Forget the Grind, Hustle Culture, and the Great Lock-In

It’s time for an Industrious Revolution

Whether you call it grinding, hustle culture, or the newest moniker to hit the internets, the “great lock-in,” it all boils down to the same thing — trading away your life energy for things you have been to told to want and need for the benefit of billionaires and shareholders who, frankly, don’t give a damn if you live or die.

Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, the general masses have been trained to grind away as many waking moments as possible to “earn a living.”

I have a secret to tell you. That’s right, lean in and I shall whisper it: No one needs to “earn” a living — it was granted to you the moment you emerged from the womb. Living, that is, not all the detritus and stuff that comes with it.

As animals, living isn’t something we are meant to earn, but to take. We take the air we breathe as we need. We should be able to take shelter where we can find it, although certain greedy human animals have done what they can to take more shelter than they need so they can fool the rest of us into thinking we need to earn it.

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Without Effort, There Is No Contentment

The homespun foodie’s week in review, Oct 5–11

Nothing in life should come without effort, with the exceptions of sleep and love.

I know that I harp on the same ol’ themes over and over —

  • There is enough for all of our need, but not all of our greed.
  • The simple things are the best things.
  • Waste not, want not, and be fulfilled.
  • We are not main characters in the tableau of life.
  • Good food, good people, and hope is what makes the world go around.

These themes may be simple, perhaps even a bit old fashioned, but I shall take them any day over the current world themes of greed, consumption, hate, and destruction. Call me a curmudgeon, but those viral videos of destroying things for “ASMR” or unboxing things to engender envious consumption or behaving badly simply to encourage engagement really upsets me. They aren’t just a symptom of the hatefulness of the billionaire class that has destroyed modern culture, they are also direct cause of it.

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Why I Am Done With Human Domestication

Are you a tame, wild, or domesticated animal?

Photo by Christopher Windus on Unsplash

The half acre of land that makes up my front yard is a mixture of lawn grasses, invasive plants, and native flora. Each morning, a menagerie of native mule and white-tailed deer, robins, and douglas squirrels commune and compete with introduced eastern gray squirrels, barred owls, and wild turkeys.

All are wild, although some of the mule deer and douglas squirrels are tamed due to their own choices and human meddling.

I, on the other hand, am domesticated. Uneasily I pace within the cage, both this physical home with window sizes and wall heights prescribed by international building codes, and the psychological home of for-profit work, infinite growth economics, and modern constructs of the good and proper life.

Inside, I am a wild animal, willing to be tamed but chafing at the bit of forced domestication.

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Happiness Will Ruin Your Life

Choose contentment and you choose life.

Photo by Timothy Rose on Unsplash

26 years ago Irvine Welsh’s Choose Life Monologue from his book Trainspotting made it’s movie debut:

“Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves.”

And, like so many before and after me, that’s exactly what I set about doing.

Although Welsh was writing about the heroin epidemic destroying Edinburgh, these words perfectly sum up the American dream that was piped into my house via Friday Night Laugh Packs and Saturday Morning Cartoons throughout my 1980s childhood. It was the same dream, now upsized, that was sold to my parents in the decades following the wars that DIDN’T end all wars.

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