Work Becomes the Idol

Scattered thoughts on Steve Jobs written a few years ago when 2 biopics were planned and I was hearing a lot of love for the late Apple guru at my job.

The man who created a phone where you can talk to yourself, the man perhaps most responsible for crippling consciousness to the point where teens now human sacrifice themselves en masse so that they don’t have to pay attention to driving for five minutes.  And then people praise him for his vision. The religious leader of capitalism, the Christ figure who delivered us from ourselves, who plugged us directly into the matrix.

His Stanford Commencement speech is porn for the privileged, inspirational claptrap as selfie, a passed hors d’oeuvres tray of 140 character bits wisdoms. The ideology of the gilded class is that everything is fine, that you only need to follow your dreams and believe in yourself and things will work out for you the way it statistically is almost guaranteed to not.  They preach this with such vigor, you could almost buy that they believe it. Maybe they even do. It doesn’t really matter. The important part is that we don’t believe it, but that we act like we do.  If we believed it, we’d be wildly disappointed.  We’d be a country suffering from pandemic levels of depression and anxiety that our dreams were not coming true.  But that’s not us, we’re America the bold and the beautiful, with dicks and guns so big that other countries deliver their talent to us, prop up our faux democracies, negotiate peace treaties on our terms, and praise our computer prodigies for their ingenuity.

We believe in the dream. We follow it, and when we filter down the most pragmatic dreams to the one standing in front of us putting food on our table and keeping the disgusting habits of the underclasses out of our way, we realign our dreams.  We make the dream what we have, what we own.  Every knock to our stability, every caveat, every cancer cell and its corresponding invoice, is the price paid.  Because dreams aren’t just dreamed, they’re purchased.  Those who can afford it can have great ones, but the rest of them at least get a piece. America the great bargain. 

The dream of course is finding satisfaction in work.  No one dreams of finding satisfaction in love, in family, in leisure.  Those things are naturally pleasurable. You don’t have to dream them, they happen. Work becomes the idol, living in praise of work, in praise of Jobs.

They’d have you believe that we’re still in the garden and the snake is selling something at the Apple Store, the best-selling item of all time, a narrative, an autobiography, an i.  iDream.  & iDream.  &iDream.