Tag: work
Not the creative work, but the slave labour.
The Suffering of the Everyday Banalities of Life
r/Pessimism, u/forestofdoom2022 Continue reading
Most people accept work and take it for granted, like the air we breath
Just try it. Say «All work sucks» to someone. See how people contort themselves philosophically to defend this “striving” belief system. Read the full page
At the end of the day, 99% of the activity is data hoarding, 1% is making use. Music years ago, other things later. Because then, when you use it, you’ll be fed up with it. Of course people like to work, because otherwise their brains explode; it’s the same mechanism. Endless search for mechanical and repetitive distractions. Tergiversations around the core of desperation.
And this is… when things are going well.
And then they say to the hoarder: «You don’t need to accumulate everything. This thing X, you don’t need to hoard it, resist it.» But if there is no need for me to save X, it means that there is no need for me to save Y, it means that there is no need for me to save anything, by simple syllogism.
And indeed, that is correct. But it only confirms the nihilism and the absolute meaninglessness of everything.
Why is living a constant torture?
Rant on Reddit, with good comments. Read the full page
Andrew McIntosh – The Point of Pointlessness (Ineffectual Whinging)
[…] that whole insane “get up and go” mentality, starting with the obscenity of the work ethic, squirming as it did like soft stool out of the arsehole of Christianity, condemning us to mindless labour and activity simply for its own sake. Work for its own sake – what kind of fucking numpty thought that was a good idea? Read the full page
One day is the time it takes to get bored of your new shiny toy.
So you then go back to either your life as a slave or your basic organic distractions.
Also see Fichte
On responsibility as the solution
It were the old family men of the pre-nihilistic-era, that believed in a future, and that told their children their morals, their hopes, their beliefs. Read the full page
When you have money, but you don’t know what to do with it, then the gravity of your being becomes immediately apparent.
Umberto Galimberti – Interviews and conferences (excerpts)
Schopenhauer is considered a pessimist, of course: every time you don’t praise or exalt “the individual”, you are pessimistic, of course, right?… … Even poor Leopardi is pessimistic, isn’t he? Those who say “pessimism”… I’m like: are you looking at reality, goddammit, or do you really not want to see it? Read the full page
There is no magical third act
I just… I just cannot believe this is it. This is life. There is no magical third act where I am the star in some fantasy adventure. I won’t suddenly gain superpowers and fight cartoonish villains. This is it. This is all it will ever be. The rest of my life, quiet and drab. Our one shot at consciousness is spent on something so unimaginably boring. My curse of sentience is spent wageslaving, consuming media, messing around with hobbies that will never fill the void, shitting, cleaning. That’s all it will ever be. Sad and pathetic.
Popular chans’ meme/copypasta
Ironically, the most anti-work post ever written, without realizing it: https://waitbutwhy.com/2018/04/picking-career.html[🡕] Continue reading
Exclusion from the sphere of labor equates to social insignificance.
Umberto Galimberti at a conference
Let them grow their beards and talk careers
Molly Nilsson – Mountain Time
I envy people who commit suicide
r/offmychest, u/SoulOfTheInternet Continue reading
The Gift of Life – Astutillo Smeriglia
https://incomaemeglio.blogspot.com/2013/09/il-dono-della-vita.html[🡕] Continue reading
People think that life is something else, but that’s not true, life is not your coin collection, it only is by illusion, once you have a wife by your side. What about after? Afterwards, everything around you is as if it didn’t exist and never existed, it has less value than a turd. Continue reading
– …because next year you’re not going to see me, you know.
– Oh, so you are in fact retiring. Lucky you, prof…
– What?! You shouldn’t say such a thing, you are young!
An ex-classmate
Excerpts of interviews to Thomas Ligotti
Three interviews. Read the full page
I don’t give a fuck about a job in the city I inject rap into my veins
Fabri Fibra – Rap in vena (“Rap Into My Veins”)
Waking Life – Richard Linklater
A thousand years is but an instant. Read the full page
Anyway, I can try anything, it’s the same circle leading to nowhere, and I’m tired now. Anyway, I’ve lost my face, my dignity, my look, everything is gone and I’m tired now. Don’t be scared: I’ve found a good job and I go to work every day on my old bicycle you loved.
I am piling up some unread books under my bed and I really think I’ll never read again. No concentration, just a white disorder everywhere around me, you know… I’m so tired now. Don’t worry: I often go to dinners and parties with some old friends who care for me, take me back home, and stay.
Monochrome floors, monochrome walls; only absence near me, nothing but silence around me. Monochrome flat, monochrome life; only absence near me, nothing but silence around me.
Sometimes I search an event or something to remind me, but I’ve really got nothing in mind. Sometimes I open the windows, I listen people walking in the down street; there is life out there.
Yann Tiersen – Monochrome (ft. Dominique A)
– Would you still love me if I couldn’t play?
– What?
– Would you still love me if I couldn’t play?
– You wouldn’t be you, if you couldn’t play.
– No, I want to know.
– Our bodies sway to music. «Oh, brightening glance, how can we know the dancer from the dance?»
– But don’t you wish, sometimes, that you couldn’t play, that you could just be ordinary?
– Like what? Live in the country? Making bread? Feeding chickens? Playing once a year with a bunch of amateurs?
– How dare you insult my sister like that…
– I wasn’t insulting her.
– Well, at least she chose her life. Not like you and me. We’re just trained freaks.
Hilary and Jackie, the movie about Jacqueline du Pré
More than a source of mental pain, today depression is a way of life. Read the full page
Peoples got to work for a livin’. I believe in a blue-collar race. I think suicide’s the only way out[🡕] – out of life. I wanted to die. I tried to die, but I didn’t. They say it’s my depression, but what the fuck, man? I don’t fuckin’ know anymore. Which way should I fuckin’ turn, man?
Gummo
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
Already from our dusk of birth, begins a destiny. Ruthless, for most human beings: if you are not born a billionaire, you are doomed forever. You have to give in to the everyday, procure stimuli for the project; instead of de-projecting, you are damned to the drawing.
As it began, it was over already, as in all Lorenzaccesque misadventures. If I had been the billionaire Schopenhauer, I certainly would not have written “The World as Will and Representation”. I would have been careful not to: one is not born to work, to explain oneself, to think; one is not even born to un-think, because even that is engaging with thought. One is not born to manage, to act-suffer: all this is inflicted upon us by circumstances.
Just as we passively endure every prenatal perception, we will also endure the signifier. In the recurrence of life, discourse will never belong to the speaking being.
The registry office, the studying to survive, condemn us to in-forming ourselves, to form ourselves, deform ourselves, to become hunchbacked like Leopardi, just to have a part, when we would want nothing more than to put aside art, and life itself too. A true curse.
Carmelo Bene, Autografia di un ritratto (“Autograph of a Portrait”)
It is very common for schizoid individuals to present for treatment in their 30s and 40s, at a time when the possibility of a relationship is growing more tenuous and that of companionship seems to be getting more and more distant. Read the full page
Noam Chomsky on wage slavery, slavery and classical liberalism
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
I feel good, I feel bad, I don’t know what to do I don’t study, I don’t work, I don’t watch TV I don’t go to the movies, I don’t play sports
CCCP – Io sto bene (I Feel Good)
[…] for the man to bring home the bacon, for the woman to do the shitwork and provide him with a haven in a heartless world, and for the children to be marched off to youth concentration camps called “schools,” […]
“The Abolition of Work”, Bob Black
I was looking for a job, and then I found a job And heaven knows I’m miserable now
The Smiths – Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now
All around me are familiar faces worn out places, worn out faces Bright and early for their daily races going nowhere, going nowhere Their tears are filling up their glasses no expression, no expression Hide my head, I want to drown my sorrow no tomorrow, no tomorrow
And I find it kinda funny, I find it kinda sad The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had I find it hard to tell you ’cause I find it hard to take When people run in circles it’s a very very mad world
Children waiting for the day they feel good happy birthday, happy birthday Made to feel the way that every child should sit and listen, sit and listen Went to school and I was very nervous no one knew me, no one knew me Hello teacher, tell me what’s my lesson look right through me, look right through me
And I find it kinda funny, I find it kinda sad The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had I find it hard to tell you ’cause I find it hard to take When people run in circles it’s a very very mad world
[…]
Tears For Fears – Mad World
There was a time when I was irritated by certain things that today make me smile. And one of those things, which I’m reminded of nearly every day, is the way men who are active in day-to-day life smile at poets and artists. They don’t always do it, as the intellectuals who write in newspapers suppose, with an air of superiority. Often they do it with affection. But it’s as if they were showing affection to a child, someone with no notion of life’s certainty and exactness.
This used to irritate me, because I naïvely assumed that this outward smile directed at dreaming and self-expression sprang from an inner conviction of superiority. In fact it’s only a reaction to something that’s different. While I once took this smile as an insult, because it seemed to imply a superior attitude, today I see it as the sign of an unconscious doubt. Just as adults often recognize in us, who are devoted to dreaming and expressing, something different that makes them suspicious, just because it’s unfamiliar. I like to think that the smartest among them sometimes detect our superiority, and then smile in a superior way to hide the fact.
But our superiority is not the kind that many dreamers have imagined we have. The dreamer isn’t superior to the active man because dreaming is superior to reality. The dreamer’s superiority is due to the fact that dreaming is much more practical than living, and the dreamer gets far greater and more varied pleasure out of life than the man of action. In other and plainer words, the dreamer is the true man of action.
Life being fundamentally a mental state, and all that we do or think valid to the extent we consider it valid, the valuation depends on us.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Erich Fromm – Normal people are the sickest
I think it’s a common fiction that people share, that the modern person is happy. Read the full page
How in the hell could a person enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?
Charles Bukowski – Factotum
When I torment myself a little too much for not working, I tell myself that I might just as well be dead and that then I would be working still less…
Emil Cioran – The Trouble With Being Born
It seemed a man only had two choices – get in on the hustle or be a bum.
Charles Bukowski – South of No North
The Trouble With Being Born – Emil Cioran
No sooner are they [the eyes] open than the drama begins. To look without understanding—that is paradise. Hell, then, would be the place where we understand, where we understand too much… Read the full page
we’ve all heard the old women who say, “oh, I think it’s just AWFUL what these young people do to themselves, all that dope and stuff! I think it’s terrible!” and then you look at the old gal: no eyes, no teeth, no brain, no soul, no ass, no mouth, no color, no flux, no humor, nothing, just a stick, and you wonder what her tea and cookies and church and home on the corner have done for HER. and the old men sometimes get quite violent about what some of the young are doing – “hell, I worked HARD all my life!” (they think this is a virtue, but it only proves a man is a damn fool.)
Charles Bukowski – Tales of Ordinary Madness
(Giuliana and her son, in front of the factories)
– Why is that smoke yellow?
– Because it’s poison.
– But then, if a little bird flies through it, it dies.
– Well, by now the little birds know, and they don’t fly through it anymore.
Red Desert (“Il deserto rosso”) – Final scene
– I haven’t recovered. I never will. Never…
[…]
– Don’t say that. Calm down. What are you afraid of?
– The streets, the factories, the colors, the people… everything!
[…]
– There’s something terrible about reality and i don’t know what it is. No one will tell me. Even you don’t help me, Corrado.
Giuliana in “Red Desert” (“Il deserto rosso”)
Who Works Is Lost (Chi lavora è perduto) – Tinto Brass
The world be damned, breaking your back for a slice of bread. Damned be the world, either you die of hunger or you die or boredom. Continue reading
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
We asked the woman if there was one thing she wanted more than anything else in life. She looked at us, puzzled. Then, in a half voice, she said: “To sleep. Three days in a row.” “Nothing else?” we asked. She nodded. “To die,” she replied; and she wasn’t joking.
Fazzoletti di terra (“Patches of Earth”), a documentary by Giuseppe Taffarel about two elderly farmers from Val di Brenta.
The trouble with being in the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.
Various attributions
Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable – Stig Dagerman
I lack faith, so I can never be happy. A happy person would not fear his life was a meaningless drift toward a certain death. I have inherited neither a god nor any fixed point on this earth where I can attract a god’s notice. Nor am I graced with the skeptic’s well-concealed rage, the rationality’s barren mind, the atheist’s burning innocence. So who am I to cast stones at those who believe in what I doubt? Much less at those who worship doubt as if it weren’t shrouded in a darkness all its own? The stone would only come back to strike me. For there is one thing of which I am firmly convinced: our need for consolation is insatiable. Continue reading
[…] After the horses came Muriel, the white goat, and Benjamin, the donkey. Benjamin was the oldest animal on the farm, and the worst tempered. He seldom talked, and when he did, it was usually to make some cynical remark—for instance, he would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies. Alone among the animals on the farm he never laughed. If asked why, he would say that he saw nothing to laugh at. Continue reading
Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance. Read the full page
As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals? It’s all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?
Emil Cioran – On the Heights of Despair
I remembered then that once in England a sentence to forced labor was administered by suspending the condemned convict over a wheel turned by water, thus forcing the victim to move his legs at a certain rhythm to avoid their being crushed. When you are working, you always have the sensation of a similar constriction.
Italo Svevo – Zeno’s Conscience / Confessions of Zeno
I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
Jerome K. Jerome – Three Men in a Boat
Nowadays it is not only a matter of habit for me, but also one of taste, a malicious taste perhaps? – To write nothing more that would not drive to despair every sort of person who is “in a hurry.” Philology is, namely, that venerable art that requires of its admirers one thing above all else: to go aside, to take time, to become still, become slow – as a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word, which has nothing but fine, cautious work to take care of and which achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento. But for exactly this reason, philology is today more necessary than ever, by exactly this means, philology attracts and enchants us most powerfully in the midst of an age of “work,” that is to say, of precipitateness, of unseemly and sweating overhaste that wants at once to be over and done with everything, […]
Nietzsche – Dawn – Preface – 5
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things…
Henry David Thoreau – Walden
The Imitation of Christ – Thomas à Kempis
Truly it is misery even to live upon the earth. Read the full page