A mandatory class in Canada’s curriculum is Careers 10, in which the objective is to teach students the necessary competencies to find a career. We had a series of presentations on how to best accumulate wealth, with the overarching lesson of “How one can succeed in life.” These presentations were a great example of the negative impacts of the public school system on the creative mind.
The presenter, throughout the course of his mini lectures, talked of how one must live with the ideology of “delayed gratification,” where an individual must ignore the urge for current relaxation without rest to ensure future profit. The idea that one cannot rest at present (for they will accumulate greater rewards later) is used by capitalist productivity culture to justify current struggle. Numerous instances of this mindset remain in daily life. Study now; enjoy a class-free summer. Take the entry-level job; promotion is likely underway. Postpone retirement; why not earn some travel money? The challenge convinces us that after just one more essay, one more semester, one more year—the system will finally reward us.
Caught in the chasing of mechanical success, individuals risk stepping into a designed role as workers, rather than free thinkers. In this world, artistry will have been cast aside for a twelve-hour job paying minimum wage. Students without access to prestigious private institutions will be stuck in public schools that provide a “decent” education but lack the tailoring needed to stimulate scholarly rigor. Even so, the average person is privileged enough to afford this “decent” life, despite passion and life being disregarded in this battle of working to live. Of course, the punishment of failure, the cost of living, will pose the greatest motivator to all.
This proposes that success and contentment are reliant on two things: money and generational wealth, reinforcing that succeeding in life is measured by wealth instead of by happiness. If success is defined by wealth and wealth is defined by comparison to that of the ruling class, one can never reach true satisfaction. The desire to earn more, upheld by the guilt of not maximizing one’s time, causes a lifetime of discontent. This begs the questions: At what point is our need for acquisition satiated, if ever? Is delayed gratification truly the way to live? Is wealth everything?
As for my personal opinion, writing this allowed me to hone my critical thinking abilities, focusing largely on the reinforcement of subconscious messaging. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World proposed a society influenced synonymously to ours with the concept of hypnopaedia. With hypnopaedia, certain phrases are repeated thousands of times to individuals while they sleep. This subconscious programming causes individuals’ minds to wire into the pre-planned societal mindset of consumption. In our world, this is reinforced while we are awake in a daily repetition of how we must live to retire. Needless to say, no society should have the power to convince the masses that happiness must be earned, or that rest is a thing of the future rather than the present. However, modern technological and corporate solutions seem to avoid addressing this problem altogether, especially when doing so could threaten how they benefit from it.
Leave a Reply