Living someone's dream.

"It is not life that is a dream; it is death that is a dream. Stranger still, it is not your dream; it is someone else’s."

Hola,

How much of someone else's dream are you living right now? I can't stop relating this to our relationship with labour. It comes as a disappointing surprise how normalised it is to invest our productive time into making someone else's dream happen. Life is what happens when you are not working. As opposed to labour as a triggering factor for developing social relations, when it is reduced to barely economic achievements, this is a proof that somewhere this went completely wrong. One can frame this situation to be more bearable. The more your work relates to your values, the easier it gets to justify your decisions.

However, it doesn't reduce the risk that the working class live with, especially for the ones who need to work double shifts, or more to meet month ends. As has been proven during the current pandemic, as soon as the economy slowed down and the feeling of uncertainty spread, the first decision from the companies whose dreams we helped to make come true, was to reduce our working hours or in many cases terminate our contracts. In healthy economies, the state managed to come with temporary solutions to reduce the harm that was caused to the economy. It wasn't the case for everyone, in the Global South it meant, as the quote says "living". The problem with being "forced to live" is that real life for most means hunger. Thus, far from living a dream.

One is being forced to rethink if living means achieving something. One is being forced to rethink that dreams can become true. So far, just being able to live with dignity, I think we can all agree with this, is already our common dream. Still, what needs to be rethought here is: what's the goal of achieving a capital-only driven dream?

Find here a list of things I found worth sharing from last week:

1. Read. How nationalists in China are silencing feminists, or just any accusation on sexual harrasment by blocking their Weibo accounts.
2. Laugh. At these American anti-maskers who are considering wearing a mask to protect themselves against the vaccinated.
3. Play. Berlin Flat Quest and get a sense of how difficult it is to find a flat in Berlin. Did you know that rent prices have almost double since 2011? (Thanks Tania for sharing the link with me!). I also found Code Tycoon. In this game you are "junior developer at a small company, it’s up to you to transform a small business into a global powerhouse while grappling with endless meetings, bumbling co-workers, denial of service attacks, and aggressive competitors". I really like how these two game have turned frustrations into an amazing product!
4. Learn. How much Facebook is willing to share what they know about you with this smart ad campaign made by Signal.
5. Visit. The Disgusting Food Museum in Sweden.
6. Admire. Nathan w. Pyle's work. He is the author of one of my favourite comics: Strange Planet.
7. Reflect."Working remotely for the last year has revealed just how much of office culture is accidental, arbitrary, and sexist".
8. Aww♥️. This was me this rainy week in Berlin (Thank you Annika for the meme!)

Thanks for reading and have a nice week!

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Diego,

What I ate last week:

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