Serena Dandini (photo by Gianmarco Chieregato).
Qhen I was in college in the 70s few of my friends really cared about their future. Or rather we wanted to change the future all together and for this we worked very hard, sometimes – given the consequences – a bit at random, but nono one was seriously distressed about choosing a job because we looked optimistically towards a future which we imagined certainly better.
There was then as now the scourge of unemployment but we were convinced that we would do what we liked and were good at. And so she sailed somewhat recklessly in a universe that was changing but not in the direction we had hoped.
Today the perception of the new generations has completely changed. Just as the words precariousness, future and work have taken on a completely different meaning.
To put a full stop on this thorny topic, a beautiful essay has come out that I recommend if you want to make a profound but never boring reflection: it is about But who makes me do it? How work deceived us: the end of the spell by Andrea Colamedici and Mara Gancitano (HarperCollins).
“But who makes me do it? How work deceived us: the end of the spell” by Andrea Colamedici and Mara Gancitano (HarperCollins).
For those unfamiliar with them, the author and authoress are writers, philosophers and creators of Tlon, a strange wonderful creature that brings together a publishing house, a library-theater and a school of philosophy. Their talent is to be able to interpret and help us understand the spirit of the times: an increasingly capricious and difficult to decipher divinity in the confusion of our contemporaneity.
Also with this book they manage, with a language accessible to all, to reflect on how work has turned into an asphyxiating prisonin which we have often locked ourselves up voluntarily.
The post-Covid era that promised a new quality of life has enslaved us even more of electronic devices that endlessly expand our availability and the supremacy of an unbridled neoliberalism has forced us to accumulate jobs and odd jobs in order to survive by reducing our daily life to hell.
In addition, the decline of a true meritocracy risks turning our dreams into dead-end streets. Here then the question arises: “But who makes me do it?”. But above all: “Is it possible to change course and rethink the work from scratch?”.
If not all the answers you certainly will find in this enthralling wise unpublished reflections, indispensable in this historical moment to re-imagine a future on a human scale.
All articles by Serena Dandini
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