to learn more about this to enact change” you might see all of their hard work and reporting translating into something changing. You can literally find any kind of “just as correct” article arguing on behalf of compelling and creating leaders as you can find “everyone do something small.” No one knows. They can't know, so they can't care. And what they can know, only serves to justify how much more “reasonable” they'd be in not caring.

I was recently told to “let it go” when relating my experience with wasting time and money in school to a friend who'd asked. This came from a drunk older woman kind of under her breath as we were at a wedding table. This sentiment always seems to be the champion idea of people I find most hopeless. If I was broken down crying and pounding the table because of what transpired during school, I could see for a second what she might be speaking to. But even recalling and explaining something that happened, to someone that asked, was regarded as the opportune moment to be old-titty-slapped-with-wisdom about what I should no longer consider a problem.

But her's seems like the popular sentiment. It doesn't really matter what it is, eventually people find it “wise” to say and behave like it doesn't matter. Now, I'm all for existential crisis discussions, but I'm not for this kind of hopeless and dismissive sort of “fuck you” to a legitimate concern that, regardless of your opinion of it, had and continues to have consequences. She has a kid ushering the wedding after all, who I'm sure she wants to waste money on and hear about how his degree and time meant nothing.

Surely we learn to alleviate systemic problems and develop better ways to talk about things we choose to be collective amnesiacs about...right? What were we even talking about? Meh, it doesn't matter.

We're saved and condemned by how stupid we are. We can write off genuine potentially life-ending problems as mere accounting errors. Then, we're dumb enough to convince ourselves that things will be okay. Then, we develop entire philosophies and institutions to sometimes even physically condition us to never think differently! We'll sing and dance as we circle the drain, and no one will be the wiser, if we have anything to say about it.

You can justify putting out a shitty product because of “market forces and profit.” You can justify killing people, for any reason, because of “sand niggers,” or wait, I think we still keep it polite and roll to “Islamist extremists” and threats to “freedom.” You can justify throwing endless amounts of money at something you want to change if only to come to the lucid realization that “it's all about PR after all!” For good measure, why not justify a habit of denial and contradiction because “those beliefs bring them comfort!”

Did you know I read a book once on the difference between Sunni and Shia? Don't ask me to define it this precise moment, but dammit, I was so much smarter than the simple war mongers in the White House. At least for a day or two. Oh the attitude that the intellectuals or technology can save us anymore than the screaming lunatics. What undermines them all is a bad theory of human possibilities. Well, bad in that it probably doesn't genuinely assume most of us will have to die off before we see any “major leaps forward.”

“There are only 2 things you can do wrong on the path to truth, not starting, and not following it until the end.”

The truth, as far as it seems to me right now, is that little points of triumph and pride don't outweigh the amount of horrible things happening every second of every day. “We the people” aren't that. We're a bunch of animals running wild. Often, it seems, we have to be extremely lucky to even get people in our own goddamn families that care about us in any real, let alone constructive, way. We don't do things until we're forced. Until we feel threatened right to our faces. We talk about the brink, we calculate the destruction, we'll always plunge right over the cliff.

I need to find a way to brace for impact, or, you know, “just let it go.”