l3zhr

I’ve seen a shift–I think it’s a shift

–since the mid 20th century in how we talk about technology’s impact on the average person’s life.

I’ve seen videos from the 50’s full of optimism and hope for technological advances that fill your day with more ease and time for leisure activities.

Tasks that used to take hours now only take minutes or are in fact obsolete. Now you can do whatever you want with your time! The images were of people lounging, smiling.

E.G.: Synthetic fabric that resists wrinkles make ironing now longer necessary. Now instead of ironing, you can read a book!

Now, it’s shifted to

it being a virtue to use that extra time to do more work.

Do the same amount of work in less time –>

Do more work in the same amount of time

See the difference?

Now technology doesn’t help save effort and stress. It just allows us to shift the same amount of effort and stress to a larger variety of things.

I THINK THIS IS BULLSHIT.

I have a hypothesis that Boomers, who grew up with so many labor-saving devices but don’t understand the context of their usefulness/why they were invented are the ones who started shifting to this mentality. My evidence may just be anecdotal because I’m going off of a small sample size. But the people I’ve met who are silent generation or older do not have that mentality while boomers and younger do. Maybe it’s because in their time, they didn’t have a choice between doing something “the old-fashioned way” and using technology to speed it up, so they appreciate technology like microwaves and washing machines more.
[Also shit went down with going off the gold standard/Reaganomics/etc which made making more money the highest virute]

I was reminded of how generational this mindset can be last night at dinner with my in-laws. They were trying to convince me to sell my crochet etc. projects online. And let me tell you I am sick of that response to my hobbies. Also they were praising someone my age who flips thrift-store clothes on eBay as a side hustle to their well-paid full-time job. I have heard the advice to monetize my hobbies mostly from Boomers. Do they just take leisure time for granted more easily? They don’t understand that I want to keep something a hobby that I do for fun. They don’t see why I would prefer doing it and feeling happy instead of doing it while thinking of what anonymous potential customers would think of it.

I also think this is what the Protestant Work Ethic leads to when so much work is no longer necessary. I think the PWE is a coping mechanism. It’s like “Life hack! Instead of seeing labor as something that often sucks but is a means to an end, see it as an end itself! See it as a virtue in and of itself! Now it doesn’t suck anymore, does it? Because doing it and saying it doesn’t suck makes you a good person!”

When work is seen this way and is so divorced from being a means to an end (money for food, shelter, etc.), there is always more work to do. There is never a reason not to work more. It is devoid of context. And this is a very dumb way to think.

You can never say, “I’ve worked enough, I’m going to relax now.” Because leisure time is not your goal! Work is! Leisure time is a reward for working, not the thing you actually look forward to experiencing and which works gets in the way of.

Like many other things divorced from context, the PWE depends on character judgement and shame. If something is based on reality, reality is what it rests on. When a mindset isn’t based on reality, it depends on character judgement and shame as its scaffolding.

Time- and effort-saving technology is a part of reality and so it can’t impact something depending on that artificial scaffolding.