The Black Sheep, the Work-Centric Society, and Pre-Adamic Civilisations

We live in a work-centric society.So profoundly work-centric that, before asking how you are, people ask what you are.And what you are always means the same thing:— What do you do for a living?— What did you study?— What are you going to work as?How you feel is irrelevant.Which is why the question “How are you?” is almost always answered with a courteous lie:“Very well, thank you.”In this society, there are three great groups.The first:Those who have never worked six hours a day for a continuous monthbecause they were born exceedingly wealthy.They are admired by some, envied by others,and forgiven by everyone.The second:Those who have never worked six hours a day for a continuous monthbecause they were born desperately poor.They are neither admired nor envied.They are invisible…or worse: inconvenient.And the third group is us.The rest of us.Those who do work.Those who hold the scenery upright.As the eight-hour workday begins to fracture,I shall use six hours a day as a reasonable average.Six hours of life surrendered each day.Six hours multiplied by months.By years.By decades.And here emerges the central paradox of the work-centric society:the two groups who do not work are permitted everything.They may be brilliant geniusesor profoundly mediocre.They may think, speak, rant, create, fail.But the group that does work…is permitted almost nothing.It is convenient — rather like pest control —that this vast group think as little as possible.And if it thinks, that it speaks little.And if it speaks, that it does so quietly.This is why football — or soccer — in much of the world,the NBA, the NFL and the MLB in the United States,rugby and cricket in countries once colonised by England,function as the first restraintagainst the most dangerous risk to power structures:thinking…and saying what one thinks.If that proves insufficient, religion follows.And if prayer fails,we fill your home with alcoholor your pockets with drugs.Thus it becomes clear why speaking in platitudes is so well regarded,and why refusing to do so is so poorly received.As an antidote, this podcast exists.Manual of the Lucid Misfit was designed to articulate the discomforts of ordinary life,so that being the black sheep of the familyor of the neighbourhoodis not such a solitary experience.Social gatherings — physical or virtual —are the finest laboratory in which to verify all of this.As long as we speak of the predictable, everything flows.But let someone mention an uncomfortable subject,and the gathering implodes,while those who dared to speakare symbolically crucified.I am increasingly convinced that political allegianceis chosen like a football club.In childhood.And never changed.Gender can be changed.Religion as well.But the club… never.In countries ruled by the round ball,one’s club is a prenatal identity.The football divide is as irreconcilableas left and right,as the Grammy winners of 2026,anti-vaxxers,climate-change deniers,flat-earthers,and those who listen to music other than our own.And I am increasingly certain of something even more unsettling:at any moment now, there will be an official presentationof at least one superior non-human race.I do not know whether it comes from beyond the planetor from deep layers of time.But it exists.From pre-Adamic eras.A race that has always accompanied human evolutionand has already designed a communication agendaso that, when it appears,it does not overly impresseither those who never worked six hours a dayor those of us who did.The author offers more than 13,000 posts drawn from his personal history on his blog, freely accessible at http://pablomera.blogspot.comAnd he invites listeners to write to him at [email protected].]