Amerika

From an otherwise incoherent article about wage gaps, a moment of truth as the writer diagnoses the cause of wage gaps and a wider problem all in one:

The highest-paying jobs disproportionately reward those who can work the longest, least flexible hours.

These types of job penalize workers who have caregiving responsibilities outside the workplace. Those workers tend to be women.

If you want to know why our society is awash in Generation X underachievers and low-impact millennials, here is the reason: jobs are both terrible in and of themselves, and terrible as a lifestyle.

Our current environment forces our most ambitious people into wasting their lives away, at which point they become alienated and resentful, and start enthusiastically approving antisocial policies. The tendency of modern Western Europeans to notice the world burning and change the channel originates in this.

An ambitious person will be forced into a work schedule which will steal their soul by depriving them of their time, energy and experience of family. A legion of successful divorced professionals with kids in therapy can attest to this; it peels society like a banana, starting at the top, removing those with the most to give by ensuring that they are enslaved to constant frustrating, ugly drama.

Our economy is constructed as a circular Ponzi scheme: much activity exists, and because other people think it is important, they keep buying and selling. Constant growth is the goal, and we achieve that by adding pointless and unnecessary activity so long as we can sell it before the buyers, and the resellers who service them, realize that it is empty. We have gone in search of a reason to work, not in search of work that needs doing.

This enslaves every person to their debt — as this is the only way to afford housing — and so they keep going to work to pay for the stuff they need, adding on top of it the stuff they want to feel better about wasting their lives away.

The toxic environment that results occurs because we are all aware of our mortality. The last thing we want to do is waste our irreplaceable time, but that is exactly what society demands of us, and demands the most from its best. Doctors serve hopeless cases and hypochondriacs, lawyers pursue pointless cases, architects design boring strip malls that will be torn down in a decade, and writers are reduced to entertaining people looking for the opposite of truth, profundity, wisdom and beauty through distractions of a salacious and saccharine nature.

Futility of this nature wears people down and makes them angry deep within. The rising tide of bad human behavior comes from this tendency to allow our economy to lead us, instead of serve us. But when we have no goals, what purpose can anything serve, except to perpetuate itself from our fear of what comes when it goes?

And so: we all embark each day to go to jobs we do not believe in, wearing down our time and vitality, with the best serving the worst, growing more hateful and revengeful by the moment.

Good thinking, humanity.

Tags: antiwork, jails, jobs, wage gap