Tara

“Work done off the paid job is looked down upon if not ignored. autonomous activity threatens the employment level, generates deviance, and detracts​ from the GNP...Work no longer means the creation of a value perceived by the worker but mainly a job, which is a social relationship. Unemployment means sad idleness, rather than the freedom to do things that are useful for oneself or for one's neighbour. An active woman who runs a house and brings up children and takes in those of others is distinguished from a woman who 'works,' no matter how useless or damaging the product of this work might be.”
― Ivan Illich, The Right to Useful Unemployment: And Its Professional Enemies

“The updated version of Descartes’s Cogito is ‘I am seen, therefore I am’ – and that the more people who see me, the more I am…”
― Zygmunt Bauman, Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity

“Honesty requires that we each recognize the need to limit procreation, consumption, and waste, but equally we must radically reduce our expectations that machines will do our work for us or that therapists can make us learned or healthy. The only solution to the environmental crisis is the shared insight of people that they would be happier if they could work together and
care for each other. Such an inversion of the current world view requires intellectual courage for it exposes us to the unenlightened yet painful criticism of being not only anti-people and against economic progress, but equally against liberal education and scientific and technological advance. We must face the fact that the imbalance between man and the environment is just one of several mutually reinforcing stresses, each distorting the balance of life in a different dimension. In this view, overpopulation is the result of a distortion in the balance of learning, dependence on affluence is the result of a radical monopoly of institutional over personal values, and faulty technology is inexorably consequent upon a transformation of means into ends”
― Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality

“...sometime in the late 1980s the neurotic was replaced, as a cultural type, by the depressive, who understands his unhappiness not in terms of conflict but rather in terms of mood. Mood is taken to be a function of neurotransmitters, about which there’s not much to say. Inarticulacy is baked into any description of the human being that we express in neuro-talk.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction