The post I'm bouncing ideas off of isn't letting me reblog it for some reason, but if I had to guess: most likely the idea of physical labor being good for you can appeal to people who haven't done physically demanding jobs because: for office drones and people who have been in school a lot (or unemployed for that matter) often they don't get enough physical movement and/or things that make you go "Oh! I did something! I can see that I did something!"
People need a balance of these things, and I got a total rush from picking up a couple cigarette butts in the local city park yesterday because when you've been exposing yourself to a lot of climate change -- cruelty to immigrants -- police violence -- transphobia -- whatever whatever whatever, big stuff that you can't fix by picking up a couple cigarette butts, being able to go "ok, I made a really tiny part of the world slightly better in a small but measurable way" makes the big abstract stuff seem a little bit less terrifying.
So people can follow the train of thought, "a little bit of physical labor (that wasn't really "labor" in the sense of being paid or for a boss) was good for me" and extrapolate to "'a lot more physical labor would be a lot better for me" and indeed "a lot more physical labor would be better for everyone." While of course people who have been working physically demanding jobs often need completely different things, like rest and decent working conditions and respect and quality health care and idk a heating pad or knee brace or something.
(Some of what people don't like about work is effort and some of what people don't like about work is the power/dehumanization stuff. Like when you're not allowed to use the tool that doesn't hurt your back and does the job just as well, or when you're not allowed to go at your own pace and take breaks as needed, or when the boss expects you to keep working through an injury. The former is intrinsic to stuff needing to get done, sometimes it can be reduced and sometimes it really can't. The latter is not.)
Like when I was doing Food Not Bombs a lot, sure it was a lot of effort and sometimes I got tired, because transporting stuff and cooking and cleaning are work. And doing it week after week after week gets old after a while. But if I got a small burn on my finger and wanted to stay away from the stove for a bit, or just didn't want to work that much and wanted to play computer games for a couple hours instead, or was sick and thought I shouldn't be working that day at all, I could just do that, and because I wasn't the only person putting in the work we'd still get the meal done. And while there are some downsides to the "people get to decide when and how they work" model (some days you get seven people in the kitchen and there's not enough for them all to do, some days you get two people and they have to bust ass) it really clarifies how much of the sucky parts of "work" are not actually intrinsic to "getting things done".
25 notes
·
View notes
2023 READING LOG
JANUARY
-> Books:
HURSTON, Zora Neale; Their Eyes Were Watching God
WILLIAMS, Tennessee; A Streetcar Named Desire
-> Essays & articles:
CHRISTENSEN, Joel; How do chatbots dream of electric Greek heroes?
DYHOUSE, Carol; Why Are We So Afraid of Female Desire?
EDWARDS, Stassa; A Little Madly: Hysteria at the Moulin Rouge
HOOKS, bell; Romance: Sweet Love
LAING, Olivia; NYC blue: what the pain of loneliness tells us
LIEBERMAN, Jeffrey A.; “The Miracle Cure”: A Brief History of Lobotomies
LORDE, Audre; The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power
SHUSHAN, Gregory; Near-death experiences have long inspired after life beliefs
STADONILK, Joe; We’ve always been distracted
TÁÌWÒ, Olúfémi; The idea of ‘precolonial Africa’ is vacuous and wrong
WYPIJEWSKI, JoAnn; How Capitalism Created Sexual Dysfunction
FEBRUARY
-> Books:
DOUGLASS, Frederick; Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass
WINTERSON, Jeanette; 12 Bytes: How We Got Here, Where We Might Go Next
-> Essays & articles:
BLACK, Bob; The Abolition of Work
BURDEN-STELLY, Charisse; How Black Communist Women Remade Class Struggle
COBB, Michael; Bigmouth Strikes Again
GOODLAD, Lauren M.E.; Now The Humanities Can Disrupt “AI”
HALBERSTAM, Jack; Towards a Trans* Feminism
HARVEY, Katherine; Medieval babycare
ROTHFIELD, Becca; A Body of One’s Own
RUKES, Frederic; The Disruption of Normativity: Queer Desire and Negativity in Morrisey and The Smiths
STRINGER, Julian; The Smiths: Repressed (But Remarkably Dressed)
VENKATARAMAN, Vivek V.; Lessons from the foragers
MARCH
-> Books:
AMADO, Jorge; Gabriela, Clove & Cinnamon
-> Essays & articles:
ALEXANDER, Amanda; Making Communities Safe, Without the Police
BOURDÉ, Guy; The philosophies of history
ELLIOTT, John H.; An Europe of composite monarchies
ERNAUX, Annie; A Community of Desires
HARCOUT, Bernard E.; Policing Disorder
JABBARI, Alexander; After the mother tongues: what we lost with Persianate modernity
MANTEL, Hilary; Anne Boleyn: witch, bitch, temptress, feminist
MANTEL, Hilary; Holy disorders
MANTEL, Hilary; Night visions
MANTEL, Hilary; No passport required
MANTEL, Hilary; The shape we’re in
MINER, Horace; Body Ritual among the Nacirema
RUSSEL, Francey; What It Means to Watch
WEBB, Claire Isabel; Cosmic vision
APRIL
-> Books:
MISHIMA, Yukio; Sun and Steel
OLADE, Yves; Bloodsport
-> Essays & articles:
BATESON, Gregory; A Theory of Play and Fantasy
CÉSAIRE, Suzanne; The Great Camouflage
CHARALAMBOUS, Demetrio; The Enigma of the Isle of Gold
DAVID, Kathryn; How Stalin enlisted the Orthodox Church to help control Ukraine
SINGLER, Beth; Existential Hope and Existential Despair in AI Apocalypticism and Transhumanism
WYATT, Justin; The Smiths, Pop Culture Referencing and Marginalized Stardom
-> Short stories:
ELLISON, Harlan; The Man Who Rowed Christopher Colombus Ashore
SAYLOR, Steven; The Eagle and the Rabbit
MAY
-> Books:
PLUTARCH; Life of Sulla
-> Essays & articles:
BRAUDEL, Fernand; Clothes and fashion
CHAMPLIN, Edward; Nero Reconsidered
GARTON, Charles; Sulla and the Theatre
HAY, Mark; The Colonization of the Ayahuasca Experience
HSU, Hua; Varieties of Ether: Toward a history of creativity and beef
PROBYN, Elspeth; Cannibal Hunger, Restraint in Excess
STAR, Christopher; How the ancient philosophers imagined the end of the world
TELUSHKIN, Shira; Meet Eva Frank: The First Jewish Female Messiah
38 notes
·
View notes