Belly Button Lint

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Tag: work

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    Therapeutic State

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    1–2 minutes

    Our once “administrative state” has been supplanted with the “therapeutic state” that manages Americans’ mental and emotional well-being, extending its reach into the role of individual communities.

    This aligns with the managerial regime’s goals to incorporate private life aspects into its realm of control, a.k .a. managerial overreach. This creates a realm of bureaucratic expertise where managers can marginalize and demonize the opposition: only the insane would argue against progress.

    The only cure is the complete alignment with the professional-managerial classes’ ideologies and lifestyles.

    We have produced a class of elite Nurse Ratched’s whose safetyism negates debate, preferring destruction.

    (from N.S. Lyons)

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    Attention (is you)

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    1–2 minutes

    What you pay attention to matters. It is in the end, who you will become.

    Participating in petty politics or inflating mundane worries at work shapes you. Similarly, ignoring your friends isolates you. Where your attention is (or is not) is who you are right now, but it also shapes you.

    Once you know who you want to be when you die (a person at peace, without regrets) any other behavior compromises your goals: keep your focus.

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    social media captures leisure, which is us

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    1–2 minutes

    Labor used to be bodily work with limits, meaning your leisure time was yours while your labor time created capital through products and services.

    Sociologists once thought the only way to know someone was by what they did in their free time; at work, they were compromised.

    The miracle of social media is how it has converted “disposable time” into fixed capital; the mechanics of capture bypass physical labor limits to consume thoughts, style, and representation, altering it into material, structural wealth.

    The machinery of capture has ensnared us, but we have gone willingly out of awe and fear. Beginning with industrial bodily factory ballet and permeating to our mind and time, we are now devoted to the mechanics of the algorithmic desire.

    “but this is the art of the machines—they serve that they may rule.” Samuel Butler, 1897

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    Body moving vs. thinking

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    1–2 minutes

    There is joy in discovering your body to be functional.

    Productive movement is also termed “labor,” often negatively associated with “work.” However, the system that has captured natural joy (movement as an accomplishment) has replaced it (or displaced it) with an abstracted fulfillment: intellectual insight.

    Yet, academic pleasure offers me less joy than utilitarian physicality.

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    Contradicting wants: labor and relaxation.

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    1–2 minutes

    At one point, wanting to fulfill your potential requires work, but you also want a peaceful and relaxed life, which -if misinterpreted- denies effort.

    To satisfy both desires requires “work” and “not-work”: a seemingly impossible contradiction.

    However, doing excellent work to meet your potential during half of the day generates fulfillment over the next half.

    In a reinterpretation, we do not have to be totalizing; we can be granted relaxation and labor for ambition to fulfill both desires, but perhaps not simultaneously.

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    The difference in the amateur and professional

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    1–2 minutes

    Commonly we hear: The amateur creates out of love. The professional creates for money.

    This, however, is a false distinction. If the amateur loved what they did even more, they would do it for money.

    If anything, the amateur overidentifies with what they create, declaring their identity as an artist, poet, or actor, while the professional considers it their job, and realize while it is what they do it is not how they identify who they are.

    This is what allows the professional to continue to create, while the amateur is overly anxious and sensitive to any feedback or criticism, to the extent that they will not produce or release their productions. It is as if the amateur will lose “who they are” if this hobbyist love was taken from them, while the professional has no such illusions.

    From Steven Pressfield, the war of art

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    Reinstating Natural Rights

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    1–2 minutes

    A coercive government cannot reinstate man’s “natural rights” because natural rights are a by-product of a peaceful industry.

    Granted, war may have been necessary to achieve temporary peace, but war is precisely when natural rights are suspended.

    Also, one cannot appeal to a current, settled state of peace and freedom to have “natural rights” reinstated because large businesses, industries, and machines maintain dominance. In fact, these very systems, devices, and bureaucracies are why we need to reestablish human rights: these dominant systems undermine natural liberty.

    In this conundrum, re-awakening “natural rights” implies a split from both war and managerial industrial systems that maintain servitude. It isn’t easy to imagine how a revolution that could accomplish this may manifest and engender awe in a time that could introduce such notions as “natural rights.”

    ~ from #Accelerate (the accelerationist reader)

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    utility as a means to social realignment

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    1–2 minutes

    When you are snubbed socially, the impulse is to regain your position in another way: if you are laughed at, you prove social worth by over-indexing on utility value (you increase your productivity) to compensate. 

    This operational and social alignment means if someone wants you to work harder, they leverage social exclusion: the more they snub you, the harder you work.

    The clever manager or bully only pushes so far, then allows a taste of the good life before resubmerging you.

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    don’t aim for happiness or you will destroy it

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    1–2 minutes

    We say we are looking for happiness, but we are looking for a marvelous life that comes from a great pursuit.
    Almost none of which appears as happiness. Happiness is a byproduct of doing excellent work.

    Furthermore, even if we achieve happiness we promptly destroy it agitating for a novel heightened level of experience or meaning: we destroy happiness seeking more happiness.

    (in part from Jordan Peterson)

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    Therapy work works

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    1–2 minutes

    Therapy is talking to someone about your experience. This is why all forms of it work, up to a point.

    With psychoanalysis examining internal trauma or CBT reconsidering external stimuli, we pay for a personal relationship (trusted guide) or a training framework (tools) to review our plight.

    In many cases, this offloading and reflection alleviates us by reframing. But of course, we enter back into the world encountering more challenges.

    Humans used to get guidance from friends, family, and elders. Today, we have a professional class with pedigrees to handle our chaos.

    Is this commodification of our mental health and relationships, or is the world and life more complicated, requiring more advanced solutions?