Jobs

They have you doing exactly what they want. It might appear that this is so they can drive the economy, make themselves money, feed the people, run the government or exert power over their fellow man, but remember this isn’t a conspiracy made out of men! It’s not a conspiracy made out of people at all! The conspiracy has no need for money, or an economy, or power or sated people. All it wants is your slack! Your independence, your creativity, your imagination, your difference, your mutations. It wants a world of passive, dependent, auto-obedient dupes and it’s greed is insatiable. So, straight out of school, they make things worse.

Those horrible, unending, relentless early mornings set up during school continue. The regimented march of the clocking-on, clocking-off, clocking-in, clocking-out, never-clocking-ending-clocking-shake-it-all-a-clocking-bout, the constant, eternal tick tock, tick tock of their control leaves you no time, rushed and stressed, always with something to do, somewhere to be. They tell you that you have to do banking, and close the fucking banks the whole time you’re not there, at work, doing whatever they ask.

The entire system is needlessly inflexible, intolerably normalized. One fit lifestyles for homogenized, bland, pointless little zombie-sheep like you. Oh, it’s fine, for you. By now you want to get up at 7am every day. There’s so much to do! You get a proper evening, you’re uncomfortable every single fucking day, but it’s good because, well everybody else does – you’re off at the same time as them. Too knackered to talk, too exhausted to want to bother, but it’s quality time that counts. Besides, otherwise you’d miss the best part of the day. Bah! You ruin the best part of the day with your insistence at agreeing to insane toil, you sell a third of your useful life to a force that just makes you want it more. And by agreeing you sell the rest of us out. You even think you know what quality time means!

Why? What insane justification can possibly excuse this? The conspiracy at least needs an excuse!

Paul Graham wrote that “The basic idea behind office hours is that if you can’t make people work, you can at least prevent them from having fun.” They don’t measure how much you work, and pay you that way. The conspiracy doesn’t, frankly, care how much work you do. They measure how long they can attach you to their slack-sucking construction and seep the slack from your life. You could at least try to negotiate. You could ask if they’d measure the work you do instead of the hours your bum warms their chairs, but that would be weird, that would make you look different and stand out. You’re more terrified of the conspiracy and it’s disapproval by now than you are of sacrificing half your waking hours on their endless fucking unmeasured pretending-to-work busy-fussing and waiting. What a fucking imbecile! You’re as stupid as the wasted, grey, timid, coasting-duped walking dead you’re surrounded by. You are one of them.

A co-conspirator with your own boss. He wants your slack for the conspiracy, and you want to hand it over because you have to impress everybody with your earnings power and your willingness to work and your hi-energy, get-going, work ethic.

It doesn’t matter what kind of work you do, you still have to do so much of it you’re driven mad like a cat in a box. If you pick something easy it’s low paid, they just make you do more. If you pick something high paid it’s high-power and you somehow still have to do more to fight off the competition from the other suckers fighting and working to get their chance to work harder for more money that they can’t even use because they’re at fucking workall the time.

Hunter-gatherers, even in the harsh forests and African plains, used to hunt and gather for maybe three hours per day. They’d slack off, have sex, fool around and sleep more than you and they’d eat better than you with your double-super-mcwhopper, shake and fries grabbed quickly during your half hour lunch break. You dumbass jumping fuckwit! You work eight, nine, even TEN hours a day, practically every day, toiling at grind, wasting your grey matter, so you could what? Have a couple of weeks off in the summer? Put food on the table? They call this progress and you, stoned out of your mind on conformity, normality, and bland, boring, washed-up mediocrity agree!

You are either fighting the boss, or fighting to be the boss, either competing against your comrades and fellow dupes or licking their darkest holes. You may even think that you slack off, but all you can do in that place is pretend. It’s unreal, it’s all a conspiracy house of cards. It works because you think it works. It works because everyone thinks it works. Very little useful comes out.

If you aren’t involved in the politics, you’re a victim of it, if you ignore the promotion ladder you get stepped on, if you climb it you’re even more stupid, working harder to make someone else rich.

You suffer pointless unending meetings, back-breaking heavy-work, constant complaints from soulless customers, dumbass clients, idiot bosses, reckless agents and quarter-wit co-workers. ALL of them co-conspirators in taking your slack. YOUR co-conspirators, you HELP!

So you try to get it back, and be the customer, the client, the boss, the agent, the co-worker, the co-conspirator back at them. Even though you can’t use stolen slack. You’re just wasting you own taking theirs, FOR THE CONSPIRACY!

They need the mass slacklessness to drive the mass consumption that drives the mass production that takes away the slack! So flea brains and robots and donkeys like you gave up your slack to help them.

Does bumming off in your job help? The great saint Bill Hicks once claimed to have told his boss “why don’t you pretend like I’m working?” as if that would fix anything. It’s not the work that destroys you. Work can even be satisfying, rewarding. It can even be slack. Bumming off in your job doesn’t help, you’re still in a job. All the time.

On To Chapter Six