Humans can now only relate to others as objects, as commodities: the human relation is now a product-driven object-obsessed interaction. Worse, how you relate to others is how you relate to yourself.
The seduction is easy: I love working with tools whose smooth functioning moves into a frictionless joy of goal achievement. I am a product fetishist, producing myself as a proximate object for consumption.
Tag: economics
- Theme: Systems
Product fetish as self-production
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1–2 minutes - Theme: Growth
not working is work
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1–2 minutesThere was a time (before cell phones) when you could sit for 10 minutes doing nothing. Today we convert all time to use: your commute is time to learn, your evening is consuming entertainment to enable communal discourse tomorrow, and your vacation doubles as social media production.
Similarly, meditating (formally doing nothing) is now a practice requiring discipline: your 10 minutes is sanctioned work for mental health, requiring apps and guides to mitigate your drive to spring into action consuming or producing. - Theme: Self
Self-interest v Equality
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1–2 minutesAdam Smith said our economy is based on self-interest, which seemingly relegates equity, equality, and altruism to symbolic social cries.
The story goes that material reality (foundational) allows contradictory wishes and dreams (philosophical/ideological) to ride atop it. Our economy encourages the symbolic virtues as a distraction and abundant energy source.
Yet, let’s consider that cooperation and collaboration maintain functional economies. Virtues of trust and loyalty (beyond self-interest or reason) are the foundation upon which parasitic, disruptive economies establish themselves. In this reversal, the parasite has convinced us it is the host, and every man must be for themself. - Theme: Culture
Once we lived for salvation, now we live for status
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1–2 minutesWe went from a loving Father to the Protestants’ God from whom we could not earn salvation (we were all sinners reliant on his grace). As anxious souls unable to control our destiny, we channel insecurity into work: visible virtue.
Excessive work accumulates wealth, so we flipped the signified and signifier to claim “wealth” as God’s favor and our status through materialism (not spiritualism or kindness).
Our insecurity drove us into the arms of a more capricious, uncaring, and taxing God: Money. The comfort of the trade is the objective measure of our salvation, which proves most of us unworthy once again.
- Theme: Self
size matters: don’t sweat the small stuff
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1–2 minutesThe small stuff may be insignificant, but how do we know which daily actions impact our character, and which to release?
Consider who you want to be in the future and if your present self is mirroring those values or being pulled into anxiety.
We tend to gravitate towards small things because we can control them to soothe our insecurity. However, if we can control them they truly are small things, probably unworthy of anxious behavior that can shift into manipulating or discounting others.
- Theme: Growth
Size matters: the small things are more important
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1–2 minutesWe often dismiss the small decisions as inconsequential because of their slight impact.
We assume our character is reflected in big decisions: to whom you get married or your job. However, these events happen to you because of who you are.
Who you are is aggregated daily through small contacts and seemingly trivial chores. Your approach to the small inevitably becomes large. - Theme: Systems
Magic is Anti-egalitarian
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1–2 minutesMagic is in you, you can’t become magic.
Technology, on the other hand, promises empowerment through application and effort.
However, technology often becomes anti-egalitarian by limiting access, rendering it’s promise back into the realm of magic. - Theme: Systems
The Fall
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1–2 minutesDeciduous trees use vital resources to grow leaves, only to discard them in the fall as a blanket of decay. Next year, they do it all over again.
Our economic, rational self rejects this logic of recirculation for a linear logic of grasping, owning and hoarding. This is, clearly, unnatural. - Theme: Growth
Living vs Achieving
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1–2 minutesThe paradox: we know that the "right thing to do" is to think long-term, which tends to be a costly upfront sacrifice, but it incurs the greater benefit (and less heartache and loss) in the future through less living now.
As a slave to the future we increasingly aggregate metrics on a weekly, daily, or hourly basis. Our new "living in the present" is the hyper-granular metrics of productive achievement for the future.And yes, getting 1% better daily, aggregating marginal gains, and system optimization can get you to your goal. But even if you have to schedule it in, put down your system and return to the land of the living at least once a day.