I read a short, interesting book called Non-Stop Inertia by Ivor Southwood. It makes many good points about how our mono-culture of work has atrophied. The jig is up as many of us now know much of it lacks the genuine doing of something relevant; but instead has become more performative and less constructive. To compensate, the perception of “busy-workers” and positive psychology has overtaken many sectors. We see these people a mile away. They make it known that negativity is taboo (during interviews, reviews, company outings, etc.), even if the Truth may bear things we just don't like...
So regardless of whether the work itself is directly concerned with the production of affect, it contains elements of emotion management and virtuosity, both in covering over true anxieties and hostilities and in summoning a contrived enthusiasm and commitment.
And do we even get to the root of things when issues arise (or are we even allowed to). Most interestingly, the more we are connected (by technology), the less we are connected (as beings). We have outsourced humanity and diminished it in the process with canned jargon.
As demonstrated by the email-obsessed office or interminable call centre, in many ways the informational era has engineered a repression of real social conflicts by a new bureaucratic system which endlessly circulates anxieties rather than confronting and resolving them.
So not only are we asked to not show courage or conviction, but we are subverted from having any original thought or no-thought. Instead we fake feeling (as institutional statements) so we don't have to really face our feels in order to gain real insight or authenticity.
The lack of glamour or strangeness in current popular culture is symptomatic of the need to defamiliarize the roles handed out by the state and business scriptwriters, and rekindle hostilities between the centre and the margins. Reality TV and social media eliminate offstage space, destroying mystery and celebrating banality; art slides into decorative commerce; rebellion is commodified and marketed like a fashion brand, as in supposedly alternative rock groups whose superficial revolutionary posturing is belied by a deep musical and cultural conformity and a tiresome job-interview positivity. Former punk icons are now insurance salesmen and property developers. New cultural forms based upon “distance and reflection” rather than “empathy and feeling” are called for, to break this stalemate.
What is Southwood's solution to this diagnosis?: Don't go with the flow. (But isn't flow what all the HR mc-mindfulness trainings gear us toward? Ultimately these inner technologies are about seeing through resistances rather than feeling good; however, even that superficially gets watered down in today's work culture.) The flow we don't want to go along with is anything that takes us away from our True being; and that can only happen when each individual finds his or her right relationship to God first, and then the world with all its beauty and evil. We shouldn't settle for meaning through work culture—especially in an environment that expects us to compromise so much ourselves. The system wants you to play nice, act happy, find & keep your vices to yourself, and pretend we are all doing something very significant. It may try to enslave you, but there's no need to enslave yourself.