Living in Expectation of the Unexpected Gift

In the Prologue to The Human Condition, with the promise that automation would empty the factories, Hannah Arendt worried that “it is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaninfgul activities for the sake of which this freedom would deser

Allow me to pair this line of thought with an observation Chris Gilliard made a couple of months ago regarding an app that promises to “take care of your meals each week with increasing relevancy and minimal input from the user.” “Really weird,” Gilliard noted, “how tech companies are all promising to offload your decision making so you can ha

I’m writing this installment with the themes of the last—exhaustion, burnout, tiredness, rest—still in mind. There are so many reasons why any of us might feel exhausted and depleted, but just now I find myself wondering how much of it is the result of aimless labors that serve only the operations of a techno-economic system designed to offer us ev

It seems rarely to occur to us, or rather we are encouraged to forget that much of the joy and satisfaction we might find in this world may stem from our purposeful involvement in the sorts of tasks we are told to see as mundane, trivial, and inconvenient.