This book speaks to it better than I can: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullshit-jobs/

Specifically take a look at

Chapter 3: Why Do Those in Bullshit Jobs Regularly Report Themselves Unhappy? (On Spiritual Violence, Part 1)

If your eyeballs are missing, I can make an assumption that your vision isn’t great just by looking at you. That’s not a moral judgement.

Doesn’t mean blood tests are useless, and in fact it means we have some idea where to start investigating a potential health problem.

Yes, I agree that there’s bias against folks who are overweight, and also that there’s a range of risk associated with being overweight. It’s pretty clear, however, that obesity is a health concern that we should take seriously. If someone smokes five pack of cigs a day, I’m going to make an assumption about their lung health. There’s always outliers that live to 100 smoking and not doing exercise, but it would be a shit doctor if they didn’t tell folks not to follow their example.

I must be ancient here, because nobody has claimed this is like September 1993 all over again…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Can they murder people on their property? Or is there some limit to their ability to make rules?

I appreciate you taking the time to say that! Thank you. My favorite song by him is probably Desperados Under the Eaves, if you’d ever like to hear the best of his music.

Reminds me of what Warren Zevon had to say about rich people problems, off Preludes. It came out a few years after his death, and the back half of the album has snippets from some radio interview(s?) he did. Neat musings by a complex dude: he was creative genius in a lot of ways, and a titanic asshole in a lot of other ways (he asked his ex-wife to write his biography, and to not go easy on him - alcoholism, violence, absentee parenting…it’s all there).

Anyway, that’s a preface for the folks who don’t know about him: he probably could have been a bigger financial success had he not been a disaster of a human, but maybe his dirty life and times gave him enough material to feed his creativity…who knows.

WZ: I was real lucky, because I always had some kind of work that came along - at the last minute, anyway.

I was always able to make some kind of living as a musician

I also never really got rich, and that might have been lucky too, ya know?

Interviewer: in what way?

WZ: Well, because the less time you spend with the issues of being rich

they’re like the issues of being famous

they’re not real issues

so they’re not real life.

Interviewer: And it leaves more time to be creative?

WZ: There’s more of an exchange - a human exchange of ideas and feelings to be had on the bus stop than over the phone with your accountant, and if you’re rich you spend a lot of time on the phone with your accountant. it’s necessary, I believe.

I know I’m happy and that means I must be lucky. That I know.

EDIT: this is not to say I wouldn’t be grateful for more money, myself, but I chose the life of a biologist - in ecology and evolution, no less. I’m happy to make a living, and it’s always a little shocking to see folks make double/triple what I do and say it’s “not much these days”. Those of us scraping by have a wildly different perspective, and I’d love to give folks a tour of what it looks like long-term.

I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt