Abstraction and Control

I’ve been thinking about cleaning house versus organizing. I get energized when I organize the house. I can feel myself gaining control, building new possibilities, clearing up roadblocks. Organizing feels good. Cleaning house feels less good. Big cleans, like a formal spring cleaning elicit similar feelings to organizing. But the daily drudgery of house cleaning is not inspiring or energizing. It’s just something that needs to be done, and will need to be done again tomorrow. It is never done, you can’t get ahead of it. It just is.

I think for many of us, too much of our day job is the drudgery of house cleaning. Too little is comparable to the energizing organizational work. Too little tells us we are making progress. We put in time at our day jobs. They will be there tomorrow. They never get done. We can’t finish things early and take a rest. We don’t accomplish anything accept arbitrary metrics that don’t mean anything.

And that’s a problem. We need a life that is more accomplishment. We need a life that is more control. We need a life that gives us satisfaction. There is no point in putting in time when nothing is accomplished. Even a medieval peasant had more job satisfaction than a modern wage slave. They sowed in the spring and reaped in the fall. They built up enough to get through the winter. They had a cycle that made sense. They had a cycle where there was a direct connection between their efforts and their daily needs.

Our actions are almost entirely abstracted from our daily needs. We put in time at a job. We get tokens in exchange for selling our time. We use those tokens to obtain our daily needs. The abstraction makes control seem illusion and satisfaction seem out of reach. We need to connect our efforts to our needs. We need to retake control.