And seen it with my own eyes if I did not do that then all I ended up with
was just wishing I did. All because of something like a false fear!
Why get caught up in the fear mongering of some paranoid beliefs
and miss out of the best things of your life. Life does not grow in the dark
so being in the dark ages makes no growth! In life we all would be better
without the things that keep us in the dark. Or being a lone in the dark!
To me I see it best to have open conversations about things.
I see it as growth, happiness and all that makes life!
A Protocooperation, more of a Obligate versus facultative issue!
"Symbiotic relationships can be obligate, meaning that one or both of the
symbionts entirely depend on each other for survival. For example, in lichens,
which consist of fungal and photosynthetic symbionts, the fungal partners
cannot live on their own."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiosis
True and should be noted as it should be known anyway.
"No man is an island. No one is self-sufficient; everyone relies on others."
This saying comes from a sermon by the seventeenth-century
English author John Donne.
So being open and talking about it points to a better life!
We all could be lonely in our separate buildings thinking about
how our lives are, not looking at how they could be!
A Protocooperation would be irate and needed but you can't be
that way if you work to death not being open about things!
~~~~~The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death
Mary’s story looks different to
different people. Within the ghoulishly cheerful Lyft public-relations
machinery, Mary is an exemplar of hard work and dedication—the latter
being, perhaps, hard to come by in a company that refuses to classify
its drivers as employees. Mary’s entrepreneurial spirit—taking ride
requests while she was in labor!—is an “exciting” example of how
seamless and flexible app-based employment can be. Look at that hustle!
You can make a quick buck with Lyft anytime, even when your cervix is
dilating.
Lyft does not provide
its drivers paid maternity leave or health insurance. (It offers to
connect drivers with an insurance broker, and helpfully notes
that “the Affordable Care Act offers many choices to make sure you’re
covered.”) A third-party platform called SherpaShare, which some drivers
use to track their earnings, found, in 2015, that Lyft drivers in
Chicago net about eleven dollars per trip.
Perhaps, as Lyft suggests, Mary kept accepting riders while
experiencing contractions because “she was still a week away from her
due date,” or “she didn’t believe she was going into labor yet.” Or
maybe Mary kept accepting riders because the gig economy has further
normalized the circumstances in which earning an extra eleven dollars
can feel more important than seeking out the urgent medical care that
these quasi-employers do not sponsor. In the other version of Mary’s
story, she’s an unprotected worker in precarious circumstances. “I can’t
pretend to know Mary’s economic situation,” wrote
Bryan Menegus at Gizmodo, when the story first appeared. “Maybe she’s
an heiress who happens to love the freedom of chauffeuring strangers
from place to place on her own schedule. But that Lyft, for some reason,
thought that this would reflect kindly on them is perhaps the most
horrifying part.”
It does require a
fairly dystopian strain of doublethink for a company to celebrate how
hard and how constantly its employees must work to make a living, given
that these companies are themselves setting the terms. And yet this type
of faux-inspirational tale has been appearing more lately, both in
corporate advertising and in the news. Fiverr, an online freelance
marketplace that promotes itself as being for “the lean entrepreneur”—as
its name suggests, services advertised on Fiverr can be purchased for
as low as five dollars—recently attracted ire for an ad campaign called
“In Doers We Trust.” One ad, prominently displayed on some New York City
subway cars, features a woman staring at the camera with a look of
blank determination. “You eat a coffee for lunch,” the ad proclaims.
“You follow through on your follow through. Sleep deprivation is your
drug of choice. You might be a doer.”
Fiverr, which had raised
a hundred and ten million dollars in venture capital by November, 2015,
has more about the “In Doers We Trust” campaign on its Web site. In one video,
a peppy female voice-over urges “doers” to “always be available,” to
think about beating “the trust-fund kids,” and to pitch themselves to
everyone they see, including their dentist. A Fiverr press release about
“In Doers We Trust” states, “The campaign positions Fiverr to seize
today’s emerging zeitgeist of entrepreneurial flexibility, rapid
experimentation, and doing more with less. It pushes against
bureaucratic overthinking, analysis-paralysis, and excessive
whiteboarding.” This is the jargon through which the essentially
cannibalistic nature of the gig economy is dressed up as an aesthetic.
No one wants to eat coffee for lunch or go on a bender of sleep
deprivation—or answer a call from a client while having sex, as
recommended in the video. It’s a stretch to feel cheerful at all about
the Fiverr marketplace, perusing the thousands of listings of people who
will record any song, make any happy-birthday video, or design any book
cover for five dollars. I’d guess that plenty of the people who
advertise services on Fiverr would accept some “whiteboarding” in
exchange for employer-sponsored health insurance.
At
the root of this is the American obsession with self-reliance, which
makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to
death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is
evidence of a flawed economic system. The contrast between the gig
economy’s rhetoric (everyone is always connecting, having fun, and
killing it!) and the conditions that allow it to exist (a lack of
dependable employment that pays a living wage) makes this kink in our
thinking especially clear. Human-interest stories about the beauty of
some person standing up to the punishments of late capitalism are
regular features in the news, too. I’ve come to detest the local-news
set piece about the man who walks ten or eleven or twelve miles to
work—a story that’s been filed from Oxford, Alabama; from Detroit, Michigan; from Plano, Texas.
The story is always written as a tearjerker, with praise for the
person’s uncomplaining attitude; a car is usually donated to the subject
in the end. Never mentioned or even implied is the shamefulness of a
job that doesn’t permit a worker to afford his own commute.
There’s
a painful distance between the chipper narratives surrounding labor and
success in America and the lived experience of workers. A similar
conflict drove Nathanael West, in 1934, to publish the novel “A Cool Million,”
which satirized the Horatio Alger bootstrap fables that remained
popular into the Great Depression. “Alger is to America what Homer was
to the Greeks,” West once wrote. His protagonist in “A Cool Million,”
Lemuel Pitkin, is an innocent, energetic striver, tasked with saving his
mother’s house from foreclosure. A series of Alger-esque plot twists
ensue. But Pitkin, rather than triumphing, ends up losing his teeth, his
eye, his leg, his scalp, and finally his thumb. Morris Dickstein, in
his book “Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression,”
notes, “The novel ends with Lem as a vaudeville clown being beaten
nightly until he simply falls apart.” A former President named Shagpoke
Whipple gives a speech valorizing Pitkin’s fate, extolling “the right of
every American boy to go into the world and . . . make his fortune by
industry.” Whipple describes Pitkin’s dismemberment—“lovingly,”
Dickstein adds—and tells his audience that, through Pitkin’s hard work
and enthusiastic martyrdom, “America became again American.”
