I have often maintained that a big part of why we end up working so hard, and at hardly ever anything truly rewarding, is so that we can afford all of the additives and diversions that allow us to work so hard, and receive only money in return. Pills to keep us. Pills to keep us down. Other pills to counter the side effects of the first pills. Alcohol, risky behavior, and addictions in growing diversity. Thus we are occupied as well as not on the streets, or sleeping in a car.
This article from Scientific American adds some resent research to provide substance to this point of view. It especially makes sense if you remember that Capitalism, and the work, commodity, and commercialism inherent in it, is essentially life mechanized. It came about via the mechanistic mind set of Typographic thinking after all; separating things into repeatable processes that can then assemble anything that can be sold. A mind set for which economies of scale become immediately apparent so that concentrations of such task groups become the order of the day.
Bringing electricity into the picture, and especially as it relates to making experience instantly retrievable, changes everything however. That is everything but social inertia. Whereupon we apply electric modalities to a mechanistic organizational model and create monstrous mutations as a result. And the added insanity only applies accelerant to an already raging fire.
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