Anti Wage-Slavery Pro-Freedom Quotations Of The Week 1804-1806

I had whole spare summers when I was a teenager. Three spare months. No stated occupation whatsoever. Much of after-school was spare time too. I read, I wrote, I hung out with Jean and Shirley and Joyce, I moseyed around having thoughts and feelings, oh lord, deep thoughts, deep feelings… I hope some kids still have time like that. The ones I know seem to be on a treadmill of programming, rushing on without pause to the next event on their schedule, the soccer practice the playdate the whatever. I hope they find interstices and wriggle into them. Sometimes I notice that a teenager in the family group is present in body — smiling, polite, apparently attentive — but absent. I think, I hope she has found an interstice, made herself some spare time, wriggled into it, and is alone there, deep down there, thinking, feeling.
...
The opposite of spare time is, I guess, occupied time. In my case I still don’t know what spare time is because all my time is occupied. It always has been and it is now. It’s occupied by living.
Ursula K. LeGuin
[thanks to Maria Popova, Brain Pickings]

 The same situation can breed support for radical movements of the left. Poor job prospects for American thinkers during the Depression helped draw many into socialism or communism. More recently, the sociologist Ruth Milkman found that well-educated millennials were overrepresented among Occupy Wall Street activists. These young people had spent their lives diligently preparing to enter the knowledge economy and became disillusioned when, after the financial crisis, it all seemed to be crashing down.
Gray Matter
By NEIL GROSS SEPT. 30, 2017
New York Times

In our jobs and professions we have the experience of being special to a number of people. And much of our identity and sense of ourselves depends on that relationship. If we stop working, we find out how much we have depended on being so important to others.

But there’s another, not so obvious, dimension of being special: being distinguished in our misfortune or our misery. A victim is somebody special. I’m so unlucky, I’m so very ill, I have so much pain, that person really did me wrong and hurt me so much. Any one of these assertions may be true, but when we begin to build our identity on it, we’re in trouble. For instance, we can let a difficult childhood define our lives and control how we relate to others long after we have grown up. My suffering is unique. I had the worst childhood of anyone.
We are in Training to Be Nobody Special 

By Sandy Boucher

Dec 06, 2017

Tricycle