I think the central takeaway of this essay is dead wrong, you should aim for the exact opposite. The fewer labels or identities you have yourself, the more strongly you hold on to them and the more fragile your personality. If the only thing you identify yourself by is your job and that gets taken away from you in a downturn, never to return, what's left? A lot of people who are in that situation and don't have other selves to identify with struggle strongly. On the other hand, people who identify with more facets of what makes them them have a lot of options to fall back on. You're not only your job, but you're also a parent, a child, an athlete, a hobbyist, etc. Even if you stop being one of those things, you keep being all the rest, and that gives fortitude and resilience.
If your self-image includes the structure of the world around you, or the behavior of people other than yourself, you'll run into problems.
I enjoy working with computers. I happen to work at a particular company doing computer things. Only one of those is an innate "what makes me, me" thing. Even if computers didn't exist, I'd still probably tend to gravitate towards things that are fun for the same sorts of reasons.
And if you hit a physical or health issue that takes that away, or dramatically reduces the amount of time you can spend on it?
This isn’t hypothetical; I have worked with people who’ve had to quit this form of work for the following reasons: Carpal tunnel that prevented using keyboard and mouse, brain injury, neck injury that made it impossible to sit at a computer (or desk), long Covid and “brain fog”. I imagine that vision impairment might lead to the same.
If any of these were to happen to me, would I still have my sense of self? Are we more than our love of technology?
You say that, but it happens all of the time. Its immensely painful of an experience. Painters who lose their sight, musicians who damage their fingers, car lovers who get too old to drive... That's just the fragility of life and people deal with it in different ways. Some people overcome it, some don't. I think it's important to recognize that reality and still choose to love those things knowing full well it could all end tomorrow. Identity is composed of so many things, some we have control over, some not. Of course it's going to be a messy endeavour
I’m not suggesting that we should “pull back” from the things we love for fear of the potential pain of losing them. What I am suggesting is that the worth of a person is not in what they can do. Their identity should be more than the things they enjoy or are good at.
My grandmother is 100 years old. She has led an incredible life filled with all kinds of achievements. Her passion for reading, learning, languages and art, have all shaped me. She’s blind now, and basically deaf. She can no longer read, which is very painful for her (I can read to her when I visit). How much value does she still have? To me, as much value as she ever did.
I've imagined this future, and I did think of one possible workaround that may or may not be feasible: morse code. One of my motives for learning it is, you can "copy" morse code by any of your senses except taste. I've imagined where I may be blind, or deaf, or even both. As long as I have the sense of touch somewhere about my body at the bare minimum, and can move a finger, I could communicate via morse code. I know it sounds kinda stupid, but it's comforting to know I have that "last resort option" in my back pocket.
You would need someone who understands Morse to notice and interpret. The same dexterity can also operate a pen, and this is the option I have more often seen used.
Neither is likely to be a much richer channel than the other, I think.
I think you probably need more dexterity (and grip strength) for minimal successful communication with a pen than with Morse code, especially if you wind up trying to do both without visual feedback.
The odds of those around you noticing is something you have some power over, if you're thinking about it ahead of time.
All true, but a pen still can be legibly used in at least some such situations. I've seen it done.
I'm not saying not to plan around Morse, just that it's a little early to assume there must be no other hope - and always too early to place much faith in being able to exert control over circumstances where, more or less definitionally, this is not a reasonable thing to expect.
That probably sounds scary. I can't help that. Dying is a scary topic, I imagine likely much more so for actually doing it, which I as yet have not. But I do know some things about how to handle fear, and one is that it helps a lot when that doesn't come by surprise - when you don't have to start totally from scratch to build what equanimity is available.
Less so than any one specific response, what I'd focus on trying to prepare for is that. You can't really know what tools you will have available in such a moment. You can't really know you will have any. Whatever there is, though, you'll have an easier time to recognize and use for being able to better see past that fear.
Probably my loved ones, or a subset thereof, would make the effort to learn. Otherwise there's software that can parse it (so people can read what I send) and software that can produce it (so people can type words and generate morse code I can receive via whatever means). :)
This is way off in a tangent but that's kinda why I think a UBI won't lead to mass unemployment. So many people self identify with their work that it's almost always the first question when you're getting to know someone.
By the time I was old enough to work, I had recorded dozens of my own songs and made countless websites for fun. I made computer graphics and learned tons about computers and could fix them for all my friends and family. These were all forms of "work", valuable to others (to varying degrees), and I received zero payment for any of that. People like to do things, particularly things that benefit those they care about. Not everyone is like that, but we don't actually really need everyone to be like that, IMO.
Aside from the strong selection bias, you've also been raised in a culture that both works and values work.
Now imagine you're a third generation UBI recipient. Your parents never worked, and you're surrounded by people who don't even "work" in the way which you describe it.
At that point, I have very little hope, even for people predisposed to it like you.
>Your parents never worked, and you're surrounded by people who don't even "work"
I'm not sure that's a guaranteed future. Even today we offer subsistence living with welfare and food stamps, and nobody ever brags about not working because they're on the dole. Even if UBI is better than the current welfare system, it's not likely to be enough to support a middle class lifestyle. People will still work because they want to get ahead in life.
Yeah, this is why I still wear a KN95 mask everywhere. Losing my sharpness or ability to code and work deeply with computers would not only trash my career but utterly shatter a huge piece of my life. I'm acutely aware that one day the depthful involvement in tech (among other things I enjoy) may end, so I absolutely try to make the most of it and mitigate threats to it.
>> The fewer labels or identities you have yourself, the more strongly you hold on to them and the more fragile your personality.
Conversely, being beholden and holding onto identities that have no bearing on your success or direction in life which you believe does in fact determine those things seems equally dangerous, no?
Respectfully, I disagree. Every label or identity is yet another pigeonhole to be stuffed into and a thought-terminating cliche that reduces the complexity of one's life into an overly simplistic symbol which fails to represent the totality of one's being. Better to dispense with such coarse-grained oversimplifications and reject the notion of labelling selves entirely.
> You're not only your job, but you're also a parent, a child, an athlete, a hobbyist, etc.
You're actually none of those things. In the words of Alan Watts, [0]
The principal disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with
reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth, and our names
about ourselves, our ideas of ourselves, with ourselves.
You are neither a job, nor a parent, nor a child nor athlete nor any of these things. That which can be named and labelled is not reality; it enters into the sphere of representation and takes us a layer of abstraction away from the base reality of what you are, of which we cannot really speak and must treat in silence (see the Tao, or the Tetragrammaton).
We exchange these names of ourselves, ideas of ourselves, language describing ourselves, with others, hoping that the full reality of ourselves will be communicated, in whole and not in part, to others, who will actually see past the symbols and recognize the selves to which they point. In actuality they conflate the symbol and the self, the representation for the reality, falling victim to the deception of Baudrillard's simulacrum, of images that "mask and denature a profound reality."
Hence the injunction of the philosopher Kwaw to the daimios of Japan in Aleister Crowley's parable Konx Om Pax [1] to call themselves "the Synagogue of Satan, so as to keep themselves from the friendship of the fools who mistake names for things," while advocating not a "Satanist" way of life, but rather a Taoist one seeking the equilibration of opposites to achieve first inner personal harmony and then outer societal harmony.
A postmodernist would see the label "Satanist" and immediately conjure up images and notions of evil and "the adversary," confusing the name with the actual thing, the deeds and the philosophy of the synagogue, never bothering to inquire beyond the label and the name into the nature of the thing itself, letting their priors and biases make uninformed snap judgments for them. A modern instantiation of Kwaw's tactic can be found in The Satanic Temple, who advocates not for "evil" (whatever this word means) but for the advancement of rationality and reproductive rights. Yet this phenomenon extends far beyond The Satanic Temple and religion and extends to all of life more broadly, and this simplistic reduction of the world into one-word labels and mental filing cabinets is what lends to the exact same tribalism pg notes in his essay.
Ascribing labels to one's self limits your degrees of freedom by circumscribing your capabilities and characteristics within the bounds of the label. For if I am P, then I am not (not P) and immediately I have entered into a dualistic discourse of "me" and "not me" or of "self" and "other." Now you are beholden to a past, a history, and limited by that which you have identified with, rejecting what you are not yet but could at one point be. The very clinging to what scraps of "identity" one has accumulated around one's self is precisely what leads to this fragility of personality once those identities are forcibly taken away.
Ironically postmodern ideologies admit of "non-binary" sexualities that reject simplistic dichotomies and labels, but fail to extend this mode of thinking to other domains of life that would benefit from the same treatment; instead they insist on fractionating all of society into discretized identity groups and factions instead of recognizing the unique individuality of each human being, failing to acknowledge that continua instead of hard dichotomies exist and reality is not so cleanly divided. These ideologies purport to have moved beyond stereotypes and assuming everyone had the same lived experiences growing up, and yet continues to do exactly that with simplistic filing away of people into labelled cabinets of "identity."
All abstractions are leaky, including abstractions of self. Postmodern (Facebook onwards) social media has enabled a new era of idolatry; where once we erected statues and idols in a vain attempt to capture the ineffability of gods, now we publish online profiles and reels in a vain, narcissistic attempt to capture the ineffability of the self.
Crowley against Crowley? Good grief, this is why no one who knows anything has any use for that damned old self-promoter of a fraud. People read him as if he had anything to say other than on how to impress bored socialites, and here we end up with somebody who doesn't even seem to realize he has constructed an argument against postmodernism that requires a postmodern reading to work.
You'd be happier with the neo-Orthodox, I suspect, some of whom at least are not total charlatans. You should read Paul Kingsnorth in particular, who gives a much better account of the ideology you and he share; I would not normally make such a recommendation, but you'll believe what you believe in either case, and at least from him you'll see how a consistent account of it may be given.
