For most of human history-from the Greeks, to the Romans, to the Middle Ages- leisure was the basis of culture. Our modern concept of work is actually relatively new-only about 300 years old. Comically, the subreddit has three times as many members as r/careerguidance. The antiwork subreddit describes itself as “a subreddit for those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, and want to get the most out of a work-free life.” r/antiwork now has 2.1 million members (who fittingly call themselves “Idlers”), up from just 13,000 in 2019. The journalist goes deep into r/antiwork, which has become one of Reddit’s most popular subreddits. One of the best pieces I’ve read in recent months is Anna Codrea-Rado’s long Vice piece called Inside the Online Movement to End Work. TikTok is full of adolescents proudly slamming their laptops shut at 5pm, despite being in the middle of a Zoom meeting. Work is shifting lower on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: work doesn’t need to provide self-actualization it just needs to provide basic needs like food and shelter. There’s a growing backlash to the Millennial idea that your work should be your purpose in life. I’ll examine how these norms might be ripe for change and what companies are leading the way. This week, I want to dig into the things that we explain away with a wave of the hand and a That’s just the way things are. We take things that are made-up (and that may make little sense) as gospel.
We don’t tend to think about how things came to be the way they are we just accept them as everyday parts of life. The United States only adopted the five-day workweek in 1932. The modern use of the word “charisma” only originated in the mid-1900s, and even in 1968, The New York Times still had to explain how to pronounce it: “The big thing in politics these days is charisma, pronounced karizma ,” wrote The Times. Now it’s so ubiquitous that as I type the words high five, this emoji appears on my MacBook: ✋ Just in the past week, I read three articles that taught me about three surprisingly-recent social creations: Huge swaths of modern life are manmade-simply…made up. Roosevelt in a dress-a common outfit for boys during his childhood: Slowly, the norm changed.įor added measure on how manufactured gender norms are, here’s a photo of Franklin D. Only in the 1950s did a series of events shift pink to being “a girl’s color”: Mamie Eisenhower, the newly-minted first lady, wearing a pink ballgown to the inaugural ball Marilyn Monroe wearing a pink strapless dress in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Jackie O wearing a pink Chanel suit the day JFK was assassinated. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”
A 1918 trade publication wrote that, because pink is derived from red, “Pink is for the boys, and blue for the girls. Gender norms are social constructs-pink, for instance, was originally considered a boy’s color. Many parts of our lives are social constructs. The most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.
The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. The story thing turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories.
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