If you try to analyze the tea leaves of memes, there's a bigger sense of pushback regarding "grinding" and "hustling" and "enriching shareholders." Whether that's translating effectively through "quiet quitting" or exercising some muscle of infantilizing nostalgia is anyone's guess. The pull of chasing the next dollar, or title, at bottom, feels absolute. If you're not trying to "provide for your family," or "prepare for the future," or "capitalize on the trend so you don't get left behind," there's something wrong with, or at least missing, about you.
We've heard our entire lives about "productivity" and having more resources than we know what to do with. You can read about how much food gets wasted and the next industry to do away with people as A.I. gets better (or doesn't, and no one knows how to argue otherwise.) Proposals for a universal basic income are getting their experimental time in the sun for different small pockets of people. We've absorbed the nature of the wealth-siphoning to the rich, paying more in taxes each year, getting price-gouged and scapegoating "inflation," and swallowing Ticketmaster fees because we never know when our favorite artists are going to die so why argue with the greed machine?
It's one of the most counter-intuitive things to do to attempt to pull out. Almost no one is doing it. You need gains! You need growth! You need norms of doing business and modern human, so low, expectations to anchor yourself to. In all of my time to plot, sleep, watch, or otherwise, it can be easy to forget just how long I've played the "normal" game. Was I ever paid "enough?" Hell no. Was my effort ever recognized in a way that didn't get me exploited? Not once. Did the vast majority of my bosses or supervisors care, in any real tangible way, about behaving in sensible and decent ways? Were they going to fight for the right things? Their whole working model to sustain their lives incentivizes otherwise.
This isn't abstract. Recall, I'm currently a counselor. I get word from clients or colleagues about how other counselors conduct themselves in group. I hear of their mental health issues getting laid at the feet of their clients. I hear of their laziness. I hear from the counselors themselves how little they're willing to take responsibility for what they bring, or don't, into a group. A new mom supervisor will hire the deeply unwell counselor to fill a gap if that counselor can perform the dance of saying the right things. Being long-term accountable to what they say? That's not the job or obligation. Unfortunately, that's precisely the the work you have to do if you want to maintain sober thinking. Good luck.
Sober thinking. It's not about refraining from substance use. It's about building, maintaining, and exercising an informed perspective. Once you get out of your own world and recognize the extent of your potential or impact, you find a way to maintain a standard of behavior and pursue goals that show yourself and the world you know what you're talking about. You need to build trust in yourself as much as you might wish to be able to trust anything else. If you can't figure out how to trust yourself, you can't maintain the right expectations that protect a sober thinking environment.
Most people are not thinking from a self-reflective and sober place. They are addicted to the pursuit and ridiculously unfair and captured expectations of modernity. They are addicted to levels of immature emotional drama because there's little else that feels equally as accessible and personal. They're addicted to some version of the same conversation every single day about what they "have to" do because they're baked into the cake of their insisted upon obligations. Little "escapes" here and there are pre-prescribed as well. Your few-days vacation fits neatly into the begrudgingly-allowed request off allotment. Your indulgent bling matches business casual.
It's not your fault until you know better, so there's an endless loop of narratives and distractions to justify pretending not to know better. You could watch a 20-hour set of interviews from old people insisting you shouldn't be so laser focused on sacrificing your life for xyz. That's too long, no one's gonna watch that! I can't tell you how many times a colleague has complained about the absurdities they've witnessed only to default to something like switching roles, giving advice to just ignore or avoid - it is what it is! - or finding some cliche about things evening out over time. Of course, they don't even out. They compound and embolden and normalize iterative ways of self-destruction.
I'm seriously perpetually struck by just how much time there really is. If you feel like you never or don't have the time, here's your sign that you're spending an inordinate amount of it doing or on your way to doing something that isn't serving you like you think it is. I struggle to figure out what I "should" be doing in any moment, often as the residual fallout of otherwise guilt-tripping myself if I don't feel "busy." What's the adult functional equivalent of always being in a classroom? My instincts seek that out. Is the teacher good? Am I learning anything? Am I actually getting prepared for what I'll need later in life? Shut up, sit down, and listen.
I get frustrated by influencers who say things like, "You really can change your life. You just gotta"…fill in the blank with their vague and empty prescription. We've just as egregiously been tricked by ideas of virality and interconnectedness as we have by the velvet bars of normalcy. You exist in a constant state of change, influenced by a literally infinite amount of forces. The "change" needs to come in how you observe those forces, not pretend you can become master and commander of them all. The person so enthusiastic about making a personal brand out of fortune cookies is overwhelmingly hot, already kind of rich, or otherwise plugged into the kinds of infrastructure that would see them having some measure of success had they chosen a different path. They're also almost perfectly corruptible and content with doing or saying whatever it takes to maintain your attention.
To them, and most people, every aspect of their life is a story of their decision-making, not their luck or capture. I do believe we need to be responsible for our decisions. I do not believe we have any grasp on the nature of how we arrive at decisions. I do not believe we have any grasp because I spend inordinate amounts of time looking for the myriad things going on in my head that speak to why I live in a shed, pursue entrepreneurial frustrations, or find myself interested in the music or TV shows that I do. How often do I like a given piece of art more than my sense of novelty in my experience of it? I'm constantly seeking novelty. It speaks to my attitude towards relationships, why I have dozens of half-completed projects, and why no job, ever, will be "enough" for me to feel at home or like I fit if it doesn't change and challenge me.
There are a lot of familiar beats being a DCS assessor. Every household is different. Every kid or tangentially relevant adult a new variable. I don't know who is about to call. I don't know what horror is about to be unmasked. Whether I do or don't have a "passion" for social work (I don't), you don't get a more novel environment than trying to plug into the minds of other people. My pursuits in the social work realm are the evolved drift of my novelty-seeking and trapped circumstances. Some of my goals are to protect the time I have to wake up when I please, sit down and write, hold a counseling session, and then decide on what to do with an absolutely beautiful day. If I can do that in perpetuity, in this field or otherwise, that's going to express my values and demonstrate my sober thinking about how to act on my priorities.
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