Those are interesting thoughts, thanks for sharing. Sorry for the late
reply which I hope you see.
> Ultimately the atelic stuff that we naturally find pleasurable is
where we want to spend a lot of our time, but life doesn't work that
way. And it sounds like you're heavily skewed to the painful side of
atelic work.
You're right. There's a lot of pleasurable activities for me, making
music, playing games, sea swimming and long distance yomping, all
without telos, other than as ends in themselves.
However I really resent technological makework. I consider it a
failure of intelligence. So much stuff people do nowdays is a clear
misuse of computers. Maybe I feel that way because as a computer
scientist I see how wrong is the path we've taken and how foolish the
work is. Nobody ever got fit or happy sitting at a desk doing a job
that doesn't need doing. It's a tragic waste of human life.
Seeing people enslaved in tedium by the very tools that promised to
set them free is a travesty and injustice I cannot easily turn away
from.
> I personally enjoy that I can come back to my favourite SW projects
and never run out of new ways to play with + improve them.
Absolutely. I totally get that too. But I think an unbounded creative
drive is something different from the misery I am describing, which is
not even a Protestant ethic, a duty, or even a Sisyphean feat. One
needs full ownership of a project. And it takes considerable
discipline not to be a dog who grows a tail so big it starts to wag
you.
> if you limit your time vs binge until overfilled/ overworked, it
creates a sense of looking forward to the activity later that is
motivating. It's a matter of perspective really.
You and I probably share a similar sense of self-management. But what
I get reading these pages is that "tech culture" today is filled with
workers who feel disempowered at the pace, pressure and pointlessness
of so much activity.
I don't think this is explainable simply as a necessary side-effect of
technological society. Neil Postman made an interesting distinction
between a technocracy (in which technology becomes the framework of a
normally functioning society) and a technopoly in which technology for
its own sake becomes the dominant organising principle.
I think that's where we are. And worse I think that "change for its
own sake" is not what it seems. It's what I call paradoxical progress
in Digital Vegan - where change as perpetual disruption is used as a
disorientating force that inhibits real innovation and progress.