The NBC News story you see linked below is another reminder of not only how we are expected to become more machine like, but the matter of fact manner in which this expectation is expressed. An acceptance almost as cold as the further expectation that, no matter how deeply in debt you are for the last turn at skills improvement, you must pay anew for the next round.
In this do we blithely dismiss so many parts of human nature that it is astonishing.
It used to be said that lucky is the individual who can find work where their passion lies. Perhaps now we can see that for the ugly lie that it has become. I say that because you have to ask yourself: Which is more cruel, people who are unable to work their passion and make do with the least offensive alternative, or those who do, for whatever period of time, only to have it rendered superfluous at some point so that they have to shuck that skill cloak and don another; usually so far from any kind of passion, or comparable compensation, that it can erase nearly everything they thought they had become, or achieved.
No one bothers to question what we do to ourselves when we think of work as simply interchangeable skill cloaks that can be put on and taken off as casually as one exchanges one mask for another. The relationship of organic connection to our tools, which used to be real extensions of our senses, and our reach, and the expressions of affect, both practical and emotive, that those tools used to provide.
No. There can be no mention of this precisely because we are tools now in a factory oriented mode of living. We are nothing more than multi-spindle (that which keeps churning in mind and body, behavior and attitude) tools for which the snapping on and snapping off is simply a new fact of life. And never mind that the pace of this inhuman exchange knows only acceleration.
The train that "Old Charlie" stole the handle from (Jethro Tull) is now a linear accelerator. Jumping off, in whatever fashion, becomes ever more an act of terrorism because of relativistic mass in a relativistic matrix of information flow and hard copy output; so much of which, of course, is simply collateral.
This is what happens when an organizational model from one type of mind space becomes mutated by another mind space model. The wonder is not that there is so much insanity swirling around us any more, but that there isn't a great deal more.
Old habits die hard I suppose, even when the inmates are in control of the asylum.
The nbcnews.com article:
http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/in-plain-sight/highly-educated-unemployed-tumbling-down-ladder-n219451
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