During the first year of the pandemic, there was a great deal of squealing about suicide. Turns out the squealers, as usual, were exactly wrong.
I have a friendly acquaintance who quit his job to teach the Alexander Technique online. He had a good paying consultant gig. First, for a month, he basically collapsed. Nine months later, he looks like a different person.
I just came across an older video of mine while I was still at work: I look tired and stressed, my face is showing some kind of burden
contrast this to the podcast I did with @tasshinfogleman yesterday…
this is absolutely wild to be able to see looking back
cc @visakanv pic.twitter.com/NMjTdlPet1
— Michael Ashcroft (@m_ashcroft) October 20, 2021
Daily life in our societies is essentially slavery. We spend most of the day doing what we are told, when we are told — things we would never do if we didn’t need the money, because without it we would wind up on the street.
For children, it is little different: School is training for work. Sit down, speak only when given permission, do what your’re told, the way you’re told to do it. Don’t even use the bathroom without permission.
Once the school or work day is over, we have a few hours, mostly, to do things like eat, wash, commute, and take care of family members — with perhaps a few hours of entertainment, usually something passive.
If we’re lucky, we get two days off a week, one of which most people spend on chores.
Our entire lives are oriented around doing what our masters tell us, when they tell us, in the way they want, and, if we refuse (unless we were born rich or are very lucky), we suffer.
So it’s no surprise that when we got a good period off from work or school, suicide rates dropped EVEN during a pandemic.
There was a plague, but people were still less likely to kill themselves than during ordinary work periods.
Wage slavery and school are just a description of everyday life for most people and almost any break from it, even due to a plague, is a relief.
I particularly find ridiculous all the adults who seem to have forgotten how happy most children were when school ended and summer break happened. School was and is, for most people, a lot less pleasant than “no school.” Not because of the subject matter learning (what little there is), but because the real teaching at school isn’t centered on subject matter, it’s centered on “how to be a good little slave so you’ll slave well for the bosses in the future.”
someofparts
Many years ago, when it became normal for people to show up at various locations and shoot a bunch of folks, I searched for a journalist, any journalist, who was writing about it. I only found one who was willing to take on the subject in a meaningful way, and that was Mark Ames. Here’s the book he wrote about it – https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/64821.Going_Postal.
Ames did the legwork of going around and talking to people who had experienced some of these awful encounters. As much as possible, he filled in the back story to try and understand why these things happened.
The problem turned out to be schools and jobs that were especially awful. The backstories on people who snapped and went postal reveal individuals who were singled out for great heaping doses of extra abuse from those around them.
In a world where school and jobs are already a form of slavery, as Ian notes, the culture and policies these venues are embedded in became much worse after Ronald Reagan took office. Ames saw the proliferation of rage murders as a disorganized rebellion against Reaganomics and the culture of cruelty it created.
scruff
And the other is spent on recovery.
anon
Working from home provides a lot more flexibility. If I want a change of scenery, I go to a local library near my home where there are usually empty study rooms during the day. If the weather is nice, I can go to a café and sit outside with my laptop. I can drive a family member to a doctor’s appointment, go grocery shopping in the middle of the day, or take a walk in the park. I have the type of work that can be done at any time of the day so I can go out during the day and work on a report at 7:00 PM if I wanted. Because I didn’t have to commute, I found myself cooking more often which saved money and is healthier. I lost 10 pounds during the first year of the pandemic without trying and after I had canceled my gym membership because I was eating healthier with homecooked meals. As soon as I returned to the office my weight crept back up.
Because I don’t have an ideal home situation at the moment, I have preferred a mix of work from home and going into the office a few days a week. Still beats going in 5 days a week and saves me money on gas, food, dry cleaning, etc.
The head of my organization wanted us back to work asap even though we had all proven that we could complete tasks on time without going into the office. My guess is that it was about control for him. A lot of bosses get to where they are because they are narcissistic psychopaths who love to abuse others. Our masters like to be able to monitor us and force us to sit at a desk for 8 hours straight with a short 30-60 minute lunch break, pandemic be damned. Because we are monitored by security cameras and when we use our parking badges to leave the workplace, we can’t do things like go out for 30 minutes outside of our designated break times to take care of a family member, get some exercise, or go grocery shopping.
It’s a no-brainer that people who were able to be hired for a work from home job quit. A woman on my floor who left told me there was no reason for her to be in the office because her work is all online analysis. Now she works from home where she can be with her dogs and avoid the crazy commute. I know several single parents who have more time to be with their kids and can drive them to where they need to because of work from home options. The “great resignation” as the media likes to call it will continue as long as more forward thinking employers that offer competitive salaries provide work from home or a mix of office and work from home as a perk to entice skilled professionals.
As for children, I think some actually like school, especially if they come from unhappy households and look forward to seeing friends at school. That being said, school wasn’t great for a lot of us, possibly for the vast majority of us. I personally disliked high school and my classmates. I expect that is true for a lot of people. High school today with the advent of social media sounds like more of a nightmare.
I have followed what steps would be taken with the latest mass school shooting that happened in Oxford, Michigan, and I was in disbelief when I read that only a month after that traumatizing event, students were returning to in-person learning – at the height of the Omicron spread! Those kids deserve the rest of the school year off and a lot of counseling.
Willy
I always enjoyed work, even in those so-called sweatshops, because I seem to be made to enjoy working hard and competing well. But only if management was sane and we slaves were all rowing the galley towards some tangible goal and able to reach actual destinations without too much of that battle carnage scene from out of Ben Hur.
Maybe I was just good at being that guy who’d save Quintas Arrius, to wind up being treated like his new son and all. Or at least something worth respecting or even being taking care of, I dunno.
It fell off a lot with neoliberalism and then increasingly, cultures where management would be corrupt and incompetent cronies or even a certified psychopaths. Then it seemed that nothing anybody did mattered unless it involved outwitting and outplaying peers in Trumpish political games. Work tended to become more of a madhouse in those situations.
It seems that when things get offshored and automated and austerity-ized, the best don’t usually rise above the chained masses. You just get seen as competition with management. Instead of being treated like a new son, you sit with Quintas Arrius on that raft as he waits until your back to be turned so he can kill you for food. Doesn’t make sense in a civil society, but that’s how it can work. Be warned.
Bazarov
Most of school, as I remember it, was bad.
There were, however, good parts. The socializing was great. I made all sorts of friends. And for as much as you talk about how school is preparation for work, it really isn’t much like factory, service, or retail work (I’ve done them all) except in superficial ways. Those jobs are far, far worse for a lot of different reasons. As an example: at school, for the student, there’s no customer. Customers are pretty horrible. It’s true that you can see the teacher as a “boss,” but my worst teachers were way better than most bosses I’ve had. It was easy to slack off in school and joke around–the task masters at the factory didn’t allow slacking off (they would count how long you spent in the bathroom) and the working conditions were so bad, it was hard to joke around due to the noise alone.
Though most of my teachers were poor at what they did, the few that were excellent changed my life. One in particular took an interest in me and helped open the world of reading–not reading bullshit but real, challenging literature. She also helped me cultivate a love of writing. Without her, I would not be who I am today–I would be much more gullible and ignorant. Honestly, when I look back, her intervention was more important than any intervention my parents tried. In that respect, she’s like a second mother. Truly precious!
None of my bosses, not even the best ones, ever cared about me beyond my instrumental utility. This teacher, the way she did things, actually hurt her career because she was very unpopular with the administration. The only reason they didn’t fire her is that they couldn’t because of the union. What she did for me she did out of a spiritual and humane impulse, an impulse that most places I’ve worked strangle entirely.
Since I was in school, conditions have almost certainly degraded. Maybe today it is as bad as you say it is. After all, my students (I teach reading and writing at a major American university) struggle significantly to grasp what they read, but as much as that’s often blamed on the education system, I think it has more to do with tech addicting them to their phones and atrophying their attention spans. It’s very, very hard for them to sit quietly long enough to read what we would consider a short essay (10-15 pages). Doing so requires some discipline, and their entire world is designed to rob them of the discipline necessary to cultivate wisdom.
Trinity
My boss, whose school system went back to in-home schooling with the rise of Omicron, told me yesterday that the schools need to reopen. There are lots of pro and con arguments here, I’m just sharing his perspective. I think because he is home (telework) and his wife is not (college instructor) the education burden is his alone. He recently visited France and Switzerland (family) and told me that France has never closed their schools.
I replied with two comments. The first was that his own observation was that the French take masking very seriously, including the school children. The kids are in school, but with 100% masking. (He didn’t mention the quality of the masks, and probably wouldn’t know it if he saw it.). The second was the comparative quality of a French education, and he agreed with that, because during his visit he was able to directly compared what same age children were learning in France to what he is teaching right now to his own children. He said it was “amazing” what same-age French children are learning compared to what his own children are learning.
He also told me an anecdote where he was approached by a couple of teen boys while exploring around his hotel in France. He thought they were trying to bum a cigarette, but instead they wanted a mask! To get into a store, and they had forgotten theirs.
This is why the US (and similar countries) are fooked. In a way it is partly our fault for not insisting (in prior decades) what became apparent in the internet age: the disparity in communalism, and the wide disparity in public services (including education). That’s one side of the argument. There is also a valid argument that we are “taught” what to value (through mass advertising, ads disguised as news, 24-7-365 ads, ads on every screen all the time, and a still growing number of screens everywhere we go) . So we value shiny baubles, flashy property, money-money-money, and keeping up with the Jones’, instead of valuing the importance of community, public health, and educational excellence.
As Ian said, we are as much slaves economically, but also culturally, including to the ruling classes’ fake messaging (and our own habits).
Ian Welsh
In my entire 12 years of schooling I had 5 teachers I would have gone to class with if I wasn’t forced to.
University was somewhat better, in the sense that I wasn’t “strictly speaking” forced to be there, but I’d still say only 4 profs were better than just reading a book on their subject, leaving aside some technical skills where I needed hands-on teaching.
Bazarov
Ian, you’re assuming that students can read a book. You’re assuming we still live in that world, where the majority of people who graduate high school–hell, who get into college–can and do read books.
This is not the case in America, I’m sorry to say (perhaps it’s better in Canada). I have had many, many, many students who graduated from what we would think of as “good,” well-funded high schools who are not literate enough to read a fairly accessible 10 page essay and who’s writing is akin to gibberish. I always ask my students in office hours about their reading habits–it’s very bleak, for the men especially (a large minority of my women students read books and boy does it show in their ability).
I fared similarly to you at university, though I had more professors who I enjoyed going class to see than you did. I often tell my students that they would learn more from reading (and understanding) 10 important books than they would from their whole college education. But they can’t read, at least not without significant help from me (and I’m very thankful I’m able to help these students–it’s amazing to seem them blossom once they begin to have some confidence!).
It’s truly shocking, Ian, the extent to which in just one generation society has become post-literate beyond the wildest imagination of the anti-TV people in the 80s and 90s. Knowledge, for most of my students, is mediated principally through images. Literary and analytic language is Greek to them. So many of them are extremely inarticulate (this especially goes for the men), and their inability to express themselves results in terrible anguish. I’ve seen so many of my students, so many young men, choked with tears, trying to explain to me in their halting way their deep loneliness, their deep longing for connection. It’s heart wrenching.
Soredemos
I’m not particularly swayed by all the hand-wringing about damage lost education will inflict, because I’m pretty sure being dead or crippled will be worse for kids, but on this subject I think Ian is engaging in a lot of projection. Clearly he had an extremely bad time with school, and is hugely dismissive of its importance as a result.
BlizzardOfOzzz
Apparently you guys have not noticed. It’s not that kids are not in school. It’s that schools have become much worse. All the prior problems are still there, but now they are muzzled like disease animals, or maybe sitting in front of a screen, being told they have to stay away from their friends, that they can’t give or receive a hug because they might get sick, etc. This is now the “new normal”: child abuse on a mass scale.
Occasional Poster
@Willy
I always enjoyed work, even in those so-called sweatshops, because I seem to be made to enjoy working hard and competing well.
You were obviously paid okay to work in those “sweatshops”. I doubt you would enjoy working at, say, an Amazon “fulfillment center” while living in your vehicle because the wage you earn isn’t enough to cover rent and monthly living expenses.
StewartM
My former college landlady said “Schools are places where they teach children–who come to school curious and eager to learn everything–that learning is a horrible thing that no one in their right mind would do unless someone FORCED them to do it”.
It’s also a place where smart children learn that they’re “stupid” because they don’t excel immediately at subjects that they don’t see as relevant, or which are badly mis-taught. We may say ‘it’s progress, not perfection, that counts” but when you penalize “getting it wrong” at first that makes that a lie. Schools are the first place we divide humankind into “winners” and “losers”.
The “Asian education” model in particular, that some of our elites are gah-gah about (not specifically ‘Asian’, as our law schools and med schools do it too) where you get hit with tests on stuff that you were never taught, done not to maximize learning, but to maximize the number of students who fail, is also a horrible model. Having a roomie in college who was in law school, I can tell you the movie “The Paper Chase” is an apt description of law school. This model almost involves no actual teaching at all, in fact. I recall an exam I took, the final which was a standardized test, where a full third of the test covered material that was never assigned in reading nor covered in lectures. Yet the professor never removed those questions when grading the test, which of course resulted in many if not most people failing the course (I had an “A” going into that final so I survived it which my final grade being knocked down to a “B”).
mago
Always in agreement with your position that school is a conditioning ground where teachers are custodians whose conformity is also forced. I was a rebellious anti-authoritarian student and later a teacher. And I suffered for it of course. That tendency was ignited and fueled by both physical and mental abuse from those in charge. In the time and place where I grew up teachers could get a pass on spanking (in elementary school) to, oh I don’t know, but I got taken into the hall, grabbed by the hair and to slam the back of my head repeatedly against a metal locker door because I turned around and answered a classmate’s question sotto voce. (Middle School). That happened for diverse reasons from my long hair to my attitudes to my working class background social status.
And that leads to my variance with the suicide issue. Two years ago I predicted to no one in particular that we would see increased substance and domestic abuse as well as suicides. I don’t have a chart or graph to back my claims, but it’s likely that the damages from loss of livelihood and home coupled with broken personal relationships occur with greater frequency among the marginalized—those without tech savvy or connections and born in the wrong part of town. In other words there’s a class issue. Can’t zoom the old Alexander Technique or write an app.
Once you’ve fallen to sleeping in your car or on the street there’s no coming back. That’s a form of forced suicide right there. The ranks of the dispossessed are accelerating. Despair, desperation and wrecked lives.
Not to be a bummer or anything.
Gaianne
This post cracked me up. Funny because it is true.
–Gaianne
Ian Welsh
Even most kids who didn’t have a particularly bad time in school looked forward to summer holidays and preferred not being at school to being at school.
So, no, Soredemos, it’s not primarily projection. I adjust for my psychological issues when doing analysis, if I’m aware of the issue, and I’m aware that I despised school even more than average. (Though school wasn’t ‘hard’ for me in any intellectual sense.)
A fairly good article on the overall issue is here:
https://www.salon.com/2013/08/26/school_is_a_prison_and_damaging_our_kids/
John Taylor Gatto also wrote about this extensively, though his website is now considered a security risk (presumably because he’s dead and hasn’t been updating it.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Underground_History_of_American_Education
someofparts
John Taylor Gatto’s book is available online for free. I just started reading it and the writing is very engaging and easy to follow. I just came upon a really delightful paragraph that I want to share. After the author left teaching, he unexpectedly became very popular as a guest speaker to a variety of audiences. This is what he had to say about it.
“As I traveled, I discovered a universal hunger, often unvoiced, to be free of managed debate. A desire to be given untainted information. Nobody seemed to have maps of where this thing had come from or why it acted as it did, but the ability to smell a rat was alive and well all over America.”
That is one of the most encouraging things I’ve read in a long time. It absolutely explains the popularity of Joe Rogan and the hysterical attempts of the legacy media to shut him down.
Chicago Clubs
The most ridiculous people among the pandemic whiners are the ones who insist that “lockdowns,” as though we really had anything of the sort in America, have killed more people than covid itself, as though there has been some massive, somehow unreported suicide (or homicide) bubble because people just couldn’t get to soothing old work or school and socialize. These are often the very same people bragging that they ignored stay at home orders and claiming, against all evidence, that “everyone normal” also did so. Just sad. Glad to see some evidence of what was obvious already: they’re full of shit.
And kids ARE disease animals. Ask any parent or pediatrician.
anon y'mouse
“Daily life in our societies is essentially slavery. We spend most of the day doing what we are told, when we are told: things we would never do if we didn’t need the money, because without it we would wind up on the street.”
and this is why the society we have buit is the one that “they” want, and not the one that will make us thrive.
this is what i reiterate at every possible opportunity—how do we all support this society in its evil? by getting up to go to work the next day, and the next.
this is the chain by which the Masters get us to build what they want, instead of what we all need.
and the most common responses i get to this are sad and revealing indeed:
–well, what would you do all day? nothing? work gives life meaning!
–people still want food, clothing, shelter, and working plumbing. who would do all of that if everyone is just doing whatever they want to do?
–and some version of “if you don’t –contribute– to society, you don’t deserve to be alive or receive its benefits.” i shall let the reader determine what “contributing” consists of.
if we all really wanted to cease doing all of this for the OverLords, it is within our power. but the problem of indoctrination into the mindset that serving the OverLords is just what we have to do to be able to continue to exist is extremely widespread. i tend to call this some verison of Stockholm Syndrome.
Trinity
“where you get hit with tests on stuff that you were never taught, done not to maximize learning, but to maximize the number of students who fail”
With standardized testing, this method was utilized in high schools (and perhaps lower). When I was a brand new teacher, I taught summer school to rising sophomores who had not passed the algebra test. They all passed with my outside-the-box methods (mostly pattern recognition and repetition, things we humans are very good at). In the fall, they were all placed in a test-based geometry class. That teacher deliberately accelerated her syllabus, made them believe they couldn’t keep up, and every one of them ended up back in my non-test based geometry class (due to scheduling, not my very charming personality). I was told by an irate guidance counselor the other teacher did this deliberately to maximize her passing rates. And she did, with a 100% passing rate for her geometry students. She won “teacher of the year” the following year.
Willy
Occasional Poster,
You were obviously paid okay to work in those “sweatshops”. I doubt you would enjoy working at, say, an Amazon “fulfillment center” while living in your vehicle because the wage you earn isn’t enough to cover rent and monthly living expenses.
Yes, that situation would certainly be that much worse. And I’m also fully aware of how much worse things are today than back when I was a kid, stocking shelves at a grocery store. While I eventually completed school and moved on to better things, for a while, my coworker friend dropped out of school and worked grocery full time. He was able to buy a house and a new boat even. I looked him up after several decades and he’s still in that same house and that boat sits in his front yard. Apparently, the peak of his career life was at age 21. He’s a registered Republican BTW. I’m guessing that maybe he feels fortunate because nobody in the grocery business could today in our city, even remotely be able to afford a new boat let alone a house. Not without a large inheritance or significant other help. The rest is obviously Republican machinating and Democrat failure.
What I was trying to describe, was that even for the white-collar middle-class hard-working, life has gotten much harder.
someofparts
At Georgia Tech they have, throughout my long lifetime, had a policy of deliberately flunking out as many first year students as possible. The backstory is political.
Tech gets money from the state on the condition that they have an open policy for admitting students who went to high school in state. But Tech is a world-class engineering school and many of the youngsters coming out of our sub-par state high schools have no hope of keeping up with the work load there. So every year they admit lots of local kids and then promptly flunk them out during that dreaded first year.
They get to take all that nice state funding by providing easy admission for locals and then get rid of those kids so they don’t have to spend money on remedial programs to bring them up to speed. I begrudge them every tax dollar they get from us.
alyosha
Those before and after photos of your friend could be me. COVID was one of the best things that ever happened to me, because of WFH. My boss even remarked during a zoom call “you’re too relaxed”. Since when is that a problem? I eventually got rid of the annoying boss.
The whole experience made me very aware of the divide between those of us who could easily WFH versus those trying to make a living in dangerous, public spaces.
Soredemos
@anon y’mouse
You don’t seem to have counters to those points other than to sneer at them.
The reality is that most people do actually want to spend time doing stuff they feel is meaningful. People do actually want work, and they’ll often seek it out even when they don’t have to, eg volunteer work or some sort of productive hobby. Retirees often don’t spend all their time playing golf. Most people aren’t content to just wallow around doing nothing.
And no, most people aren’t going to have explosive creativity if freed from the ‘shackles’ of work. The average person isn’t going to produce a great novel or similar. This is one of the philosophical differences between a jobs guarantee and UBI (among others. Another is that a UBI would just amount to a de facto subsidy to allow companies to pay shit wages. By contrast a jobs guarantee at a living wage would provide a floor on wages that private companies would have to meet or exceed).
Also, yeah, things do need to be done. Barring some sort of Star Trek post-scarcity future where all the tedious work has been automated away, society runs on the back of millions of people showing up everyday to do things that simply must be done. I guess picking up the garbage is optional to you, just ‘slavery to the overlords’? There really is a delusional, probably bourgeoisie arrogance to thinking that much work isn’t genuinely needed and can just be magically eliminated.
Ian Welsh
A lot of low paid work is unnecessary, but a lot is very necessary. Most fast food workers aren’t needed. Garbage and cleaners and orderlies are. An even higher percentage of high paid work is bullshit. Most of what Wall Street execs do is actively harmful.
Eliminate the bullshit or harmful jobs, divide the actual work that needs to be done fairly, and yes, if there’s minimal bullshit, people won’t mind doing the work that needs to be done. Work is satisfying, when necessary and when you’re treated with dignity. And my guess is that those who don’t want to work at all will be a minority, but we can adjust as we go.
anon y'mouse
Soredemos–
most people do want to do something, but most somethings are basically extensive bullshit and exploitative of either the person doing them, or the person they’re doing them to. they also force us to do the same stupid bullshit day in and day out regardless, and then claim that this is all we are capable of when no, it’s really all that the present system desires for us to do.
my solutions would be some of what you’re saying–job guarantees, but NOT as the MMT proponents would have it. they view it as a temporary position into the world of capitalist work and a “floor” but then appear to balk at making that floor truly a truly livable thing. i view it as a permanent place of valuable, community serving (not profit serving) work that people can lock into for as long as they like. a true alternative to the system, not just a sling to help it along.
UBI would, in this system, provide a pure profit stream to the capitalists and people would still be working for the same stuff they were before. because too much of the system is already owned by capitalists, and most of our money goes right into their pockets immediately after we get it.
my idea is something more along the lines of a “we hire almost everyone (who can behave and not be violent)”, all they have to do is sign up and be there. a job bank, of sorts based in the community and providing its benefits to that community. but one that does allow people to give as much time as they are able. even disabled people often want to do “something” but are not able to do as much something as someone without whatever barriers are there. partial work, partial leisure and partial education for all for the entire lifespan.
and the things they would be doing would be providing a true alternative to capitalism, not merely the things capitalism hasn’t found a way to profit off of (yet). providing housing, medical care, schooling, food, etc to the others in their communities.
there was a business profiled somewhere recently that took this approach (a bakery, and not the famous one in CA whose name is escaping me at the moment). what if we ended all but the most necessary gatekeeping for employment (for actual safety) and let people sign onto as much or as little as they were able to? and paid the same, regardless? or at least, that the real necessities of life will be given regardless–shelter, food, medical care?
people will self assemble to what they view as the most necessary things, the most rewarding things. the other, unpalatable jobs (what i tend to call “cleaning the toilet”) can be fairly shared among them –regardless of their desires or abilities– as a condition of continuing the valuable, important work. even cleaning the toilet isn’t that bad if you aren’t doing it 40hrs every week while being paid and treated badly to do it. i bet even unpalateable jobs will take on a different hue under such a system, and those jobs will be readily identified because the job bank will identify them as the ones least likely to be signed up for.
yeahyeah, too many breads and circuses. and now, too many online scams for people to get involved in pretending they are doing something. the world has turned to an even worse dystopia with all of this bitcoin/nft ponzi BS that allows people to play at mini-capitalist rentier all day.
my rebuttal is that people right now sign up to do this stuff, when they are able to do so without too many barriers. have you ever tried to volunteer at a museum? they have a more extensive application process than many jobs which pay “real” money. that is too high of a barrier, and results in a clique. lots of NGOs appear to be cliques as well, of the PMC. many, many people donate time at their church to do a lot of the caregiving i’ve listed, and more would do so if they saw the real tangible benefits in their community spreading outwards and not just the minor, vague NGO type benefits which have to be continually begged for and justified, and are the province of an insider’s group of PMC using the place as a C.V. stepping stone.
these abstract heirarchy chains that siphon away all profit, time which all of us have little of, and creativity of the community to some distant headquarters where the poobahs determine what they will do with it needs a real alternative. one not provided for at all by working for a local non-profit nor at the welfare office.