Work and Identity
Identity through work is withering away.
“I am proud that I contribute to this society through this job.”
“I am satisfied that I have a title I can be proud of.”
“I am satisfied that my job allows me to enjoy the status that comes with it.”
Self-realization through contributing to society by means of a career can no longer be a way of life that works for everyone. The incentive to invest years of education in a career or a lifelong job will disappear as well.
There is something more important than retraining yourself for some new technology that will probably replace your job again in a short time, just so you can keep chasing the worn-out ideas of a “career” and a lifelong job.
Think about the life you actually want, without blindly depending on other people to tell you what that life should be.
In medieval societies, people often understood themselves through their identity as believers. In modern totalitarian societies, identity could be built around being a member of the state. In democratic societies, work became one of the main ways people understood who they were.
Now even identity through work is disappearing.
You become unemployed. There is still work somewhere, but perhaps no stable job to settle into. You become anxious and struggle to make yourself look employable somehow. You pay someone to revise your résumé. You spend money traveling from one interview to another. You move into an expensive short-term rental for a temporary contract job. You take unreasonable business trips because refusing them may cost you the next opportunity.
Children draw their dream jobs on paper with crayons. How many of those brightly colored jobs will eventually turn black and white?
Why go to high school? Why go to university? Especially if you are going there to get a job rather than because you want to study?
We still have to live. I have to survive. As work disappears through automation, the question of how to live begins to show itself on its own.
The Speed of Change
Rapid technological development makes the future harder to plan. Competition pushes companies and states to develop and deploy new technologies quickly, while laws, institutions, employment systems, and everyday habits often change much more slowly. The result is a society in which people are repeatedly asked to adapt to new conditions that they had little part in choosing.
Entropy Exodus is a project and a way of life that explore how an individual can gradually reduce the effect of those changes on their own life.
And this is the life I want.
This philosophy and project centers on Biosolace, a capsule-type biosphere spacecraft, and aims to create a way of life that becomes progressively less dependent on employment, markets, centralized infrastructure, and other outside systems for its continued existence.
Its realization does not necessarily mean an immediate and irreversible departure into interstellar space. It may include a form of settlement on Earth or another celestial body, called Anchor-type, a form of periodically approaching and then moving away from the social sphere, called Comet-type, or a form of dispersal into interstellar space, called Voyager-type.
This project aims to make this separation durable enough that changes in the central society no longer determine where a person must live, what work they must do, or which technologies they must adopt in order to keep their life going. What happens within the central society after that is not the primary concern of the project.
I hope that even people who do not want this kind of life can find something useful here when thinking about and building a way of life of their own, without interfering with how others live or forcing others to live the same way they do. Again, It is just one way to live.