It’s the beginning of a new work week. By which I mean, it’s Monday. But of course, the day to start a work week isn’t truly universal, is it? That makes sense, since the very notion of a week’s length is pretty arbitrary, and it certainly doesn’t represent anything external in the universe, only things that are inside human minds and their artifacts.
Of course, having set lengths of typical weeks and having pre-programmed days off is probably very good for people at the overall and individual level. After all, if left to their own devices (so to speak) most businesses would probably like people to work seven days a week (and probably 24 hours per day).
This is not a case of businesses being “evil” or capitalism being “evil”, it’s a case of everything and everybody tending to respond to local incentives and to support their own self interest‒because things and people that do not support their own self-interest tend to go away, as they are inherently outcompeted by things and people that do.
Of course, most entities have more than one local incentive going on, and these can be at relative odds with each other, just as in any individual human (and presumably other) mind, there are numerous modules that have parallel and sometimes conflicting drives‒parts of the mind/brain want specific kinds food at any given moment, and want rest, and want safety, and want excitement, and want companionship, and want sex, and want to learn, and want run around and play, and so on. And the strength of these “wants” varies from moment to moment; their vector sum changes continuously.
So, getting all the incentives and forces lined up within one individual is already a complex and varying, nonlinear problem. Then one has to work things out between individuals, and that often leads to groups and organizations of various kinds which then have to balance their own drives and interests and “fears”.
It’s tricky, it’s complicated, it’s immensely nonlinear, and it’s all highly “emergent”. Almost none of it is actually motivated by any desire to be “evil”, to willfully harm others*, to be deliberately unfair. Most negative behavior that isn’t entirely in the eye of the beholder is simply brought about by a kind of myopia, a nonreflective self-interest.
Very few people (or institutions) are specifically predicated upon doing harm. Those that do consistently do harm seem a lot of the time to be motivated by fear. This can exist, I would say, not merely at the level of an individual, but also at that of a larger organization, since organizations without self-preservation inclinations tend ceteris paribus to be less likely to survive over time.
To feel fear is not inherently irrational or even always detrimental or to be avoided. But there are many kinds of irrational and nonrational fears. And when one’s behaviors (whether one is a person or a company or a nation or a slime mold) are born of misapprehensions and even full-on delusions, those behaviors are going to tend not to be as productive as they might be**, and again, this makes for poor outcomes over time. It is not, as the biological term goes, an evolutionarily stable strategy.
I don’t know why I’m writing about this topic and subject and whatnot. I feel sure that I’ve written about all this before. I didn’t use the exact specific words and ordering of words, of course; that would be vanishingly unlikely unless I did it on purpose, because there are so many ways to put together so many words to convey ideas.
In any case, it’s not as though they make any impact, even to the extent that I have potentially useful insights. Very few people read my blog, and I don’t know that anyone “shares” it, even if they like it***.
Anyway, I don’t think I’m going to be able to do this much longer. I don’t mean this blog, though that is subsumed by what I do mean, so it can at least serve as a marker. I’m really not doing well. This blog is, most days, my only social interaction that has to do with anything at all in which I am interested. I have “social” interactions when at work, of course, but they are about work.
That’s usual for me. I cannot seem easily to socialize for the sake of socialization‒it’s not that I don’t want to, I just cannot seem to do it‒but have to have some associated purpose. Even things like movies and shows and so on have always been things in which I participate at least partly as a way of connecting with people.
Unfortunately, this tends to make shows that I used to watch (for instance) or books that I used to read and discuss or movies that I went to see and enjoyed with someone specific painful for me when those people are gone. Actually, on a day-to-day basis, almost everyone is gone, many of them long gone. Like the song below says, “everyone I know goes away in the end”. Though it’s not even “the end” yet, and most of them are already gone.
It’s too bad my depression won’t seem to go away. I know it’s not literally always at its worst, since that could only be the case for something with a constant level, but it does feel interminable. That’s a commonly described attribute of depression, that when you’re in it, it feels as though it has always been and always will be. I know that’s not literally true, and also that it’s not constant, but I also know that it never seems to go away for long. And I am running out of countermeasures, and the ones that I still have are losing their effectiveness.
Whatever. It doesn’t matter, anyway. But I do hope you have a good day and a good week.
*Though sadism does exist, it tends not to be a stable attribute, because other people take a dim view of it (for reasons of self-preservation if nothing else) and will eventually expunge the willfully destructive from the world.
**Reality exists, whatever it might be, and those things that do not stay parallel to the course of reality are destined to crash into its walls. And they will lose in that collision.
***I didn’t mean to refer to my song, Like and Share, but what the heck. I’ll embed it here.
