This content originally appeared on Go Make Things and was authored by Go Make Things
…is just to be alive.
That’s the core premise of this video from Shizen Style on why chasing success often feels so unsatisfying.
I’ve observed this myself.
Hitting 1k subscribers for my newsletter felt great… for a moment. Then it was the race to 2k. Then 5k. Then 10k. It was never enough.
Part of this seems to be innate to the human condition. We’re driven to create and explore and have an impact.
But, I suspect, part of it is also socialization, industrialization, and a modern society built around tech-broism and hustle culture.
As a kid, I enjoyed making things and exploring for its own sake. As an adult, I’ve felt this obnoxious push to “have a impact” and “monetize” anything that brings me joy, sucking the joy out of it in the process.
We weren’t made for this.
We weren’t made for anything, really. But we certainly weren’t made to spend more than half of our waking hours every day in labor.
That’s almost certainly an artifact on colonialism. Many, many indigenous and pre-colonial cultures work(ed) far less than we do (not paint to it through rosy glasses—nothing is a utopia).
The problem, of course, is that it’s hard to just enjoy living when you’re trying to survive.
Wealth inequality, the high cost of rent and food, social injustice, climate collapse, corporate violence… it’s hard to just “enjoy life” when you’re basic needs aren’t taken care of.
There’s all this talk of how AI can make art and write code and create music and draft emails and call your loved ones while simulating your voice and read books for you and… fuck that.
Those are the things that give life meaning!
We don’t have a tech problem. We have a culture problem. As I wrote the other day, we have an excess, inequitably distributed.
Our system is setup so that some of us work too much—often doing pointless work in jobs we hate—while others can’t find work at all.
Imagine if we all worked, and all worked less, and shared equitably in the excesses of our labor. A 20 hour work well, hell, a 10 hour work week, could be a completely viable thing if we weren’t all chasing success all the time.
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This content originally appeared on Go Make Things and was authored by Go Make Things