How Dare You Demand the Bare Minimum?
People seem to persistently defend the very machine designed to grind us to dust with ferocity that they wouldn’t show for their own family.
A person online saying we shouldn’t have to endure 60 soul-crushing years of 5-days-a-week labour until we’re old, depressed and nearing death gets torn to shreds in their comment section. Entitled new generations, weak-willed whining and all that. The usual. Makes me think about how people go foaming mad whenever someone in the U.S. even mentions student loan forgiveness, or the same consistently unfunny joke about participation trophies.
It feels like, as of late, any attempt to better the society and our lives is met with this fervent resistance that insists alleviating human suffering in any way is handout culture for spoiled babies. The most basic forms of anti-capitalism (how dare you suggest people shouldn’t work 40 hours a week to barely get by), psychology insights (don’t tell me to stop beating my kids, you woke clown) and general concern for our well-being (god forbid someone suggest we be nicer to others) is treated as the pinnacle of entitlement and weakness.
The more I face these sentiments, the more I feel they are directly linked to the mythos we have created around suffering and overcoming it. I can’t help but occasionally remember a news article about a wheelchair user putting a lot of practice, pain and effort to walk the aisle during their wedding on their legs, which somehow turned into the insane rhetoric that if they wanted to badly enough, “these lazy physically impaired people” could just make it through.
News articles like “Heartwarming: This child gives up his lunch for a poor kid” celebrate and (intentionally or not) propagate a culture of romanticising struggle (and its resolution or lack thereof) instead of asking the question why the hell we’re making children starve for not having money in the first place.
Here’s the thing. I love my job, but I don’t want to work until I drop dead. I don’t want to spend every month desperately trying to make it to the next one. I refuse to be convinced that repeatedly trying to hold out “until the weekend”, then “until the holidays”, then “until the vacation” and, I assume at some point, “until retirement” is a good way to spend my life.
And whenever I voice this frustration or see others do it, there is always inevitably someone smugly saying: “Oh, so you want everything to be handed to you?” Even if I did, what’s wrong with that? We already hand out lavish lifestyles to a pack of nepotism-fuelled blind bets (read: stocks and CEO play-pretend) indulgers. Why not anyone else?
How many times must we prove that UBI doesn’t “make people lazy”, and how many times must we find out that the 9-to-5 life 2.0 (where one income isn’t enough to support a pair/family anymore) is not healthily sustainable, and that a 4-day workweek actually improves productivity? The real answer is simple — it doesn’t matter. The proof is irrelevant as long as poverty, suffering and the threat of it worsening even more is used as a tool to make the work mule of the society fall in line. What barista would tolerate being screamed at by deranged customers if they didn’t have to worry about making the rent this month? What teacher in their right mind wouldn’t quit after being threatened to be stabbed by a spoiled brat if they didn’t have a mortgage payment to dread?
Our closeness to absolute peril is what keeps us docile. It keeps us quiet as our bosses lash out at us. It distracts us from revolting against the intolerable unfairness of the world. It demands our energy and attention so that we spend our evenings tired, not inquisitive and critical of the world that actively exploits us.
And thus, for this meat grinder to keep running, we churn out “heartwarming” stories about an immigrant mom working 3 jobs so her kids can go to college, neatly packaged as a tale of love and selflessness, not the gut-wrenching dystopian horror that it is. We share “inspirational” stories and photos of kids in Africa devotedly studying despite not having a school building instead of demanding that the world powers stop dropping bombs that destroyed the school building in the first place.
It’s simple, really. The next time you see “Must-see: A man bravely risks his life to save a puppy from the Dog-Crusher-9000 (that we ourselves turned on mere 5 minutes ago)”, check who in power you can try to annoy into doing something about disabling the Dog-Crusher-9000. And I’ll do the same.
