Most people just want autonomy really, but the roles on offer are hammer , nail, or scrapyard. so we get taught to dream of being hammers. Autonomy (or some kind of illusion of autonomy) comes with sucessful, diligent hammering , if you're lucky. I think most of we people in the northnern scrapyards never even tried to be hammers (I surely didn't, but then, Im a werido, ya klnow?) just tried to make a living and save our dreams for our spare time; not becauise we're lazy, but just because there are much better, more meaningful things to dream of and invest in than being any sort of cog in this machinery. I know, i know, that sort of thinking went out out with the dinosaurs and so did we . But there it is. I'd rather not be any sort of entrepreneur; and I'd rather they stayed away from my door and yours .
Jack is simply a cog in the corporate machine, and would never risk the instability of entrepreneurship. As the sole provider for my household, suggesting there's more meaningful things to invest my daily hours as a cog, is insulting.
You misunderstand me. I was actually saying that most of us, historically, have settled for humble, supposedly "safe" positions in the vast overarchering machinery of society (to be nails, rather than hammers)just exactly like yourself.and out of a similar sense of priorities. We'd work our shift in the factory, or our 9-5 at the office , then come home to devote our attention to the tghings that really matter. Most often that would family, but might be art, music , spirituality. Whatever. The point of working was to support and sustain the important things, not to displace them with the dream of “bettering” ourselves . We prefer to keep the "living" part in "making a living" The meaningful things in life areusually found outside the factory l or the office, not wiwithin it. So long as people’s standard of living is acceptable(and so long as their paid work isn’t vital to society and under-resourced), most people will work as hard as they need, to keep it that way, and no harder.
I was defending that value –system , which is very much under threat, I certainly didn;’t mean tio say that we’re not cogs in the machinery (except inasmuch as redundancies deny us that role), just that we ‘re only willing to invest some of our time in being cogs, not all of it, given any choice in the natter And that’s not the same thing as being “lazy” . And that there’s actually no intrinsic virtue in working extra hard to” better yourself”
I was gonna make a list of things we might see as more important (family , art, spirutuality..) but I figured that aspies who don't have kids would have a hard time relating to the usual thing of "family" being more important than work , especially given our dysfunctional family relationships
. and the other exampless looked even more controversial, one way or another; too easily dismissed as mere entertainment, or fanciful bollocks. i reckoned it was safer to let people insert whatever was meaninful to them . And you did. You implicitly cited your family as more important, if I understood you correctly? I mean somebody who works to support their family surely doesn’t think that work comes first , family second? (though we might sometimes be constrained to act as if that were so)
Except you thought I was putting that ethic down. So apologies for putting it too opaquely, as I now realise.
Maybe you don’t think that kind of value e system neds defending (Family is important, therefore work is important a means of supporting your family) But it does, around here. The work is vanishing , but the Work Ethic has simultaneously turned into one great big , over-riding virtue that bulldozes its way through everything else, family included
.
Paradoxically, unemployment doesn’t mean that British people work less hard than they used to; it means that most of us work a lot harder than we used to, for ever-dimininshing returns; and the losers in that scramble to hold on to your own diminishingly thin slice of cake are faced with increasing contempt, rather than sympathy. It’s a whole lot of stick, and no carrot, with the winners hardly bettering the losers by much. I'm taking issue with the ethos that supports that…or rather practically forces it on people
The economic pressures are quite bad enough to push people to breaking point, without the corresponding social pressures
But I’m gonna break off here for a bit, because I’m doing my head in by trying to make too many points in one post
Hope I've said enough to mitigate the sense of offence?
[PS I can see the weird typos. Some of them of arose from my flailing efforts to fix more conventional typos
. I'm clearly not up to much today. It's gone and spent ...I dunno how many hours to
trying to make this post legible *wince* ]
