I’m having those worries again. One of these days, the mothership is going to come back to collect me for a debriefing. They will say, “What have you learned about the people of this planet from 2 giga-seconds of living among them?” and I’ll have to reply, “Not a damned thing. Nothing about them makes any sense to me.”
Why don’t I have friends? Because I don’t make any effort to maintain friendships. Why am I not motivated to establish and maintain close friendships, and yet I regret not having them? I’m not bashful or anxious about dealing with other people, strangers or acquaintances, but I feel it’s just not worth the effort. It’s normal for an introvert to be drained rather than energized by dealing with people, but I’m almost always so disappointed by interactions with people who should be friends that I have to force myself to try again. This includes “business” interactions as well as, even more than “social” interactions.
I’m deeply unhappy, but I really don’t think I’m clinically depressed, in the sense that I would respond positively to antidepressant drugs. I am painfully aware that I have wasted my life because I’ve never been motivated to put any sustained effort into anything at all.
I’ve spent a lifetime absorbing information, but I’ve given back very little. I’ve never felt I was enough of an expert that my knowledge would be reliable, let alone sought after. But the world is full of (mis)information put out by people with a lot less knowledge than I have, and not necessarily a lot more ego. Why do I hide my light?
There’s an interesting idea here, presented primarily in the quotation from Kalecki from 1943. The idea is that “business leaders” want to be in control of unemployment — that’s the real point of supply-side economics — but Keynes showed how the government could actually control unemployment, if it dares. And since ten, the business community has been whining about lack of “confidence” as the cause of unemployment, whenever the government screws up (screws the people) and lets unemployment rise.
The War on Demand – NYTimes.com.
Paul Krugman says:
“It’s becoming clear to me that a substantial number of writers on economics find the whole idea that the economy can suffer because people are too thrifty, insufficiently willing to spend, deeply repugnant. I’m the sort of person who finds the notion that sometimes virtue is vice and prudence folly interesting; but it’s clear that a number of people find that notion just plain evil. The world shouldn’t be like that — and therefore it isn’t.”
Some people can’t help but see everything as a moral allegory. Some of those see most everything as evil (except themselves and people like themselves), but most of them just can’t see anything they regard as evil.
http://www.theawl.com/2011/01/the-most-emailed-new-york-times-article-ever
If you’re a regular reader of nytimes.com you’ll love this. If not, then, well, maybe you should be?
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