peach eating vagus nerve cultist of the house of tool ape


tjc
@tjc

If you sit all the time for your job, and you develop musculoskeletal issues and chronic pain as a result of not getting to use muscles that aren't used when you're sitting all the time, that's an occupational injury.

If your job doesn't leave you time to stretch or exercise, and you develop musculoskeletal issues and/or a metabolic disorder as a result, that's an occupational injury.

If your job doesn't leave you time to cook, or pay you enough to allow you to buy a diversity of foods and/or someone to cook for you if you lack the executive function for cooking, and you develop a chronic illness due to nutritional deficiencies, that's an occupational illness.

If your job causes you chronic psychological stress, and that in turn causes any number of chronic somatic and psychological disorders (as chronic stress is known to do), then all of those disorders are actually occupational injuries.

Tech workers get sold things like standing desks so we can be convinced that we can just buy our way out of occupational injuries. We can't. Such things might be harm reduction (in some contexts and for some people), but your job is never going to pay you enough to heal your body faster than your job is destroying your body, because you are a worker and the role of a worker under capitalism is to be consumed. Tech workers are no more exempt from this than any other workers -- it's just that some of us sometimes have the resources to slow the process down a bit.

It's not your fault. If you're sick or injured, it's not that you failed to eat the right foods, or do the right exercises, or be mindful, or use a standing desk or take breaks every hour or drink 8 glasses of water a day. If you didn't have to work for wages, no one would need to tell you to do any of those things because it would be easier to do them than to not do them. Your job is what makes it impossible to take care of yourself, and others' jobs are what makes it impossible for them to take care of you. You are not sick either because of your lack of willpower (a fiction) or your failure to perform self-care (also a fiction, for the most part).

The concept of choice is a weapon, used either to make you feel guilty about the bad choices you've supposedly made, blaming yourself rather than the capitalist order; or to sell you products that are really just material representations of the idea that you can buy your way out of being oppressed by capitalism. Ideally (for them, not you), the guilt feeds the buying (if I buy this meal kit, I'll finally be healthy, which is to say someone who takes good care of my body, which is a resource to be used by others) and the buying feeds the guilt (now I don't have any money and must work more).

Footnote: I hope it doesn't seem like I'm endorsing any set of beliefs about which foods, exercises, etc. are "healthy" and which aren't. Any such beliefs are orthogonal to the point: if you are doing something that isn't what's best for you, the reason is likely to be that doing it conflicts with your need to work for wages in order to survive. The nature of working under capitalism is that to survive, you must participate actively in your own destruction.


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