Technology saves time and labor with total indifference to whether we enjoy spending time doing certain things. It assumes that we never do—that sitting and doing nothing while machines do the thing, is always preferable to doing the thing ourselves. Taken to its logical extreme, the message is that nonexistence is preferable to existence. A milder conclusion would be that everything useful should be done by technology. No wonder we increasingly feel that life is meaningless.
From Ran Prieur’s 058.
It's quite shocking how many worldviews, when taken to their extreme, actually lead to the conclusion that nonexistence is preferable to existence. If for instance eliminating suffering is the only thing that matters, then honest to God, why is ending all life on Earth not a good idea? 5 The truth is that life cannot be squashed into a suffering versus not suffering spectrum, because there are significantly more types of experiences in life than that.
There is curiosity, friendship, peace, joy, overcoming, sharing, mystery, love, learning and laughter, amongst many many other experiences. Those are valuable for their own sake, but because the drive of technology is geared towards continual improvement, 6 they aren't as valued as the "productive" activities of the system, putting “productive” in quotation marks because of the previous discussion on how misleading the concept of efficiency is.
Or to come back to the original point, the dichotomy between work and not work strikes me as a rather modern confusion. Most activities can be very pleasant if they involve other people you enjoy being with, and if you have the freedom to go at your own pace and do things your own way. So I personally have never been interested in removing work from my life, and instead pursue work that has impact on the things I care about and which I can do with enough freedom for it to be enjoyable.
The problem is that because work within the system is completely coercive and utterly devoid of any meaning of real impact, people confuse that type of work with the totality of work, thereby leading to online movements like the subreddit Anti-work. It should really be anti-bullshit-work or pro-communal-work, because work itself isn't the problem.
- A sense of coherent will: for instance any large group spends more and more of its time in inner conflict as opposed to solving real problems
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2024-08-25