The third issue is emotional self-regulation. Most of us have routines, things we do every day. Get up, coffee, light breakfast, drive to work, work, chat with co-worker, have lunch, work a bit more, goof of on the internet, etc, etc. We’ve figured out routines that keep us mostly in the same set of emotional spaces throughout the day. This is like walking with a cane: You’ve set up mood assists throughout the day, week, and year.
When you lose that routine, you lose those assists.
But the issue of self-regulation, indeed, of self and routine is much larger.
The fact is that between helicopter parenting and school, most people today have never had to learn how to self-regulate meaningfully beyond the self-regulation required of any good slave or servant. Their schedules, from childhood, were all determined for them. Their self was created by other people, and their fundamental choices boil down to reactions for or against it.
Then, when they become adults they have university (a bit more freedom) and on to jobs, where for 40 of the most useful waking hours, a boss tells them what to do.
Most people have thus never learned to truly manage their own time, thoughts, and emotions without schedules and activities imposed by other people. It’s no wonder that some people retire in their sixties and promptly die, with “nothing to do” absent an overseer.
You can’t be your own person, not truly, without unstructured time, and I would argue, alone time. There’s a study that found most people would rather give themselves electric shocks than be alone with nothing to do.
They rely entirely on the environment, an environment controlled and structured by other people, for emotional regulation.
Without work/school/internet/tv/games, etc… they’re lost. I’d say without those things they stop being a self-regulating person, but the point is that most people have never been self-regulating people.
Worse, activities like school and jobs, despite the lies you have been told, and which some believe (especially, oddly, about school) aren’t designed with your interests at heart. School is a slave factory. You may get some knowledge out of it, but the UR lesson is: “Do what you’re told, when you’re told, the way authority wants it done. Ask for permission to even talk or go to the bathroom.”
That’s what children are trained to do for 12 years. Then university trains them some more: At elite universities, they’re trained to have a bit more freedom to meet goals (deadlines are negotiable at Ivy league universities, but not at most State universities), and you’re released into the job market, where those who went to elites have to make some decisions, and those who didn’t are expected to be good little slaves, and sure as hell not to think or feel for themselves.
We have a society that endlessly talks about freedom, but in our daily lives, the vast majority of us are not free and never have been. We have spent almost all our lives with our primarily daily activity is determined by other people, who often also tell us what to think and how we should feel.
Such a people are not, and cannot be, suited to freedom.
Forget all the other criticism, the fundamental problem with capitalism is that it allows only a small percentage of the population to live free lives, and makes the rest into either slaves or (if they don’t have work) so poor that they have no effective freedom because of their poverty.
Our society is a slave factory and until we recognize that and reorganize it so it isn’t, it will produce slaves.
What we call freedom today is simply the ability, sometimes, to choose who our master is.
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