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Originally Posted by Did you just call me Coltrane?
Yep. They get it.
In theory, with automation (and not having trillions of $$ in a few hands), we should all be living the lives of the passengers on the Wall-E ship.
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Keynes predicted that we'd have 15 hour weeks by now and leisure would be prioritized.
There are many reasons we're not there, and some are good ones. Some people are simply ambitious, love to work, love what they do, and these people tend to benefit themselves and society tremendously.
But there's also a pathology at work - a belief non-productive life is wasted time. That it's somehow better to be doing anything than doing nothing. This turns people into strange little robots. Routine is sanctified.
Put on khakis, get in car, drive, park, get coffee, walk upstairs, go into office. As a cheetah would stalk prey everyday on the savanna, because it knows no other way to live, I shall go off to the office to earn my keep every day.
Except you're not earning anything by this ritual. You're going through motions that actually hamper the work for which you are paid. The performative and rote conflate with the productive time. They layers on top of, or marble through, the productive activity. They sap energy. But you're a robot, so you don't see that anymore.
Until someone makes all the robots stay home for a year, unable to get a daily software reinforcement by plugging their asses into chairs in their cubicles just as you'd dock your iPhone into your MacBook.
Oh, wait, that was a rut, a Matrix... I was just sleepwalking through motions I needn't follow.
And why do we so easily turn into robots? I think because we're marinated in a high proof Puritan bullshit story about how rigid discipline, consistency, and sacrificing time is good for humans and makes them successful. Sure, the 10,000 Hour Rule works if you're Tiger Woods or Yo Yo Ma. But those are 10,000 useful hours. The 10,000 hours a cubicle monkey burns putting on Dockers, shaving, and sitting in traffic for an hour every morning are useless hours. The 10,000 hours anyone spends in meetings are useless hours.
There is no dumber statement than "He put in his time." People say that as if achieving success is a simply a matter of trading enough time, putting up with enough politics, being bored to tears regularly. How much innovation is lost every year because people find themselves "putting in their time"? Most of the great ideas one will have will be had while one is young. What kind of perverse society and counterproductive economy would encourage young minds to dutifully follow orders under impossibly dull conditions?
A fucking strange one. One still haunted by the spirit of the self-depriving religious loons who founded this place. Work should be performed in comfortable conditions under which its performed most effectively, not in a hairshirt and half exhausted.
"Thanks for decades of dutiful service, Bob! Here's a Rolex. Hope you picked a nice place to die!"
