Get To Work

https://www.planetcritical.com/p/get-to-work

«Why burning calories might save the world

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If you encounter the parent of a Western child these days—or a teacher, doctor, social worker—they’ll tell you the kids are fucked up. A friend of mine who’s a high school teacher in Scotland recently told me he has 12 year old students who are functionally illiterate but have managed to get by with the help of read-aloud functions on computers. The rest of his class cannot sit still for thirty minutes—he can no longer throw on a documentary towards the end of term to get some marking done because television no longer holds these kids attention.

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Last year, a deeply cynical person I know commented that the problem with people today is that they’re not tired enough. I laughed it off. But, over the months, I’ve returned to that hypothesis […] The technological revolution was meant to be socialist: With machines doing everything else, human beings were meant to do what they love. But we’re not.

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But we are burning more energy per capita than the entirety of human history combined—the problem is that it’s from other bodies, compressed under the Earth’s crust millions of years ago.

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So, yes, we’re not tired enough. We’re not tired enough because we’re burning through energy that isn’t ours, making a mockery of life by turning our own existence into that of consumption rather than expenditure. It’s why our kids can’t sit still.

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Of course that isn’t sustainable, not for our health nor Earth’s.

We’re not tired enough because we’re demanding trillions of other bodies do the work for us. Yet, that doesn’t make us happy or fulfilled or at ease because we’re not tired enough. Our bodies, like all other bodies, evolved to work (and what a miracle that we can experience physical fatigue after a day chewing over intellectual matter!) We were born to run hot, but our feverish demands on Earth have caused exactly that. She was never our body to burn and, unlike ours, she will burn up.»