Our Times
“Bad times! Hard times!” — this is what people are saying. But let us live well, and the times shall be well. We are the times. Such as we are, such are the times.
—St. Augustine of Hippo, a sermon on prayer during the slow collapse of the Roman Empire
“People will suddenly find obvious what is now evident to only a few: that the organization of the entire economy toward the ‘better’ life has become the major enemy of the good life.”
Ivan Illich
I think that this whole smartphone scrolling, content consuming, ubiquitous posting, Extremely Online thing is going to go the way of the Fedora, or the Marlboro smoked at cruising altitude in economy class. In the end it is all going to fade. This may not happen for a good number of years, but I truly believe it will happen. I think we’ll look... See more
Thomas J Bevan • The End of the Extremely Online Era - by Thomas J Bevan
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
... See moreAlec Stubbs • The Achievement Society Is Burning Us Out, We Need More Play
the self is no longer a subject but a project . The self is something to be optimised, to be maximised, to be made efficient, cultivated for its capacity for productive output. The worry is that all life activities become viewed as lines on a résumé. Knowingly or otherwise, we risk being constantly governed by the question How is what I’m doing
... See more