Do we, in our culture, grant in any way cycles other than those of machines? Yes, we have 8-ish hour workdays, and we have weekends, and we have holidays. All of this makes us efficient at making and distributing things.
But how many really decompress at the end of the day, or end of the week, or in the course of a one week vacation filled with screaming kids? In our culture, some lucky few–the smarter, more foresighted, more talented, more lucky–have 10-20 healthy years at the end of a career to “find themselves”. And some do. But I think many merely continue the distractions that got them through their days all their lives. And most of us, of course, can look forward to nothing but hoping our health holds while we work our way into final senescence. Anyone who thinks the promises of our government can be kept is a fool.
In my own case, analytic distance–can we call it the Vulcan Stance?–served me well at one time, but no more. It takes a lot of will, a lot of energy, to prevent spontaneity; and precisely because there are large parts of me crying out for release, spontaneity is what I need.
But at times I surrender without realizing it to the dominant tone of our culture, which is about work and pleasure, with church thrown in for some at the end of the week, and taken seriously.
Where is the space for self discovery? As I have been arguing for years, it is absolutely economically possible to create a society in which automation frees up the time for people to spend as much time as it takes to become deeper souls–or more in touch with the soul that was already there. I think we are already there. We simply have a profoundly unjust, anti-humanitarian system, run by and for bastards who ALSO have no conception of what a life well-lived would feel like. Cocaine and sex have their limits. I suspect they all figure this out, and substitute power, pure and simple, as their principle, life-defining drug.
And the quest for power is monophasic too, isn’t it? Perhaps this is how it creates shelter from the wind: lust never changes.
In order to adapt, you must change, you must grant you cannot control the winds and waters, even if you can both sail and swim, even if you can interact creatively with the conditions you find.
If I go up, I do not want to go down; and if I go down, I do not want to go up. This is an odd aspect of human existence. We are not robots, and I think it is precisely because mechanisms provide final shelter from the need from change that so many people WANT to die, WANT to become Terminators, meta-humans, programmable devices.
All of the bad philosophy, and the deficient metaphysics backing it, results from deep seated emotional failures, the principle of which is the defiant need for rigidity in the face of an intrinsically mutable–and here we can paraphrase this as “interesting”–world.