Capitalism

Schlick also understood that his call to playfulness was not a self-help psychological switch that can be turned on and off. It also requires structural change to do away with work that is ‘mechanical, brutalising, degrading’ or work that serves to ‘produce only trash and empty luxury’. This means that capitalism, which subjects workers to severe

Schlaf ist die kompromisslose Unterbrechung der uns vom Kapitalismus geraubten Zeit. Die meisten der scheinbar unhintergehbaren Notwendigkeiten menschlichen Lebens – Hunger, Durst, sexuelles Begehren und neuerdings auch das Bedürfnis nach Freundschaft – wurden in Waren- oder Geldform verwandelt. Schlaf aber bedeutet die Idee eines menschlichen

As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome. [[Noam Chomsky]]

Since the 1970s, productivity has grown at 3.5 times the rate of pay for American workers. Precarious employment has risen by 9 per cent since the late 1980s, and we have seen extraordinarily high levels of burnout in the workforce. In short, we are underpaid, insecure, and burned out. And yet the achievement society – with its injunction to be

“We consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness to the objects with which we deal; We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.”

— Erich Fromm , “The Sane Society”

In a recent newsletter, “The Shopping Cure,” Anne Helen Petersen explored the compulsion to buy and accumulate stuff that’s been fostered by technologies of frictionless consumption. Every conceivable activity or hobby one sets out to enjoy becomes an occasion to buy stuff: “They transform from sites of actual pleasure and diversion to means of

Thus, the ads mostly affected the people who were in a “deciding” mindset when those ads ran.