House of Eratosthenes

Twenty years blogging. My thoughts today are about the relationship between blogs, and work. So often, I have missed opportunities to do the first of those two, because the second one got in the way. Gotta keep paying those bills.

Work. Let’s think about that.

A quote often attributed to Thomas Jefferson is “I am a great believer in luck, and find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”

This is where people get derailed, and start running off down the bunny trail of “Did he really say that?” But I’m more concerned about the spirit behind the letter. Do you get more luck when you do more work?

I have learned, over the last twenty years, about people’s reaction to blogs: They, too have ideas about the relationship between those, and work. There is this unfounded premise that the work a person does, added up to the volume of bloviating they do online, equals k. In other words, it’s a seesaw. People who work, don’t blog, and people who blog, don’t work. It’s quite popular. So popular, in fact, that if you want to fool people into thinking you’ve been working hard, the first step is to not blog; don’t say anything or do anything. And what do we say when we’re caught languishing, being quiet, inactive wallflowers? “Sorry, I’ve been incredibly busy.”

The louder your are, the less work you must have been doing. Quiet people doing all the work.

The truth, I have learned over the years by watching and listening, is closer to the opposite.

Twenty Years We have rampant inflation still, that the Biden administration would like to blame on external factors. “Supply chain issues” and such. Which in turn come from the China virus they won’t allow anyone to call the China virus. Ah…they’re not entirely wrong, but what is that? People were “sheltered in place,” ordered to stay home…and then allowed to stay home. Death of the workplace. They all gathered around the home swimming pool, or the video game console, maybe with a “work laptop” or maybe not, and they “worked.” Meanwhile the government sent them checks.

These were not the bloggers. The bloggers, by and large, were blogging in protest of this. Rather ineffectively.

When did gas go up 40% in price?

When did the price of milk, eggs and butter — double?

When did the public debt swell?

We, as a nation — as the civilized half of the planet, in fact — didn’t work. And in the aftermath, we didn’t have very good luck. Here we are closing out 2024, and our dollars are weak. They don’t buy very much. You don’t work, you don’t get “paid.” Sure you can take home as many of our arbitrary money units as you did before, even “earn” yourself some increases. But the value isn’t there for us, because we, as a whole, weren’t there adding value for each other.

“Raises have not kept pace with inflation,” the news repeats over and over. Right. No work, no pay.

It is truly marvelous that this late in the game, in the digital age, what we call “communism” remains geographically contiguous. Eastern Europe is more steeped in communism than Europe overall, and Europe overall is much more into it than the United States. But we still need to worry about “the spread of communism.” It’s just like a puddle of something someone spilled on a kitchen floor; swelling. The collectives are assimilating more organisms into it — looking for someone to do all the work. The people who are already within, haven’t been doing it. Not because they’re lazy. But because the incentives have been removed. Some would argue that’s the definition of lazy. But, being human, just try living with the incentives removed for a decade or so. Try living with punishment for working.

Communism, like progressivism and Satan, has to keep changing its name, and for much the same reason as those other two: For it to accomplish what it wants to do, it can’t afford to be seen by the populace at large, as destructive an agent as it truly is. It’s the same story over and over again: Everyone understands their continuing survival depends on work, and everyone expects someone else to be doing all of it.

And then nobody does it.

And then our “luck” turns bad, and scarce.

There’s another quote that addresses this directly, one we have caught on video: “Socialist governments…always run out of other people’s money.” Margaret Thatcher.

This isn’t complicated at all. “Inflation” is simply a fancy name for what we should fully expect to be seeing in the aftermath of collective sloth. You present money to buy a thing; what is that? “Here is a dollar. It represents work I did.” That’s what you’re saying when you buy things, right? Oh. A dollar. “Work,” pffft. Right after we were all getting paid by the government to lounge around the swimming pool, participating in “zoom” meetings, and then heading inside to towel off and play video games. Tell you what; you got another one of those? If you do, then we can haggle, otherwise off with you.

And that’s inflation.

Individuals may rightly protest: Unfair! I worked as hard during the China virus debacle as I did before. Harder, even! And they’re right. But that’s the cost of living in a collective. The collective is lazy, and endures the consequences of being lazy; YOU are lazy. Unfair? Absolutely. You might have been working your ass to the bone. You might be a first-responder who’s been saving others. It’s the height of unfairness. That’s why we don’t like it.

Blame the people who have been saying something about it? “They’ve been blogging so that must mean they’re not doing any work!”

My twenty years have taught me many things, and that one thing above & before all the others: This premise is off course by about 180 degrees.

Generally speaking, experience has shown it’s the people who were quiet about the whole thing, who cashed the checks, and spread the suntan oil and continued with the napping and the video game playing and the lounging. And subsequently, were the most shocked that prices had skyrocketed as the dollar, that token of “work I got done to buy the thing,” lost its value. It wasn’t their fault. They thought they were being good citizens of the country and of their various employing entities. They went to wherever they were led. When they were led to the swimming pool and the video game console, they obliged, and when they were given checks for being idle, they cashed them.

Blogging is not work. But, it is “If you see something, say something.” And if you’re working, or trying to get work, struggling to figure out how you can contribute to society productively, you’re going to be seeing quite a lot, and much of it will have been, these past two decades, very, very wrong. That doesn’t make bloggers better people than non-bloggers. I would never go that far with these observations.

But I will say, if someone’s been existing these last twenty years, not seeing anything wrong; there must be something way heap busted about them. It’s been a rather goofy stretch of time, hasn’t it? We may disagree about what policies were good or bad, or who came up with the problems and who came up with the solutions. But we should all agree it hasn’t exactly been a steady hand on the tiller of the ship of state. Blogging doesn’t fix that. But silence comes with a guarantee no one will fix anything. And no guarantee at all — contrary to popular opinion — that someone’s getting real work done.

People who’ve been getting the work done, almost always, will have something to say about it. We should make a point of listening to them.

I never really thought of it as you put it: blogging versus ‘work’. That’s an interesting perspective and the more I think about, I can see where folks might think that.

But of course blogging is a LOT of work. Heck just keeping a journal is a lot of work.

I’m not a blogger really but I used to do some writing as a break from my ‘work’ as a way to clear my head or do something different for a while.

Thanks for the perspective. I’ll keep it in mind if I ever want to get serious about writing/blogging.
- brewdaddy | 11/17/2024 @ 18:13

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Twenty Years Blogging, and I’m Thinking About WorkTuesday, November 12th, 2024

Twenty Years Blogging, and I’m Thinking About Work
Tuesday, November 12th, 2024