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Life abuddhas memes pointed out the first of these pieces. He found it at insurgent. I went to insurgent and found the second piece. They both speak to why I gave up a "good" job at Boeing, only 1 1/2 years from retirement, to become a small-town web designer. Yes, my mother worried that I was giving up a job with a good paycheck. Well—I'm making a lot less but I'm feeling a lot better. I rent a one room cabin (two if you count the bathroom/laundryroom) on a lake on an island in Puget Sound. It's a cheap rent. I can't afford a car so I ride a motorcycle. It's been lean at times but work is picking up. My commute is about 8 feet. That is from where I sleep (Japanese style with cushions on the floor) to my computer. I can look up from my work and watch a Great Blue Heron glide across the lake. The social panorama that Ehrenreich describes should stand as an eternal shrine to the god that sucked: Slum housing that is only affordable if workers take on two jobs at once; exhausted maids eating packages of hot-dog buns for their meals; women in their twenties so enfeebled by this regimen that they can no longer lift the vacuum cleaners that the maid service demands they carry about on their backs; purse searches, drug tests, personality tests, corporate pep rallies. Were we not so determined to worship the market and its boogie-boarding billionaires, Ehrenreich suggests, we might even view their desperate, spent employees as philanthropists of a sort, giving selflessly of their well-being so that the comfortable might live even more comfortably. "They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for," she writes; "they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high."
These are the fruits of thirty years of culture war. Hell-bent to get government off our backs, you installed a tyrant infinitely better equipped to suck the joy out of life. Cuckoo to get God back in the schools, you enshrined a god of unappeasable malice. Raging against the snobs, you enthroned a rum bunch of two-fisted boodlers, upper-class twits, and hang-em-high moralists. Ain't irony grand. NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR ILLUSIONS: AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVID EDWARDS If what's wrong for me, on a fundamental level, is wrong for the planet, then saving the planet isn't about trying to be righteous and green; it's about saving your own life, and the life in the world in the process. You find happiness by working for the forces of life, not death. You try to build your life around reducing suffering. As much as possible, you try to be motivated by compassion and the desire to help others. And in the meantime, in my case, you quit your job. I just stood up one Friday afternoon and said, "I've had enough. I'm off." They said, "Right. See you on Monday." I said, "No, I'm off. That's it. I'm going."
People reacted as if I were committing some kind of suicide. My sister thought I was going crazy. And maybe, from the perspective of the culture, I was. But given the nature of our culture, that's a kind of compliment! |