You’re just a piece of a heartless shitty machine that makes money

Found this old gem in Pieter Levels’ blog, and I thought to share it for everyone here.

We don’t have to have fast food workers. We don’t have to have people who work shit jobs. We don’t have to. We just need to figure out how to restructure society, so everybody somehow or another plays a part, has something to contribute, has something to share. I mean, that’s what a real society supposed to be like. I give you some coconuts, you give me some fish, you know, we make a deal. And you do it back and forth and left and right and when there’s nothing to contribute, then you start looking at the president to get you jobs, “we need jobs”, so instead of something to contribute, you just find something to do with your time and then it becomes about doing that more then about finding something to contribute.

So society gets wrapped around becoming a part of a machine. Society, instead of becoming a bunch of individuals that are expressing themselves in unique ways, and everybody sort-of borrows and shares and sells this and you sell that and we all sort of figure out how we can contribute in a society, we got sidetracked and diverted into these boxes that they call companies and corporations. And we got stuck into these containers, we call cubicles or offices, and we got forced into this system.

So our time instead of it being invested in making pottery, or fixing cars, or doing something where you have a passion or you have some sort of a connection to, instead of that, you have sold your life to sit in a box and work for a machine, an un-caring machine that demands productivity. It doesn’t understand you, it doesn’t want to understand you. It has a bunch of very strict things in order to keep the humor at a minimum in the office, just in case one of you fuckheads says some stupid sex-jokes, that gets them sued, and they have to give somebody a million dollars. So get it together and this is your life now: no natural behavior, everybody’s is wearing clothes they don’t want to wear, everybody’s showing up doing something they don’t want to do, they have no connection to. That’s the problem with our society.

And then what’s the reward for all this stuff? Go ahead, go home and get a big TV. You go home and you get a shiny belt buckle. You gonna get a nice purse. You gonna get shoes that you couldn’t afford last week. You get that dream car. And every week we’re chasing down this new object, and every week, we’re trying to fill this hole, this sad shadow of a life that we’ve been left with after work. That you work eight hours a day, plus commuting, and then you’re like this. Sigh. Sigh.

And that’s your life. That’s your real fucking life. All that other stuff is not your life anymore. All that other stuff is work. And most of us have committed to that. I know you (Brian Redban) have been in there before, and I know I’ve been in there before. And we understand that it’s a trap, because we got out of it. But for the people that are in it, a lot of times, they don’t even understand it’s a trap. They just think it’s a good job. They think they’ve got dental. “I’m doing really good, I’ve got my own parking spot that’s got my name on it”. You’re just a piece of a heartless shitty machine that makes money.

— Joe Rogan (on The Joe Rogan Experience #389)