Friday, June 22, 2018

Zero-Sum Life

It's a Zero-Sum Life, there's no two ways about it, Bub. You come in with nothing and you leave with nothing. And that's fine. Every minute is zero sum - it's here, it's gone. We sell our time, most of it, anyway. We work for someone else (whether you're punching a clock or running your own business, you're working in service of someone else), we absorb content that's riddle with advertising messages (selling our eyeballs to marketers, who are selling their time to sell our time to others who are selling their time to make something to sell to us for the money we made selling our time to someone else), and of course we sell our time to our kids, our friends, our family, our community, etc...

Sure, there's learning, selling our time essentially back to ourselves to become better and more effective at selling pieces of our lives to others. We learn about the wonderful discoveries of others who were learning things in their great endeavor of selling themselves to others, and we become more productive salesmen of our own time. And we think there may be a few of the super-wealthy who can opt out, but are they not constantly selling their time to promote benefits of their gilded-cage lifestyle? Hell, right now I'm selling my time to you - the time it takes to write this, I sell that to you - you might enjoy how great a writer I am or endure how terrible, I'm selling you this content in exchange for your attention and the time it takes you to read it, or maybe you give up and just stop here -

"Ok, so if it's all zero-sum," you ask, "what's the point." Excellent question. Is ours the task of furthering the Human Endeavor? Maybe. Sounds nice, has an egalitarian optimism to it. But what's that for? The end game is, it seems, that we as humans reach that pivotal point of Utopia. That moment where humanity is free from the chains of fate, chance, the gruel of life, pain, suffering... the stuff of being human. In such a world, the underpinnings of what we all live by just fall away - capitalism and wealth, time, health, politics and class, lifestyle, and conflict all become obsolete. Happiness becomes the final capital.