After the collective trauma of the last two years we’re walking wounded thinking the world is still the same thing and that we are the same people, I don’t know a single person in my life who isn’t dealing with grief, anxiety and stress and we minimize it’s impact because it’s happening to al of us, but that just makes it a bigger event.
And why is this on anti-work? Because I think the solution to work isn’t for us all to be idle. We want to live rich and meaningful full lives and contribute to our homes, neighborhoods, families and communities, we just don’t want to be slaves literally or economically to anyone.
The problem we have isn’t really political, it’s personal. We need to change how we operate this bus because not only have we driven it into a ditch, the engine is made of human bodies and it runs on the blood and tears of a society where so many suffer so a few can indulge in their fantasy visions of a future we neither had a hand in creating not have consented to live in, but look around and this is Cybertopia 1999 realized because we put a bunch of libertarian white boy utopians in charge of the platform that all of us use to live.
The problem is it’s too late. It’s 2022 and we’re all nazis or narcissists or whatever you want to call ourselves and we don’t realize it because it’s so prevalent and we’re all so mad at each other anyway. So, it’s a fools errand to think storming the Capital or buying Twitter is going to change things as much as it is that a protest march or reforming capitalism is going to make a meaningful change, never mind the delusional people who think corporations or nation states will save us from ourselves.
No, I really think we need to decide what happens next. The world is changing and we are changing with it. We either do it mindfully or mindlessly, but the choice is ours to make on an individual level.
Our society has failed to solve the problems of out fathers and our grandfather’s and theirs before them because we have come to profoundly mistake the map for the actual territory in every aspect of our lives. We have defined success as something based on scarcity and rarity. The thing is made beautiful by its exclusivity, but while for many societies that lived before ours that sentiment was true as well, theirs was expressed in the rarity of a moment, be it a sunset or astrological alignment for us that sentiment is expressed in dollars.
Which is why everything fucking sucks. I’m a big believer that automated luxury gay space communism is our destiny as a human family and that we can do great things, but first we have to feed and clothe and house everyone. We have to make sure each and every one of us is safe in as meaningful a way as possible. We already know how to do these things, we just have to work out how to do them for everyone.
We create enough food for the whole world, yet many are underfed and some starve. That is as great and passionate a human endeavor and a far more necessary step for earth to be able to support a colonization of mars than launching a tesla into space. I’m a spaceboy too but I don’t see how any endeavor to invest in making life possible on another world is possible without a massive investment of earth’s time and resources. If the planet is a basket case and there’s global regional wars happening due to climate change, migrant populations and collapsing nation states and pandemic, they’ll burn your launchpads to the ground here before you get your first bootprint on the ground there.
I’m so tired of being angry all the time and I’ve been working for a long time at this point and have even run my own business because I hated working so much not because I didn’t love the work, but because I hated the politics and venal greed and stupidity and needless self-sacrifice, bigotry, misogyny, theft and crime. Late stage capitalism is brutal and I’m trying my best to move past it.
So that’s my pitch, but the problem is nobody thinks it’s possible. But we will figure this out eventually. Out species survived glaciers two miles high in Manhattan, we’ll survive this too.
The question is will we do it the usual way humans do it, ass backwards learning from our mistakes, or shall we do it the other way by choosing to use and learn from everything we have learned in our lives and from our loved ones as well as what we can learn from what’s been left to us by our ancestors through wisdom, story and knowledge?
Right now, we live in a world where we just fight the battles of the past all over again rather than look at them for what they are, the past. The war is over. Yes there are still narcissists and killers and bigots and racists but what they need is mental help and care. We all need mental health and care.
So what I think we should do is launch a global mental healthcare platform and the next new big it economy will be the therapy economy. Provide mental healthcare free of charge, subsidized by all. If the governments won’t do it, make the corporations. If you’re going to traumatize us by letting our personal data be sold to anyone with a credit card pay for our therapy.
And the great thing about this is we get to hire lots and lots of therapists so jobs and training for everyone and personal one on one intensive longterm therapy is gonna be an AI proof industry because we choose to make it one.
I dunno this is just me at the end of a long Friday thinking about how we fix things and I thought, fuck, what we all really could use right now is therapy and and self-care on a global scale.