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Work is traditionally seen as solving other people's problems, but this definition reduces work to measurable and calculable tasks. A better view of work is as creative problem-solving through collaboration and remixing ideas to create new solutions. Most importantly, work should involve caring for and understanding other people, as human relationships are what truly matter. Focusing on interpretive labor and caring for others can help move away from views of work that promote exhaustion and lack of fulfillment.
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- 3. from Esko Kilpi @RiaBaeck (via Esko rt) Quite impressive read about future of work. “New Economic Spaces” by @EskoKilpi medium.com/@EskoKilpi/new… @spottedzebra@percolab Work is always solving other people’s problems and what defines those problems is that to understand them and to solve them, a person has to think not only about what she believes the right answer is, but also about what other people have seen and learned. What they think the right answers could be. Work, then, is exploration both what comes to defining the problems and finding the solutions. The network is the key resource. Every valuable piece of learning can be put to use by someone else, or somewhere else. At best, then, work is remixing and recombining successful elements to create new versions. work as solving other people’s problems..
- 4. with that definition of work.. work is always solving other people’s problems we get 7 billion people waking up every morning ..checking to see what they should respond to
- 7. what if we were never meant to solve other people’s problems.. because we can’t know them well enough (thinking schooling the world, ngo/charity ness, interpretation, et al) and what if assuming we were meant to solve other people’s problems .. is why we ended up needing extrinsic (and thus toxic) motivations in order to .. get the work done
- 8. It is easy to see bureaucratic procedures as an extension of this phenomenon. One might say they are not so much themselves forms of stupidity and ignorance as modes of organizing situations already marked by stupidity and ignorance owing the existence of structural violence. True, bureaucratic procedure operates as if it were a form of stupidity, in that it invariably means ignoring all the subtleties of real human existence and reducing everything to simple pre-established mechanical or statistical formulae. via David Graeber‘s revolution in reverse (will be in red): work as calculable/measurable/outsourcable..
- 9. thinking of that rate of work equation .. not that it didn't work formulaely it just never resonated humanely image link: begs math rescue indeed
- 13. and even if your work is work you choose everyday the way we have work set up.. we’re wasting energy/time/resources/us.. on assuming ie: money/B.. as a middleman.. as an os work as your choice..
- 16. even makes me question the wisdom (for our planet) of interpretive labor .. work as interpreting other people
- 17. Let me start with the household. A constant staple of 1950s situation comedies, in America, were jokes about the impossibility of understanding women. The jokes of course were always told by men. Women’s logic was always being treated as alien and incomprehensible. One never had the impression, on the other hand, that women had much trouble understanding the men. That’s because the women had no choice but to understand men: this was the heyday of the American patriarchal family, and women with no access to their own income or resources had little choice but to spend a fair amount of time and energy understanding what the relevant men thought was going on. Actually, this sort of rhetoric about the mysteries of womankind is a perennial feature of patriarchal families: structures that can, indeed, be considered forms of structural violence insofar as the power of men over women within them is, as generations of feminists have pointed out, ultimately backed up, if often in indirect and hidden ways, by all sorts of coercive force.
- 18. But generations of female novelists — Virginia Woolf comes immediately to mind — have also documented the other side of this: the constant work women perform in managing, maintaining, and adjusting the egos of apparently oblivious men — involving an endless work of imaginative identification and what I’ve called interpretive labor. interpretive labor ness
- 19. No doubt all this makes it easier to see the two as fundamentally different sorts of activity, making it hard for us to recognize interpretive labor, for example, or most of what we usually think of as women’s work, as labor at all. To my mind it would probably be better to recognize it as the primary form of labor. Insofar as a clear distinction can be made here, it’s the care, energy, and labor directed at human beings that should be considered fundamental.
- 20. The things we care most about — our loves, passions, rivalries, obsessions — are always other people; and in most societies that are not capitalist, it’s taken for granted that the manufacture of material goods is a subordinate moment in a larger process of fashioning people. In fact, I would argue that one of the most alienating aspects of capitalism is the fact that it forces us to pretend that it is the other way around, and that societies exist primarily to increase their output of things. In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the end of life but the final saturation with absence. — Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life rev of everyday life
- 21. it (interpretive labor) may seem kind/unselfish/necessary.. but if it’s .. 1 enabling toxicity/toxic-people/ongoing-victimisation 2 perpetuating energy sink for all of us perhaps it’s .. 1 not the ‘care, energy, and labor directed at human beings that should be considered fundamental’ 2 not ‘fashioning people’ for good/freedom.. perhaps even..freedom begs we facilitate curiosities rather than fashion people not desiring to verbiage quibble here.. just wanting to make sure we let go.. enough ie: we keep missing equity - maybe t h i s i s w h y
- 22. @brainpicker Sontag, 50 years ago, on the trouble with treating art and cultural material as "content"—terrifyingly timely today buff.ly/1MPXCCb Susan Sontag against interpretation https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/01/16/susan-sontag-against-interpretation-content/ this part in particular: Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world — in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.” It is to turn the world into this world. (“This world”! As if there were any other.) work as solving other people’s problems.. gets us back to..
- 23. perhaps what we’re seeking is art/play/being/becoming.. as the day so that rather than ‘solving other people’s problems’ and/or jumping thru hoops to get recognized..resources.. funding.. whatever.. we spend our day listening ..to our hearts ie: hlb via 2 convos that io dance.. as the day..[aka: not partial.. for (blank)’s sake…].. a nother way
- 25. imagine.. 7 bn people waking up everyday.. to listen for/to their own curiosities..
- 26. imagine.. a mech deep/simple/open enough to facil those 7 bn curiosities.. everyday
- 28. if you listen closely.. you can see .. currently.. we spend our days trying to rally people around our campfire (whatever that may be).. voting each other up.. calling our senator.. inspecting inspectors.. making tools to inspect inspectors.. et al
- 31. what if.. we spent our time differently.. ie: listening.. to ourselves and others https://redefineschool.com/holmgren-indigenous-law/
- 33. James Suzman reckons, after years of studying the Bushmen, that a world in which people work and worry less is possible
- 34. It was only in looking at the Bushmen that I saw how our attitudes toward work are this kind of elementary particle to our society. Where does this come from? It obviously didn’t come from our lives as hunters and gatherers, who were content to work as little as possible. There wasn’t this obsession with being busy with full employment, with having enough for everyone to do all the time. It became clearer and clearer that this was a product of the agricultural revolution and what it forced on us, placing this premium on labor. And so many modern institutions and behaviors seem contingent on this. At the same time, a lot of these institutions are seemingly at odds with the way we’re able to live now. The agricultural revolution was sort of an accidental one, and once we developed it we became hostage to it. The population became hostage to its own growth, and this has shaped a huge amount of the economic and intellectual architecture of our modern culture. We’re still obsessed with growing, even when there’s not much room left to grow in. - James Suzman
- 35. perhaps we un-hostage ourselves from busyness https://redefineschool.com/kierkegaard-busy-ness-law/
- 36. To his surprise, Lee established that the Ju/’hoansi not only managed to feed themselves better than many in the industrialized world, but that they did so on the basis of only around two hours foraging a day, and cheerfully spent the rest of their time on more leisurely pursuits such as napping, playing games, and making art. ..what enabled them confidence to do this? ..faith in their environments and faith in their own abilities - James Suzman Affluence without Abundance
- 40. what matters most – is/as the day. [not after hours or after school] aka: not partial.. for (blank)’s sake… [having to do with no-strings/agenda-attached… intrinsic/perpetual-beta ness. following your whimsy isn’t an after hours activity or 20% of the day.. it is the day.] https://redefineschool.com/as-the-day/
- 41. eudaimoniative surplus.. [a play on Clay Shirky‘s cognitive surplus] https://redefineschool.com/eudaimoniative-surplus/
- 42. let’s on that dance fittingness: how well your actions match your gifts match who you are