alienation from work

This note last modified September 1, 2024

If you build a cabinet, you can look at your work with pride. You have a tangible achievement for your hard work.

If you modify spreadsheets all day, it’s much harder to point to what you actually did. Of course you can explain why your job is important to the company, how you improved profits by a percent of a percent, but that’s so much more abstract than building a cabinet.

Since workers are so divorced from the actual products of their work, this leads to ennui and alienation.

conspiracy theories
- Conspiracy theories play into the temptation of clarity in response to the recognition that something is wrong. They recognize on some level that the way society is built leads to unfulfillment# and oppression, but look for the simplistic answer that there is a single unified evil that is doing the oppressing and can (in theory) be taken down, instead of the reality that the world is more complex, buffeted around by forces beyond anyone’s control, and that evil doesn't really exist

communities#
- Humans evolved to live in tight knit communities where most everyone knew each other and worked together. Hyper industrialization has compartmentalized the ways in which we live and over-applied metrics to assigning value to us. This is an explanation for the rise of loneliness, alienation from work#, social media, internet communities, and parasocial relationships. While this is, of course, a massive oversimplification, I hope that it’s an interesting thought with an element of truth.