Last night I listened to a Simon Sinek talk about finite vs. infinite games. The main example being the United States in the Vietnam war. The US looked at the conflict as a finite game, something that could be won in a certain amount of time and using enough resources. The North Vietnamese however, looked at it as an infinite game, they weren’t fighting to ‘win’, they were fighting to survive and to make sure that their way of life continued. They didn’t care about how many lives had to be lost or how long they had to fight, to them there was no win/lose it was live/die.
The more I thought about that I compared it to today’s environment for employment. That often I think we want there to be a win, we want to get to a point of working enough and spending enough time at work that for whatever reason we get to a point of not having to work anymore. That someday it will all have seemed worth it.
But, the more that I read posts in this sub, the more I realize that we’re stuck in an infinite game and we realize the hopelessness of it. We’re stuck in situations where we have to work in environments that aren’t healthy for us physically, intellectually, or emotionally, but we have to endure or suffer, or worst case die. And I feel like the crisis that we as a working class in the US (I’m in the US so I can only speak from my perspective) is our realization that we are involved in an infinite game that we don’t want to be in and that nothing we can do can ever get us out of it. We’re damaged by the places we work and we’re damaged by realizing that any change to the game is extremely unlikely.
TLDR; dropped to a new low mentally because of the death spiral for people like me because of Capitalism.