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263 sats \ 2 replies \ @kr OP 17h \ parent \ on: "Fed" By The Food Industry, "Healed" By The Health Industry HealthAndFitness
For sure. If you get some time, I think you'll enjoy The Unsettling of America, it really made me stop and think.
One of Wendell's related points on specialization is about how we've degraded ourselves to the point that we identify solely as "consumers".
He says the home was once a place of both production and consumption, and the things we produced or repaired (food, clothing, furniture, etc...) gave us meaning and a sense of purpose.
Today we optimize for efficiency. We all have specialized jobs that separate us from our food production, our families, our communities, and our responsibilities.
- We spend hours commuting to offices to meet with other specialized workers instead of working near the home (where most people worked pre-WW2)
- We then hire specialized government nannies to watch our kids and specialized cleaners to clean our homes while we pursue our specialized work
- After work we scroll through specialized (algorithmic) content, isolating us from our neighbors, families, and friends because TikTok seems more interesting than a trip to the local theatre or the park
We specialize in pursuit of measurable progress, but along the way we ignore all the non-measurable things that distort our lives in undesirable ways.
We use the term "home production" a lot at our house.
I've often encouraged dual-income friends, especially those with kids, to actually work out how much income they keep from the second job. By the time you add up all the taxes and additional expenses for food, cars, childcare, etc., it usually works out to less than minimum wage and it comes with the added loss of family connectedness and personal wellbeing. It's a bad deal, quite often.
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We use the term "home production" a lot at our house.
Love it
By the time you add up all the taxes and additional expenses for food, cars, childcare, etc., it usually works out to less than minimum wage and it comes with the added loss of family connectedness and personal wellbeing. It's a bad deal, quite often.
Yeah the math rarely works out, and even then, there's a tendency for people to under-price the value of family and personal wellbeing because they're hard to quantify.
But when people reflect on their lives later on, overlooking those things are common regrets.
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