Let's commune a bit about human habit, for it is merely human habit that prolongs the stupidity that is the office block.
Now, an individual is born and raised in a society where notions of being a responsible member of society are instilled at the earliest of ages. This has been so for a very long time, and is indispensable in the maintenance of a coherent society. However, any such notions as tradition can have an undesirable side effect: they delay the societies adaptation to change, even when the potential for change has come about from an aggregate will to see change. Change, sometimes when achieved, is denied by appeals to tradition.
An individual leaves school, and finds themselves a job. Usually (it seems to be the case in my observations) people dream of the cars, mortgages, and families. People take their lead from those who have come before them; they accept many of the behaviours of earlier generations as being exemplar to the way they should behave in order to realise their "individual" dreams. People can accept too much.
So, people who accept that the office is the place where work is done, and the home is the place where life is lived have in all but a very few cases, tacitly complied with a social convention; they have not exercised their own will, and in most instances without necessarily thinking what the implications are. However, when I was 12 years old, I wasn't comparing and contrasting modes of work; I had merely observed promise in a way to relate to the necessity of work so it would pay dividend for me, and I found that promise existed in working as a regular employee for a large corporate employer in my own space, time and intensity needing only to concentrate on issues relating to a profession that interested me.
Others had since surrendered the promise of a similar relationship to the work they do because the command and control structure of work conspired with their need to fulfil other priorities of their lives. Others don't necessarily "decide" to give up the promises they make to themselves, they just adopt conventions because devoting thought to alternatives required an effort they couldn't have priority for. It is (possibly more) true that most also do not have the wider social support to help realise these alternatives. I have observed that society has built a form of systemic slavery where those who work, only do so because they accept the way work is done: from an office, and at a time and intensity which is determined by a set of long ago established conventions that place the ability to perpetuate this system at the discretion of the whims of a few individuals; not necessarily because this system works in any way that benefits all the interests involved, but rather, just because things are just done this way so to make more of the same things so to perpetuate this way of doing things.
I observe the wish of raising a family to be the most compelling motivation. I too, feel such desires, though perhaps they are not strong enough to compel me to act on them. In exercising one's individual wish specifically to have a family, individuals are most compelled to accept the choice presented by social convention: to accept the way things are in terms of how they are going to work, and to teach their kids likewise, or not to have a family. For individuals who want the former, the choice to adopt a conventional relationship to work is not a conscientious decision; this is the acceptance of a convention that is maintained through a contract between one generation and the next. Such a contract is based on very little more than the very dark motivations of blackmail and coercion that, while enforced from one generation to the next, are not moral teachings; they are nothing more than coercive habit.
Hence, individuals accept that work is done in an office, life is lived at home, and social structures (regardless of their actual benefit or detriment) are formed around these tenets. Cities grow, and draw people into ever higher population densities because people are drawn together by working conventions; not because working this way is an aggregate exercise of individual desire. Some may have a genuine desire to work and live in accordance to this arbitrary convention, but for a majority, it is merely a tacit agreement accepted only because most individuals can tolerate this behaviour and most are tolerating it only because they need to so to meet other priorities; raising a family prominent among these.
Raising a family unfortunately inculcates the same acceptance in their offspring. Those who hold a genuine desire to convention are often looked at with envy and their ideals are promoted, even though most individuals do not desire to adopt the life of a few - they just desire to enjoy their life as those individuals who readily desire convention appear capable of.
So, where do I fit in? Well, if I don't start a family and accept the way work is done, it looks as if I don't.
Yea... um... then give me my disability pension (I have an acquired brain injury which appears to explain why I am averse to collocation) and disappear. But I've got a lot of time on my hands. Hence, I'm going to continue heckling your good selves because I've got to do something with, say, the next fifty or so years or things are going to be rather boring. I could terminate my life (if I put my mind to it, I can make sure you won't be able to stop me) but then the question of whether society can break with the convention of the office block goes on unanswered. If you think this question should continue unanswered, then I might label your good self with such phrases like "arrogant pig", "wanker", and "profligate bastard".
So people. My apathy, and the extent to which I feel forced to distance myself from this particular society of convention is but a symptom of my behaviour which is deemed for arbitrary reasons, to be unacceptable. I have chosen not to select the convention of working habit because I see no way for these habits to bring happiness to me. Any participation at any intensity in any collocated love-in is, at its idealistic best, a zero sum for me. However, notions like "deployment" are introduced which conspire to drag my arse involuntarily around this planet entrapped in chronic "cosmopolitan" transience. There appears to be a consequence for the fact I do not wish to take on working mode prescribed by this convention; I am chronically isolated. I receive much less than I need to feel welcome in other peoples' society.
My friends. I think you will hear a bit more of what I think about collocation. As my implementation of Clique Space(TM) continues to evolve, I may yet be able to underscore the fallacy of collocation: a stupidity that stupid people have inserted into what would otherwise be a good vocation for me.
No comments:
Post a Comment