Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Ice-cube tray people

Where did we get this notion that ones “private” life should not overlap with ones “professional” life? I mean, I can certainly understand the reasoning motivating such a principle. Employers want predictable, reliable employees, and personal lives, fraught as they are with emotions and other messy complications tend to make people act unpredictably. But the notion that such a compartmentalized ideal is actually achievable seems to me to forget that professionals are, in fact, still human beings. The only way to reliably keep your personal life from affecting your professional one is not to have a personal life at all. The fact that we are reminded of this in scandal after scandal after scandal, and still look at them as scandals is a sobering reminder of how dehumanized our society has become. (Our unforgivably failed social norms about the proper care of children is another). I’m beginning to think that the true citizens in our society are not human beings any more, but corporations and other similar collective entities, and this is a thought that is beginning to scare me.

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