I was amused, in a “oh for fucks sake” way today when I found out that over 80% of workers experience anxiety on Sunday, thinking about return to work on Monday.

Then on Monday heart attacks spike. Thirteen to twenty-five percent higher than normal depending on the study.

Work is anything you do due to coercion. If you wouldn’t do the job if you didn’t need the money, then you’re being coerced by what Max called the whip of hunger. (These days also homelessness.) This is different from being a hunter-gatherer: nature didn’t deliberately set up a system where if you don’t work you die, it’s accidental. And hunter-gatherers are famous for not working when they have a surplus. (To be fair this is partly because it’s hard to store surplus, but many such societies actually forbid creating large private surpluses, as they understood where that leads.)

Now work because it’s truly necessary is fine, but as we all know, and as the late Graeber pointed out, something close to half of jobs are “bullshit jobs”. They either don’t need to be done, or they make the world actively worse. (That would include 90% of people working in finance, for example.)

What Graeber found is that people with “real” jobs, even janitors, might be unhappy, but they were a lot less unhappy than those in bullshit jobs making equivalent wages, because at least they felt like their job really needed to be done.

But this is a pattern that goes beyond jobs. The suicide pattern of teenagers is instructive: suicides drop a lot during summer vacation.

They also dropped during the Covid shutdowns, which I predicted at the time.

Because school sucks. You spend all day doing boring things that teacher tells you to. In the US at least you don’t even learn much, with massive rates of illiteracy because you aren’t really being taught (if that was the goal, it could be achieved much faster and more effectively) you’re being conditioned to do what your told, when your told, to give teacher what they want in the way teacher wants, and to keep your mouth shut when not called on.

You’re being turned into a good little wage slave. It takes years of coercive conditioning to make humans willing to put up with wage slavery and creating those people is the job of schools and teachers. Professors put the finishing touches on those who will wind up being senior wage-slave supervisors or otherwise entrusted with minor bits of power and expected to use it in the interests of the masters.

Adults have heart attacks because work sucks so much. Kids kill themselves.

We created this, as a species. We did this to ourselves. Is there truly no better way we can come up with?

 

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