4 ms·

> It's hilarious that this is standard self-help advice designed to make you a better worker, Are we reading the same article? This article doesn’t read at all

> It's hilarious that this is standard self-help advice designed to make you a better worker, Are we reading the same article? This article doesn’t read at all about becoming a better worker. It emphasizes anti-consumerism and building diverse personal experiences and insists on not blindly following your peers and doing what others want you to do.

Cpoll 5y ago
I think they meant that the same advice is presented in a different context as self-help/better worker advice. I can see what they're saying, a lot of this also gets mentioned as productivity advice: - Anti-Mimetic Scheduling: take advantage of the off-peak times - Building a Deep Bookshelf: allocate 10% of your annual reading to books where you know you’re not going to ‘agree’ with the fundamental premise - Don’t Participate in the Shark-Tankification of Worth - Learn to Navigate without GPS: It kills the brain and it kills the wandering — the spirit. - Stop Writing to Please - etc.
eat_veggies 5y ago
It's for a specific kind of worker -- the neoliberal individual, the "entrepreneur of the self" who cultivates their personal value like a capital investment because they are human capital. "Building diverse personal experiences" is a nice euphemism for this. Although you are not doing what others want you to do, it's a freedom conditioned by the market. Being anti-memetic is already priced in. Not all of the tips, like "be nice" and "forgive people" accord to this logic, but as a general through-line: Burgis is relentlessly focused on "the way great companies are built" (#23), worships the great innovators Henry Ford and Steve Jobs (#18), demands that everything has a purpose (#17, #13), in service of what he deems most important, "the calling" or personal vocation (#1). We might read this through the lens of 20th century German sociologist Max Weber, who traces the spirit of capitalism to the Protestant ethic [1]. As a very short summary, it's an ethic defined by the very same vocational calling [Beruf], where labor acquires a religious significance and produces values that then become secularized. From my copy of his book: > One of the constitutive components of the modern capitalist spirit, and, moreover, generally of modern civilization, was the rational organization of life on the basis of the idea of the calling. It was born out of the spirit of Christian asceticism [...] The Puritan wanted to be a person with a vocational calling; we must be. Whether or not you believe the historiography, the function of the vocational calling is to produce a subject who works and disciplines themself automatically. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber#The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber#The_Protestant_Ethic...
- xwolfi 5y ago
  Sure, and it's hard to detach from the idea we must have a purpose - which I would even argue predates and exists outside the christian sphere. I'm an atheist and I still think life should try to expand outwards in space for the sake of structuring the chaos... Look having no goal, purpose or calling seem to work now that we organized process-heavy societies where one dilletante wouldnt hurt too much. But let me remind you not so long ago we did what our father did and his father before. And also, that if we jump back into natural nihilism to live as free of purpose as animals, we'll miss many of the intellectual wonders that the group managed to accomplish, maybe through the illusion it has no alternative, I concede. Probably not important to you, after all, since there's no inherent rule nor purpose, but sad a bit to me.
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    No one is suggesting having no goal. But if you have exactly the same goals as everyone else - build a business, become an executive, do executive things - while persuading yourself that you are somehow different because you read a few extra books and don't use a GPS etc, you are very much not operating outside of your culture, never mind being counter to it. And you are at least metaphorically - and possibly also literally - "doing what your father did." What goals are genuinely countercultural in 2022?
    - krapp 5y ago
      >What goals are genuinely countercultural in 2022? Undermining or opting out of society: Crypto, neo-reactionism, antiwork, anti-capitalism, even alternets like Gemini to a degree. Undermining societal norms or rejecting status quo reality: incels, anti-vaxx, flat earthers, pro-pedophilia. QAnon and BLM are both explicitly against society, albeit for vastly different reasons.
      - burntoutfire 5y ago
        > Undermining or opting out of society: Crypto In 2021, everybody and their dog is trying to make money by speculating on crypto... It might have been countercultural in 2012.

Cpoll 5y ago

I think they meant that the same advice is presented in a different context as self-help/better worker advice. I can see what they're saying, a lot of this also gets mentioned as productivity advice: - Anti-Mimetic Scheduling: take advantage of the off-peak times - Building a Deep Bookshelf: allocate 10% of your annual reading to books where you know you’re not going to ‘agree’ with the fundamental premise - Don’t Participate in the Shark-Tankification of Worth - Learn to Navigate without GPS: It kills the brain and it kills the wandering — the spirit. - Stop Writing to Please - etc.

eat_veggies 5y ago

It's for a specific kind of worker -- the neoliberal individual, the "entrepreneur of the self" who cultivates their personal value like a capital investment because they are human capital. "Building diverse personal experiences" is a nice euphemism for this. Although you are not doing what others want you to do, it's a freedom conditioned by the market. Being anti-memetic is already priced in. Not all of the tips, like "be nice" and "forgive people" accord to this logic, but as a general through-line: Burgis is relentlessly focused on "the way great companies are built" (#23), worships the great innovators Henry Ford and Steve Jobs (#18), demands that everything has a purpose (#17, #13), in service of what he deems most important, "the calling" or personal vocation (#1). We might read this through the lens of 20th century German sociologist Max Weber, who traces the spirit of capitalism to the Protestant ethic [1]. As a very short summary, it's an ethic defined by the very same vocational calling [Beruf], where labor acquires a religious significance and produces values that then become secularized. From my copy of his book: > One of the constitutive components of the modern capitalist spirit, and, moreover, generally of modern civilization, was the rational organization of life on the basis of the idea of the calling. It was born out of the spirit of Christian asceticism [...] The Puritan wanted to be a person with a vocational calling; we must be. Whether or not you believe the historiography, the function of the vocational calling is to produce a subject who works and disciplines themself automatically. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber#The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber#The_Protestant_Ethic...

xwolfi 5y ago
Sure, and it's hard to detach from the idea we must have a purpose - which I would even argue predates and exists outside the christian sphere. I'm an atheist and I still think life should try to expand outwards in space for the sake of structuring the chaos... Look having no goal, purpose or calling seem to work now that we organized process-heavy societies where one dilletante wouldnt hurt too much. But let me remind you not so long ago we did what our father did and his father before. And also, that if we jump back into natural nihilism to live as free of purpose as animals, we'll miss many of the intellectual wonders that the group managed to accomplish, maybe through the illusion it has no alternative, I concede. Probably not important to you, after all, since there's no inherent rule nor purpose, but sad a bit to me.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  No one is suggesting having no goal. But if you have exactly the same goals as everyone else - build a business, become an executive, do executive things - while persuading yourself that you are somehow different because you read a few extra books and don't use a GPS etc, you are very much not operating outside of your culture, never mind being counter to it. And you are at least metaphorically - and possibly also literally - "doing what your father did." What goals are genuinely countercultural in 2022?
  - krapp 5y ago
    >What goals are genuinely countercultural in 2022? Undermining or opting out of society: Crypto, neo-reactionism, antiwork, anti-capitalism, even alternets like Gemini to a degree. Undermining societal norms or rejecting status quo reality: incels, anti-vaxx, flat earthers, pro-pedophilia. QAnon and BLM are both explicitly against society, albeit for vastly different reasons.
    - burntoutfire 5y ago
      > Undermining or opting out of society: Crypto In 2021, everybody and their dog is trying to make money by speculating on crypto... It might have been countercultural in 2012.