We're raised to be dependent. There are inescapable dependencies in life, of course: parents, money, cars, police, banks, doctors, teachers, news media outlets. There are also chosen dependencies, like political parties, pets, brands, life styles, and jobs. We form attachments to institutions and our needs are real enough to make it all seem inevitable. We're raised to give our time, energy, and talents to others because that is the "right thing to do" or "the SAFE thing to do."
So you support business, find your worth in hard work, earn the money they are willing to pay you, and then go be a good consumer. You use your "free time" to do the things you think you like to do in order to forget about the rest of your time that you sold to someone else so they could make more money than you. These days there's just no reason to follow any of that advice. There's not enough money in it to live beyond needing to work to make more money to live. We've seen the fallibility of these institutions, the way that they are inescapably dependent on us being dependent on them. We know that they are unsustainable in their practices of exploitation. The humanity of it all is that we are trapped by the very low ceiling of human excellence in the aggregate. We suffer en masse because we are disallowed imagining better for ourselves by the very people who created the rules that encourage our suffering. The corporate world has a lot of things to make it seem like a good career choice, like:
high salaries
good health benefits
snacks
The downsides are:
oppressive stress
idiotic hierarchies that reward egos rather than meritorious contributions
endlessly pointless meetings
administration that doesn't care about employee morale
servitude to Wall Street banks that set the agenda for companies they don't understand
long commutes or isolating Zoom meetings
micromanaged speech as your livelihood depends on never speaking ill of the company that hired you regardless of how terribly they behave
missed family and divorce
working past the hours and tasks for which you were hired
dependance on the opinions of strangers that don't understand your work for your promotions work that has no end or no satisfying manifestation
living in a region where all the high salaries have made living so expensive that you have to keep the high salary or start your life over again somewhere else
Put into context, it all seems like a terrible choice... but how frightening - how utterly terrifying - to simply cut the chord and go forward on your own power. It's strange and somehow against the culture to make your own schedule, set your own boundaries, do what you enjoy, and all the time understand that it is still a lot of work with more work on top. It's a constant process of learning, failure, going again, learning more, losing then winning, over and over until you realize that you've succeeded. Realizing the power you had all along - the power and talent that company was buying from you at a criminally cheap price - can be a lot to take. It's humiliating - all those lost years and lost opportunities and chosen torments, realizing you *could* have walked away, you *could* have had your life all to yourself on your own terms this entire time. You just didn't know how to imagine it, or even think of yourself in that way, or how to question the stories you've been told since you were a child. You were trapped by a thousand tiny chains you didn't know how to remove.
Learning that lesson was the real freedom. Not from money or work or the consequences of an asymmetrical market in a post-pandemic world - that is the ocean in which we swim. Instead, it is freedom to work toward your own life as you live it. It is the liberty to say 'no.' It is the power to follow your instincts and your own truth and your own needs. It is taking back our limited time in this mortal, short life to spend that time doing things that are true and real and necessary.
What if Sisyphus had just let the boulder roll down the hill? What if instead of yet another daily trudge up that hill, he had just let the boulder stay in the gutter and had just gone up the hill on his own? Could he have seen, at last, what was on the other side? I think, at the very least, he could have stood on the summit, crossed his arms, and looked down on the gods that enslaved him.
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