Every aspect of all our lives is ready for some revolution—healthcare, education, democracy, capitalism, nuclear disarmament, climate crisis, food processing, water rights…Everyone is feeling dissatisfied with how things are. It’s time to introduce a little anarchy. However, we don’t need torches to burn it down and start over for this to work. What we need is to reimagine. Political thinker and Linguist Noam Chomsky defines what anarchism should be and that any system or person imposing authority over someone must be justified. If it can’t be justified, we must find something better to replace it. That’s it. If a system isn’t working, why can’t we replace it with something more fair? A parent can justify pulling their four-year-olds to get them out of the street when a car is whizzing by. That is justified behavior. Is it justified to work people to the point they get chronic illnesses in exchange for a few years of retirement? Is it justified to deny healthcare to another human being because they don’t have the correct insurance?
Convenience is a relativity new problem in human history. For most of human history, convenience wasn’t an issue. To make bread, you had to bake it. You had to pull the grain, grind it, and prep it to bake it. It lasted for a couple days, and you needed to do it again. Now, you can buy a loaf of bread and store it for weeks. The industrialists saw this and created whole industries around the power of convenience. Now, convenience has turned to one-click shopping.
But it is also killing the only planet we live on.
We might need to take a step back to take a giant leap forward.
The disease of more is a side-effect of industrialism and consumerism. You can listen to plenty of podcasts and watch plenty of Tic Toc videos of someone who says they found meaning in being more efficient than the rest of us. We created a whole industry called “self-help” to cope with the world of corporations. Another fad diet or app to help you become more efficient to keep up with the constant speed. Decision-making is faster than ever because of the speed of information and communication. It has worn us down. So much so people are just sick of making another decision. How do we make hard decisions if we are inundated with a constant stream of easy ones? We must start saying no to every email, every text, every phone call, every problem, and every emergency. Instead, we start saying Yes to the possibility of our chosen projects. The path to finding meaning again is embracing of less inefficiencies and, yes, profits. Enough can simply be enough to go do the next thing.
What did our ancestors die for if we can’t live the life of happiness they always dreamed of?
If life is perceived as difficult before we achieve modernity, why wouldn’t they want us to be happy then?
Just because people have suffered, it doesn’t mean you can’t be happy.
However, if you are not drowning, it is your duty to be a lifeguard.
The next step forward is to embrace inconvenience, change, and the fear of the unknown. While this is all uncomfortable, it isn’t any more uncomfortable than the current situation we are currently in. At least with this path forward, we are actually moving in a direction instead of being stuck, which makes things different. It is challenging to recognize when it is time to have a revolution until it shows up. While it would have been better to face this challenge yesterday, today is the next best time. For tomorrow is no guarantee—really for all of us.
The U.S. Department of Human and Health Services recognizes burnout as a workplace condition. So, why, then, do we call it burnout? Why not call it something like “Exploitation Exhaustion?” The language around this is important. In Europe, paternity leave or medical care is recognized as a fundamental human right. It is expected. Unlike in the U.S., those things are viewed as a benefit or a privilege. The cultural approach to fixing burnout is embedded into our industrial mindset, framing it as an individual’s problem. So, they tell us to take 15 minutes out of our day to be mindful or go on a walk and meditate. We try to carve out time for “self-care” to cope with the system we have set up. When people inevitably fail, it’s the individual’s fault for not hacking it, not the environment that has been created. Corporatism then pushes us to go to therapy. While therapy can be helpful, it isn’t the panacea to this culture we have built. It all pushes us to cope, not to be free. Plus, not everyone can afford therapy, and wait times are long. The wellness or self-care industry has increased its market value to approximately $1.5 trillion worldwide. That says a lot about the world we have built. What needs to be addressed is what no one is talking about. The collective problem of burnout—the decisions that policymakers, lawmakers, and corporations have made for over a century that led us here.
There are 331 million people that live in the United States today. Out of those, there are roughly 23 million millionaires. About 6% of the total population in the U.S. There are about 750 billionaires in the U.S. today. The total wealth of U.S. billionaires grew from $240 billion in 1990 (adjusted for inflation) to over four trillion which is more than the combined wealth of the bottom half of U.S. households.
Adam Smith famously wrote about the invisible hand—the unseen forces of self-interest that impact the free market. If yesterday, the economy was ruled with a hand, it is now with an iron fist. An unforgiving one at that.
In 1914, Henry Ford introduced the assembly line and said, he would double the pay of factory workers from $2.50 to $5.00 per hour and you can work 8 hours per day instead of 9. Kicking off the race of making products for the masses—average stuff for average people. In this new social contract, the working class bought in. Give the factory a hard day’s work and in return, you can have your pocket full of cash. Eventually, this evolved to extra forms of security like healthcare, dental, and retirement. The American Dream was now realized.
Before the Ford Assembly Line, cars were handmade. It initially took 12 working hours to produce one car. Ford was able to reduce that time to a mere 93 minutes. So instead of having 100 people building 1 car, you have thousands of factory workers working on one specific part over and over again on many cars. The goal was to break down large tasks into smaller ones. While repetitive, you can then move even faster and cheaper with fewer defects. Now you no longer needed each worker to master every part of the assembly line, you just needed one person to master one part of the process. By reducing the amount of skill each job that each laborer had to do, you can now replace them with someone cheaper. By applying this process all across the factory, The Ford Assembly Line revolutionized production making average stuff for average people.
We don’t want to go back to the way this was. After all, we can’t imagine that sort of life. Our ancestors could cause they did the same thing as their parents which was the same as their parents and so on. Every path forward has risks and dangers. It always has been this way. But we know with certainty that the current trajectory of the result is really going to hurt without some sort of course correction. Today, there is a choice. Perhaps the answer is a middle road. Not to go back to the way things were and not to stay on the path we are on. To go in a new direction with something that is recognizable but new.
As we slowly strip away inconvenience, we also lose the part of our lives where we find joy and meaning in the struggle. There is no personal satisfaction in heading straight to Go and collecting 200 dollars.
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