I think it escapes the domain of work. It's widely propagated in a variety of different mediums. I don't operate under the pretense that me and my direct friend

I think it escapes the domain of work. It's widely propagated in a variety of different mediums. I don't operate under the pretense that me and my direct friends and kin are a good representation of the world at large, but to give an example: You've got to go shopping, and there are occasions where you're confronted with a mass of people. I actually like people, and social interactions generally, as I suspect most do, but there's this weird undercurrent- which to be fair may exist regardless of social/economic organization- I don't want to rethink my path through the store, I don't want to maneuver through the crowd, I don't want to talk with people, I fume at the idea of people chatting in the middle of the aisle. I'm in this considerable, and evidently consequential hurry, to rush through life on autopilot. Rushing to get back to doing literally fucking nothing. But this phenomena seems to be a shared experience among my friends and relatives. I've read pretty widely, I generally don't traipse into the territory of pseudo-religious woo-woo, but Eckhart Tolle fairly elegantly explains that the world as we know it is largely structured around what he defines as the ego. The ego is exhausting, it's all consuming. But it's continuously demanded as we move evermore towards the speed-of-light society. Decision after decision, projections of the future made from a patchwork-geist stitched out of the past. Closely attending to arbitrarily defined time. Balancing accounts. Superficial chats with disassociated people trying to think their way out of the bag. Meanwhile there's the internet, and its widespread integration into nigh-every facet of life, I don't need to make the list for you, and I'm sure you can point out a litany of negative consequences and their cascading effects on you personally and society at large. I for one am running in an ego-depleted state almost constantly, so yeah, I agree with you. All this to forward some unknown and undirected agenda, blindly. You specialize in some repetitive task, go in to the same building day after day to do what you did every other day, and with negligible respite. The undirected part, I think is one of the things that really gets people. We're social animals, we want a function in a community, perhaps even need it to be made whole, but that's been extracted by the abstraction of bureaucracy and organization, you toil for some faceless, dispassionate, and disconnected c-suite exec you'll never be in the same room with. You don't do it for your boss, you probably don't do it for yourself. One could aggrandize the economic impact you have on your community servicing your amorally defined debt to a bank that you've never walked into, and purchasing goods from a chain supermarket which contributes pennies to a few dozen workers. Companies that are headquartered in a state a thousand miles away, selling goods from all over the world- countries and their cultures you know next to nothing about, people who you'll never know. It's not just work though, it's everything, everywhere I think. I could write pages about it, suffice it to say I don't like where we are.