Thursday, June 30, 2005

People are generally useless, and that's as it should be

I am a media theorist. I'm also a loafer. A guy. A talker. A writer. An electronic musician. A lover.
These things have come about gradually. I'm not actually or intrinsically any of these things out of context.
I also find that, recently, I'm a temporary employee working as an administrative assistant.
On my way to work in the morning I pass all the other people who are probably split pretty evenly between people who are doing a job that is strange to them and outside their area of expertise and those who are doing their job, goddamnit, according to THE PLAN which, goddamnit, exists and doesn't demand contemplation, by GOD. The thing that binds these two groups of people together is the tacit agreement on the idea that people need to serve some kind of purpose in relation to other people. People need a job that assigns them some kind of station.
I don't really get it. Wishful thinking says (and not the morally-degraded notion of wishful thinking that first comes to mind when the term is brought up, the one that is pre-judged as useless because because as things are they can't come to fruition, but just that- thinking that contains an earnest wish) that we should recognize that people are people and they just want to do. As such, those folks who have been specialized out of demand for their talents or those people whose skills set is simply societally redundant to the point that there aren't jobs left for them- these folks should be let to chill on the social dime. A laid-back, non-commercial, non-competitive kibbutz is what the world should be. The truth of the matter is that most people are useless to other people. And they should be. People aren't for other people. So why should a dude such as myself get corralled into fake jobs such as the one I'm doing now just to scrape by when there are so many quality things he is capable of? What the hell am I doing? Overeducated and underqualified and chained to debt. I have to keep looking for better jobs, but the feeling nags at me that there's something in my "me"ness that just isn't commercially viable right now. Can't Uncle Sam send me to the Riviera till something comes up? What does wasting away in an office have to do with the general project of self-improvement? How about a system that apologizes to the individual with perks for not having a use for him or her instead of the individual always scraping to the system- man, that'd be too humane.
I'd really much rather be sunbathing. Or throwing a frisbee. Why can't I get anyone to throw a frisbee this summer?

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