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This may sound preachy, but if you’re in your teens or 20s please take care to develop the habit of speaking positively about people behind their backs. Gossip is unavoidable, and yes it does allow people to bond, and yes some people deserve to be shit talked. But I think being negative about things is literally just nature, whereas trying to be positive about things and people is a quality you have to be very intentional about . If this does not apply to you, good for you. But for most people I think it does. Im not lauding toxic positivity so much as saying that if there’s space to speak positively about someone behind their back, it’s better to take that route.

"i do not dream of labour" is one of the worst pseudo-marxist taglines that western leftists have co-opted because when you ask them what they do dream of, they say traveling, studying, and creating art. broski, who's flying the plane to take you to prague? who's the security at the library with the texts you're studying? who are the clerks in the museum showcasing your art? like bro, you do dream of labour. you just dream of someone else doing it so you don't have to! you merely want to outsource the labour and make it invisible.

I don’t think this does away with the legitimacy of the basic sentiment that work shouldn’t be the point of life to be honest, it just shows that class society has always made that dream a reality for a few while condemning the many to endless toil. What’s new about capitalism is that we don’t even need to do this to maintain a large scale global society at this point. Work is no longer central to life for millions of people in the world who are thrown out of the workforce by automation or who are forced to make their living in nonsense careers that have the sole function of accelerating the circulation of commodities and money through wasteful consumerism. Yet nevertheless working society gets on without them just fine, and can even produce enough to sustain them as dependents on social assistance. Since the 1940s most mass working class movements in industrialized countries have been in opposition to the centrality of work, and even the welfare rights movement for example is about this since it’s critiquing the fact that people can only “earn” their right to live by working for money yet at the same time there aren’t good jobs available for everyone. After experiencing mass disruption to the workforce during the pandemic, seeing how many jobs didn’t actually count as “essential workers,” and now seeing just how many people can be unemployed while the system continues to work, wouldn’t poor people demanding that their needs come before the imperative to work have a revolutionary meaning today? I think there’s a real distinction between this sort of refusal of labor and the middle class one you’re describing, even if both find a recuperating institutional outlet in consumer culture

dont retreat emotionally. people like you and want you around. they like to talk to you, and you genuinely matter. you have to trust this through the hard times so you can get to the better times without sabotaging yourself. you are worth loving