2020 has been a profound exercise in educating millions of people my age that their identities are not their jobs, their lives are much more precarious than they knew, and that 60-hour-a-week careerism is actually not their deepest human aspiration

This hint at a sort of collective ego-death is critical to uncoupling capital production value from innate human worth and is a key development in moving towards 1) Shorter work weeks 2) UBI or similar 3) Eventually, post-work societies

A couple more destabilising economic crises and they won’t have enough young, aspirational workers prepared to trade their entire lives for a social respect and physical safety that disintegrates immediately everytime there is a greed-powered economic stressor

A lifetime of productivity myths and stories of personal worth unravel. This is a good thing for humans, who can then do more meaningful things with the time they took back, like make meaningful human connections, create art and technology, and take mind-altering substances

It actually undoes a whole bunch of psychological and environmental conditioning - observe it deeply and you expose the relationship between idleness, leisure, utility and *morality* - and how those things currently interface is what gives a whole generation productivity guilt

And this really is Capitalist Realism - our entire lives have been co-opted through a system that makes everything transactional - every action measured by its ability to create income, and then wealth. Wealth that it rarely ever returns properly to it’s makers

The facade is beginning to dissolve though. We’re in our thirties and already *tired of performing*. Things are going to be different - I guarantee it - it’s the speed that is the question

‘What’s your dream job?’

‘It’s 2020. We don’t dream about jobs anymore’