I just finished a rather bizarre "interview" for a remote employment job. Using Microsoft Teams, I answered a list of canned questions posed to me through the application's chat function, trying to behave as if I was having a conversation with a live person. I imagine that this was someone's definition of "artificial intelligence". To be sure it was a less-stressful way to do an employment interview, but it is starkly indicative of what I could expect from a job from this and frankly most organizations - a rather thoughtless and mechanized exchange of my time and marketable skillset for money.

I have been doing this time-to-money exchange for many years now, accepting that this was my lot in life. I began doing it at the age of sixteen, working as a doorman at a movie theater. I worked my way through a string of somewhat low-skill service jobs and, upon marriage, went to college to qualify for some sort of better life. I worked to start a business (running a child care center), but we ran out of money and loans and goodwill for a man doing women's work before it could get off the ground. This was easily remedied by using my expanded "qualifications" to get jobs that my college degree in Home Economics was useful for. Once such post-college pink-collar jobs got boring, I was put onto some off-shore work in oil exploration by a friend and I turned what was once a computer/electronics hobby into lucrative paying technical work. Except for a few wanderings back into pink labors like school-teaching, I took a succession of technical jobs and ended up working primarily for the academy and government. I was all quite profitable and I was often contributing to a government pension fund.

So here I am in my mid-fifties and I draw a small pension for all of the years I worked for my state's education system. I walked away from my highest paying job yet just a few weeks ago, tired of the institutionalized government work-world that I had sapped money from for much of the past several years. Although I have put out my resume to find my next "situation", I am far less than halfhearted about it, to my wonderful wife's chagrin.

I was up very, very early and took the time to read a bit from John Taylor Gatto's subversive magnum opus: The Underground History of American Education which is always good for stirring the juices of underlying angst for institutional-ism. Gatto makes one point (among many) that, as a society, we entrust expensive battering rams called vehicles to teenage "dolts" as a matter of course and the world still seems illogically to spin in service to the idea that most people are far more capable and resourceful than we give ourselves credit for. As a corollary to this, most of us fall, far too timidly, into the trap of being wage-earners in modern voluntary slavery to others.