The sickle said: "The leeks are harvested collectively every ten years. After the leeks are harvested, they must grow vigorously and grow tall and wait for the next ten years to be harvested, instead of lying flat."
✓Improve mental quality = anti-strike ability, accept and adapt to social changes.
✓Increased emotional intelligence = willingness to let go of the past and reinvent yourself.
✓Maintain the ability to learn for life.
These are certainly good traits to improve your chances of survival.
But,
1. The difference between a 20-year-old’s learning ability and a 50-year-old’s learning ability can’t be solved by something like “mental toughness”.
✓It is more practical to plan a social system that is more in line with human nature.
2.It’s easy for rich people to think about changing jobs, because it’s easy for rich people to do anything.
If this person is still paying mortgages and raising children at the age of 50, he should find out what is wrong with these ideas.
Maybe he could just buy a chip and put it in his head! But what about us?
3.There are all kinds of scam tutorials on the market, especially compulsory education schools. Those place waste us huge of time and money. (Reference: 《Early Retirement Extreme: A Philosophical and practical Guide to Financial Independence》)
I suddenly feel that we (young people) are the soil in the greenhouse, not the flowers. The flowers in the greenhouse are politicians (Those vested interest born with a golden spoon). They think that their success depends on themselves, but it is not.
Our parents (ordinary people) worked so hard to make the soil fertile. They were forced to survive and unconsciously terrorize their children. We were fed and trampled at the same time. (That’s why I think we are like soil rather than flowers).
In the process of struggle and being trampled, in reincarnation, all the nutrients we have accumulated are plundered. Our parents think that what they have planted is hope, but they don’t know that hope is the most terrifying thing.
The lock-in system of society
1.Educate
2.Employment
3. Consumerism
4.Personal debt finance
5.Retirement system
Our entire educational process is to help us write a resume that we use to become a qualified social animal. We are taught to be disciplined, and what we learn about so-called problem-solving is to use fixed methods and steps to solve problems for which there are already established answers.
In ancient society, an individual should have learned core survival skills such as how to cook, hunt, plant, build houses, and make clothes when they reach adulthood. And we moderns come out of school with hardly any core survival skills. The only option we had was to work on the schedule that was given to me and outsource the problem of survival through consumption.
All we have learned is how to be a qualified social animal, and our diploma is this certificate. The increasing demand for diplomas in society has led to more and more universities to provide diplomas. Universities will lower their admissions standards to expand enrollment, while continually raising tuition fees. People are blinded by the so-called liberal approach of colleges and universities, believing that this is giving more people a chance to succeed. But if you think about it carefully, the so-called lenient entry and strict exit is actually the principle pursued by all scams.
Institutionalization is to make people adapt to and ultimately rely on a series of rules designated by others. Eventually, individuals lose their self-awareness and can only rely on this system to survive. The specialization of the job further locks you in. Today’s jobs are all about professionalism. This is a way to improve efficiency for enterprises, but it is a cost-increasing thing for workers. When you specialize, you spend most of your time learning and increasing your skills in that specialization. Your other skills are not developed, which creates 3 problems:
1. Personal careers are at great risk.
Job specialization is the equivalent of turning each of us into a screw in a machine. This screw can only be used on a specific part. Once you lose your job for some reason, you can only find a job in this subdivision because you don’t have other professional skills. Then if the advancement of technology makes your major disappear, then you may be a waste. If you change careers, you will face huge learning costs.
2. The cost of living has increased substantially.
Because you don’t have other skills, then your various needs must be solved by others through consumption.
3. Specialization leads to greater competition.
Professionals can only choose jobs that correspond to their majors. Then many people with similar skills have to compete for the same position. Since everyone has similar skills, it is something other than this skill that is ultimately used to decide the outcome. For example, your interview skills, whether you are willing to curry favor with leaders, and whether you are willing to take the initiative to work overtime, this is the involution in the workplace.
Productivity is a black hole that makes you sink deeper and deeper:
Although companies are updating technology every year to improve productivity, your hours may not decrease but may increase. Because only by turning the majority of people into social animals, can the huge accumulation of wealth of the few be satisfied, and this also reflects the essence of capitalist society.
When our social productivity reaches a certain level, the products and services produced will reach a balance with people’s needs. However, if the production efficiency is further improved, this balance will be broken, and the production output will exceed the consumption. At this time, there are two ways to rebalance. The first is to reduce the hours of work, increase the time of rest, the more productive, the less time we work. This is obviously not what the capitalists want to see. The second way is to increase demand by stimulating consumption. From a production economy to a consumption economy. At this point, consumerism was born.
Consumerism is really about reshaping values. Advertising is a propaganda tool for consumerism, a means of brainwashing. Advertising is less about the specific function of the product, and more about the stimulation and suggestion of human desire instinct, such as: identity, status, wealth, image, health. The impact of advertising on us is a deep psychological one, constantly reshaping our values and self-perceptions, selling the so-called image of success and the so-called way of life. And the ultimate goal of all this is to make us have more desires, and mistake these desires as necessities, so as to achieve more consumption. At the same time, the price of products has been increasing, and finally we can’t afford them, so we have to It doesn’t matter if you can’t afford it, you can go into debt, use credit cards, pay in installments, take out loans. Almost all major purchasing decisions of the contemporary generation are made through debt.
In any society, personal finance options for office workers are quite rare. There are two types of financial management options available to office workers. The first is the investment and financial management products that banks and investment insurance companies sell to you as commodities. The bottom line of any financial product is not to make money for you, but to make money for the people who sell you your investments. Your interests do not come first. You give money to someone else, and you pay him a commission whether you win or lose. Such a bizarre thing is taken for granted by us.
The second type of investment and wealth management products are the so-called social security funds and endowment insurance. The essence of any social security fund pension insurance is a Ponzi scheme, and its existence requires endless successors behind it. So, as soon as the workforce shrinks for the foreseeable future, the government starts to panic. Those who can introduce immigrants engage in immigration, and those who are unwilling to engage in immigration lie to you to have children. If you carefully analyze the capital flow of a typical working class, you will be horrified. When your salary has not yet arrived, part of it has already been taken by the government to pay taxes. Even if you charge too much and finally get it back to you, no interest will be given to you.
While you are withholding taxes by the government, a portion of your funds are forced into so-called retirement funds, social security funds, unemployment insurance, etc.
This society assumes that you do not have any ability to manage your own investments. He needs to help you manage. And these investments of yours are put into special accounts, you can’t touch them, you have to wait until the retirement age they give you to use these funds. When the money you use for retirement is controlled by others, and they extend the retirement age, you have no right to speak.
Also, it’s a question of whether or not you will live to receive your pension. When you are old you will find that a cycle is completed. When you were young, you were sent to kindergarten and nursery by your parents to be institutionalized, and when you were old, you were sent to a nursing home by your children to complete your institutionalized life. You spend most of your life consuming to make money for others. In the last stage of your life, you have to spend all your savings to see a doctor and still let others make your money. This is the life that the social animal can foresee.
This is a cycle where a consumer is locked. So, how should you break the game as a laborer? The answer is to gradually decouple from this locked system.
The tyranny of merit
對於成功的想法 來自一種看似吸引人的原則。 如果每個人都有平等的機會， 那麼成功者就應該獲得獎賞。 這是功績體制理想的核心。 當然在實際面上， 我們離這樣的理想還很遙遠。(請看：耗時15年，走訪18國，多位科學家揭示最殘酷社會真相：我們為何無法擺脫貧窮？ [Unsolved Mystery Stories | Xiaowu])
但是問題不僅在於我們未能達到我們所宣稱的功績體制原則。 而是這樣的理想本身就有缺陷。 它有一個黑暗面。 功績主義會侵蝕公共利益。 這會導致成功者的傲慢， 而使失敗者蒙羞。 它鼓勵成功者去深信他們成功的事實， 忘記幫助他們前進的運氣和好運。 而且讓他們開始輕視那些運氣比他們差、 資格條件比他們差的人。
即使全球化加劇了不平等以及停滯的薪資， 全球化的支持者為勞動者提供了一些令人振奮的建議。 「如果你想在全球的經濟中 競爭並且獲得勝利， 那麼就去念大學。」 「你賺多少錢取決於你學習什麼。」 「如果你嘗試就可以成功。」 這些菁英忽略了這當中隱含的羞辱。 如果你不去念大學， 如果你沒在這個新經濟中發展， 那麼你的失敗就是你自己造成的。
所以我們應該怎麼做？ 我們需要重新思考公民生活的三個層面。 大學所扮演的角色、 工作的尊嚴， 以及成功的意義。
鼓勵人們去念大學是件好事。 為那些負擔不起的人提供更多的機會， 這麼做會更好。 但是這並不是解決不平等的方法。 應該少放些心力去叫大家武裝自己僅為了功績體制下的鬥爭， 而是放更多心力創造更好的生活。
以上中文內容來自：The tyranny of merit | Michael Sandel — YouTube
