On the Unfettering of Captive Enthusiasm
Or: Why the Hell Can’t I Have This Engaging Alacrity When I’m Not at Work?
I’m wondering more lately about what cube farms are doing to the assembly of voices operating within them. If I assume that I’m typical along several dimensions (an uncontroversial assumption), and I know that my peak creative cognition occurs during the 8-5 business day, and I know that I’m frustrated to waste that cognition tapping away at a keyboard for naught, then, by induction, there must be a teeming culture of similarly frustrated people tapping away at keyboards for a looming, aggregate naught.
In a sociohistorical context, this can’t be a recent development. I’d be committing egregiously ignorant navel gazing if I didn’t realize that, for all that situation represents, I’m still not incalculably better off than…well, than the vast majority of the several billion people to have ever lived. The reasons I enjoy a greater standard of living are obvious and numerous, so I won’t bother enumerating.
Still, that doesn’t take much of the sting out. Forward is forward, and there’s no mistaking the increasingly troubling ennui growing like a weed, sucking up nutrients and light from other interests. I bother indulging myself here because I need to dump it, and because I might begin to help the rest of us in a small way.
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