We are the sorry descendants of SATs, GCSEs, BTECs and A-Levels. Our early lives have been dominated by the insistence that everything we experience, learn and know must be a quantifiable and dry exchange of information and analysis.
In our dismal working lives we spend 40-hour weeks analysing spreadsheets, fetching our superiors coffee, resetting self-checkout machines, or generating sponsored content for a trainer company in the “creative industries”—our education didn’t just leave us adequately prepared for our future: we were ready to be unchallenged, sleepwalking in a perpetual and existential boredom.
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During your meal-deal lunch-break you scroll through your phone. A Facebook acquaintance displays an intricate satellite survey of the route their round the world flight took them on; another shares the speed of their heart rate and the length of their evening jog in kilometres to the decimal point; another gives the exact sale price of their first home and a tiled photo of its various interiors, it includes their home office set-up with his and hers MacBooks, and a reed diffuser. Above these artefacts is a framed canvas printed with some inspirational text—it reads: Never, ever, ever, give up.
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