More solidarity:
Americans quit their jobs this summer at rate never seen before. Gen Z led the charge. The children of Occupy Wall Street — footsoldiers of the Third Force — went full Johnny Paycheck on their crappy minimum-wage employment.
“This is a fight response,” a career coach told The New York Times. When people are triggered, they go reptilian: fight or flight. And flight’s not an option when you’re cornered. Across a scorched-earth economic landscape employees looked their bosses in the eye, and their bosses blinked. Because the power dynamic was reversed and everyone knew it. For once it was the workers who had the leverage.
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The way people were quitting — trumpeting their departures on social media — should have been a clue that this wasn’t about laziness. It’s the opposite of lazy to quit out loud. That is fury talking. It’s a statement that this is not about me.
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The Mandarin word for it is “tang ping” — literally “lying flat.” Young Chinese, beaten down by an authoritarian system and yearning to live a more relaxed life, spread themselves against the earth like a measuring tape, becoming “the metric of all things,” as one protester put it in a social media post that was quickly deleted by the state. Clearly, the pushback against degrading overwork is not just a Western thing. Rather, it’s a sign, as one tang ping enthusiast put it, of a “global unraveling.”
Note: these anti-consumerist countercultures are fundamentally anti-Western, regardless of where they are taking place globally. Which civilization invented the commercial and industrial system that now exists in China? Which civilization is being rebelled against by both the Antiwork and Lying Flat countercultures? Hint: Western civilization.
“I opt out.” Those are powerful words. Consider the mighty, status-quo-toppling impact of this passive gesture if everybody did it. The new activists have found magic in inverting the old mantra of the capitalist hustle.
Don’t just do something: stand there.
To do nothing, even for a short while, is an active rebuke of the creation of capitalist value.
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And this has been the one upside of the otherwise grim blight on the world that is this pandemic: the disruption gave everyone time to reflect on their workaday routine. And a lot of people came to the same conclusion: Why the **** should I take the prime of my life and simply hand it over?
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To be crystal clear here, this is not about not wanting to work. We humans are working dogs. We prefer to work than not to work, studies show.
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And the average employee comes to understand: You do not own me, day and night. I give my service to you, on my terms.
So celebrate this moment of opportunity born of crisis. Maybe these are the first growing-pain heaves along the road to what a new definition of a successful life actually looks like.
https://www.adbusters.org/article/gen-z-will-you-whack-capitalism-into-a-new-orbitOpting out of Western civilization isn't enough. To end it, you need to get to work for something to counter it.