During the first year of the pandemic, there was a great deal of squealing about suicide. Turns out the squealers, as usual, were exactly wrong.
I have a friendly acquaintance who quit his job to teach the Alexander Technique online. He had a good paying consultant gig. First, for a month, he basically collapsed. Nine months later, he looks like a different person.
I just came across an older video of mine while I was still at work: I look tired and stressed, my face is showing some kind of burden
contrast this to the podcast I did with @tasshinfogleman yesterday…
this is absolutely wild to be able to see looking back
cc @visakanv pic.twitter.com/NMjTdlPet1
— Michael Ashcroft (@m_ashcroft) October 20, 2021
Daily life in our societies is essentially slavery. We spend most of the day doing what we are told, when we are told — things we would never do if we didn’t need the money, because without it we would wind up on the street.
For children, it is little different: School is training for work. Sit down, speak only when given permission, do what your’re told, the way you’re told to do it. Don’t even use the bathroom without permission.
Once the school or work day is over, we have a few hours, mostly, to do things like eat, wash, commute, and take care of family members — with perhaps a few hours of entertainment, usually something passive.
If we’re lucky, we get two days off a week, one of which most people spend on chores.
Our entire lives are oriented around doing what our masters tell us, when they tell us, in the way they want, and, if we refuse (unless we were born rich or are very lucky), we suffer.
So it’s no surprise that when we got a good period off from work or school, suicide rates dropped EVEN during a pandemic.
There was a plague, but people were still less likely to kill themselves than during ordinary work periods.
Wage slavery and school are just a description of everyday life for most people and almost any break from it, even due to a plague, is a relief.
I particularly find ridiculous all the adults who seem to have forgotten how happy most children were when school ended and summer break happened. School was and is, for most people, a lot less pleasant than “no school.” Not because of the subject matter learning (what little there is), but because the real teaching at school isn’t centered on subject matter, it’s centered on “how to be a good little slave so you’ll slave well for the bosses in the future.”