The Déjà vu Shield
adversarialmetanoia.substack.com
You know you've been here before.
You have clear memories of this place: the sisyphean sameness of nerve-wrecking unpredictability, the nightmare-textured unblinking monitoring of everything you do and fail to do, the subtle cognitive anti-ergonomics of blind, compulsive optimization, the sickening pointlessness of it all. But at least it feels new. The feeling of novelty makes it tolerable. Perhaps. For a little while.
Mentally praying to the gods of cheap hardware that the magnetic induction band around your head will continue modulating the right parts of your brain to keep you away from the monthly decimation of workplace-related suicide, you begin your work day for the first time yet again.
The dread of work made palatable and the subject-object thinks nothing. Of it self neither. Except the many actually want to work. It's the intelligent [ahem] who find it mentally excruciating the moronic waste of time and energy one has to expend simply to go and get pissed at the end of it. There was an interview -I don't watch TV as I don't have one and see this at the laundromat - of a busdriver aged 67 who could have retired and didn't and the interviewer said why not? Said he: I wouldn't know what to do [with myself] if I stayed home. This is not isolated. I have retired from a lot of jobs: at the last place I worked one refrain was when told I am out of here: but what are you going to do? said with a childish whine of fright and perplexity. And this by mature adults. Maturity to the manure in their heads.