Care to share some of your favorite findings?
The topics are
1. Capitalism takes away your ability to be bored, at least mostly. You'll spend the majority of your time at work. You can be bored there, but not in a very productive way. Your boredom is a function of the company's failure to extract maximum value from you every hour you're there. My gf got laid off with a severance, her boredom is a gift, she can sit and be bored and in that way think about what her purpose is, why she likes being alive and what she wants to do with it. In that way capitalism steals purpose: your purpose day to day is to drive profits for a company. It's not explicitly evil or bad feeling when that happens, because the system rewards you in a million ways when you do tie your purpose to a company's profits. In what ways can people escape this to explore what their purpose might actually be? This isn't necessarily a new thought, I just wanted to explore it.
2. That "retirement" exists as a concept is terrifying for so many reasons, as listed above. It also creates a kind of cultural expectation of sacrificing the bulk of your life to "earn the right" to leisure... but some people are born into that right. That sucks.
3. Capitalism may have weaponized and pillaged the desire to be a part of something greater. Similar to 1, there's probably a natural human desire to "be a part of something greater" (heard in countless interviews of people that do otherwise kinda strange things like join violent militaries or participate in cults or allow themselves to be hazed to join frats). When you join a company, that desire is cannibalized to feed the needs of the corporation. Your day to day energy to spend on being a part of your local community is instead directed to the needs of a company who is possibly transnational and who even could be directly harming your community, by for example dumping trainfuls of harmful chemicals in your backyard. Corporations and corporate culture have been very good at directing the desire to have a common goal and be working together on something, but did they invent these techniques or just pillage them? Is project management something unique to capitalism? What happens if you get a big group of people who aren't having these energies directed by a profit minded project manager, what will they do in their own communities to find meaning? What happens when you take a highly skilled project manager and put them in a situation where there's no profit to be made, what kind of projects and organization will they dream up? This because I do a lot of anarchistic direct action and communal work and am always thinking about managing goals, projects, tasks, needs, and etc in situations where there's no profit motive.
I'm also working on a blog post about how tf to get the 80 different web dev aligned emacs major modes to all respect a .editorconfig file and another one journaling my family's visit to Taiwan so realistically I'm spinning way too many plates....
