Corporations Control Our Free Time

This is a brilliant piece on how corporations control the tempo of our lives while simultaneously giving us the feeling of control.

A few highlights:

• When your entire day is taken up with work, you overvalue your free time and tend not to spend time doing the essentials like walking, mediating, exercising, reading, writing, etc.

• You also tend to overspend during these times because you feel like a rat let out of a cage.

• Overspending is part of the equation, because if you’re not doing that then the economy will suffer.

Brilliant analysis.

In brief, the corporate world manufactures a culture of desire so that people will perpetually be unhappy. This way they’ll think the only way to fix that is to get a full-time job and buy things.

It’s genius, really.

His conclusion is also smart. The goal probably shouldn’t be for us to disconnect and become hermits. But we should be thinking about what desires are being pushed onto us, and how they can be rejected and replaced with our own.

We need to learn to want less. We need to learn to minimize and focus on creation instead of consumption as the source of happiness.