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It reminds me of the excerpt in Bullshit Jobs (by David Graeber, rest in peace...) "In a sense, those critics who claim we are not working a fifteen-hour week
by lasagnaphil 6y ago
It reminds me of the excerpt in Bullshit Jobs (by David Graeber, rest in peace...)
"In a sense, those critics who claim we are not working a fifteen-hour week because we have chosen consumerism over leisure are not entirely off the mark. They just got the mechanisms wrong. We’re not working harder because we’re spending all our time manufacturing PlayStations and serving one another sushi. Industry is being increasingly robotized, and the real service sector remains flat at roughly 20 percent of overall employment. Instead, it is because we have invented a bizarre sadomasochistic dialectic whereby we feel that pain in the workplace is the only possible justification for our furtive consumer pleasures, and, at the same time, the fact that our jobs thus come to eat up more and more of our waking existence means that we do not have the luxury of—as Kathi Weeks has so concisely put it—“a life,” and that, in turn, means that furtive consumer pleasures are the only ones we have time to afford. Sitting around in cafés all day arguing about politics or gossiping about our friends’ complex polyamorous love affairstakes time (all day, in fact); in contrast pumping iron or attending a yoga class at the local gym, ordering out for Deliveroo, watching an episode of Game of Thrones, or shopping for hand creams or consumer electronics can all be placed in the kind of self-contained predictable timeslots one is likely to have left over between spates of work, or else while recovering from it. All these are examples of what I like to call “compensatory consumerism.” They are the sorts of things you can do to make up for the fact that you don’t have a life, or not very much of one."
- bonoboTP 6y agoI think it starts already in childhood with extracurriculars filling up waking hours, always preparing for some test, "making progress" on some axis. Not letting kids roam around aimlessly. At least that's the impression I get about American schooling nowadays. Mindblowing stuff like not even having recess between classes etc. Is it surprising that people take the same template to adulthood? That you need to fill up your timetable with "activities" that have a name, a structure. Even when travelling, more and more people buy prepackaged, well-defined, "experiences" with titles on AirBnB with a predefined timespan, description etc. You can't just go somewhere and meet up with people, you must tick off an "experience" to feel accomplished. It needs to be "a thing" that can become a line item on your credit card for it to be real.
- permo-w 6y agomaybe this is my tendency towards left-wing anti-establishmentarianism speaking, but I feel that this is somewhat blaming the workers for what is really - I think anyway - a result of the capital holders taking most of the profits from the advances in automation, and then using that money to successfully lobby governments to lower their taxes and not close the tax loopholes, resulting in wages staying the same, and people working the same hours
- thundergolfer 6y agoDavid Graeber absolutely would not blame the workers for the situation he describes above.
- lasagnaphil 6y agoHe isn't really just blaming the workers for this, he's blaming an ideological component of our everyday lives that have been engraved in the minds of both workers and capitalists. In his book Graeber goes onto length on how this dialetic of "compensatory consumerism" has been established throughout society, going all the way back to the Protestant work ethic, the labor theory of value, and then the scientific management of Taylorism. He doesn't just critique the phenomenon of bullshit jobs as simply "blame capitalism" or "blame the workers", it's far more subtle than that, and I would recommend reading the full book if you are curious about it.