In honor of all that is free-flowing and holy on this most auspicious, post-declaration-of-war Labor Day, I wanted to share some editorial brilliance. It arrives in the form of a quote from Hunter S. Thompson, a song about neurosis and denial, and an article from Strike! Magazine by David Graeber. It's a good day to think about why so many find no meaning in their daily existences and/or secretly hate their jobs. (Hint: the same phenomenon may or may not also explain why so many grown adults have opinions about things like Miley Cyrus these days.)
For this week, I'm writing my experience with practice (ritual) in daily life (like i said i would). More specifically, I'm writing about developing my practice and rituals after opting out on the debt cycle. (think about it) (don't think about it).
Presented with minimal comment, happy labor day:
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.
On the misuse of your talents and the peer reaction to you insisting on them:
Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at. Say they were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. Neither does the task really need to be done – at least, there’s only a very limited number of fish that need to be fried. Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share of the fish-frying responsibilities, that before long there’s endless piles of useless badly cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and it’s all that anyone really does.
And on who's supplying the demand for most bullshit jobs and why artists and intellectuals are being intentionally marginalized:
There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (Answer: if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.)
And, it maybe it takes an acid trip to figure out why this is happening. So in that case:
“We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear—fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a terrorist sympathizer. ”
Enjoy your day & Think about things.
Brookman.