Corporate America has programmed people to HUSTLE! BE THE BEST! ACHIEVE! MAKE MORE MONEY!!! for so long that they now need to pay someone to come and teach us how to relax, enjoy the moment and be happy again.
you should try reading zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance
I was an efficiency whore while working management at a big software company.
It sucked in some very specific ways. I didn’t even realize the impact until after I left that environment.
There were some good things from corporate America, too, but they didn’t bring real ultimate power happiness.
The fallacy of infinite growth (money) is such a CF
Infinite growth is a strategy that works for a virus not humans
The real problem is that our concept of Infinite growth fails to describe the growth of use value. We only measure the growth of exchange value.
Strictly speaking, both are possible. But only one is good.
You could do the SMBC web comic joke about two computers that just trade bits of data as a form of economic activity and achieve growth capped only by the maximum processor speed of the transactions. Viola! Infinite growth! But its all exchange growth, no utility.
You could also describe the Cambrian Explosion as an “Infinite Growth” strategy. Rapid proliferation of species, new ecological niches that are filled by species specifically focused on occupying those niches, revolutionary new means of biologically observing and processing information, etc etc etc. Now we’ve got enormous utilitarian growth, but there’s no real exchange process (unless you consider organisms eating one another a market mechanic).
From a biological perspective, the real upper limit on growth is efficient use of solar energy to process planetary materials. And we’re still nowhere near that limit. Plants and planktons and insects and crustaceans have been lapping us on that front even into the modern industrial age.
Our model of economic growth just fixates on the exchange side so heavily that we end up with the Two-Computers-On-An-Island-Trading-Bits proxy for economic success. We’ve abandoned our conceptualization of utility growth in our quest to fully financialize. We don’t recognize volunteer labor as a form of economic growth. We don’t recognize procreation as a form of economic growth or mortality as a form of de-growth. We don’t recognize ecological destruction as a form of economic de-growth or extinction as a massive loss in economic value.
Until we adjust our measures, the infinite growth we’re aiming for is purely a growth in accounting statistics. We’re sacrificing real prosperity for a financial fairy tale.
If we got off this rock infinite growth wouldn’t be so bad. We’d have space to grow as a species. Until then infinite growth is more harmful than good.
“I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species, and I realized that you’re not actually mammals.
Every mammal on this planet instictively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area.
There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is?
A virus.
Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague.
And we… are the cure.”
Every mammal on this planet instictively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment
That’s a cute line, but its not true. Animals regularly breed themselves into Malthusian collapse. Nevermind mammals, the earth was nearly rendered inhospitable because of too many trees. In fact, the fossil fuel economy of the modern day is predicated on this explosion in plant life that flooded the planet with excess oxygen.
Mammals follow similar trends, exploding through an ecological niche well past the point of sustainability. Species can - and have - overproduced to the point of collapsing their biomes and causing localized extinctions. Some mammals find an equilibrium, but that’s a result of selection bias. The species that hit an equilibrium point are the ones that stick around long enough to become present in the fossil records and major ecological zones. Plenty more fail and die out.
A virus.
The major distinction between a virus and an organism is that viruses cannot reproduce on their own.
This is particularly ironic given the premise of the Matrix movie. It is not the humans that are the viruses. Even in confinement, they continue to bare fruit and multiple. It is the AIs that exist parasitically which persist only with a steady new supply of human hosts.
Consequently, Agent Smith’s genocidal plot nearly brings down the system that the AIs need to survive.
Absolutely. Any time I see quotes that extol the virtues of non-human animals compared to humans, I think that those animals would absolutely do the same thing if they had the physical and mental capabilities to. Life is “designed” to procreate with no end limit. Since there are finite resources, if they’re too successful they start to become victims of their own success.
teach us how to relax, enjoy the moment and be happy again.
That’s not what they’re paying the motivational speaker to do. They’re paying them to make you more productive and trick you in to thinking they care about you so that you might stay loyal and work harder to make them money.
To me, this says that your workplace has acknowledged and accepted that the way they do business is leading to burnout, at least for some people. But rather than using that as evidence that their business practices need to change, they’ve instead opted to individualize the problem. Our growth projections aren’t unreasonably ambitious, you just need to do more deep breathing.
It’s like how I’m told to take a vacation to relax, only to return to the same (or an even larger) pile of to-dos that I left behind.
Edit: If this resonates with you, check out the book “McMindfulness” by Ronald Purser.
