144. The Girl Moss Episode: The Girl Boss is Dead

I'M THE VILLAIN

We have probably all seen the late stage capitalism memes by now: "Stop glamorizing the grind and start glamorizing whatever this is" is a famous one, though there are many more. In this episode we talk about the societal shift towards glamorizing doing nothing. We talk with Winx Vestrit, a friend who works with Isabel on the board of the National Home Funeral Alliance, about a tweet that really resonated with them which goes: "The girl boss is dead, long live the girl moss (lying on the floor of the forest and being absorbed back into nature)".
So much of the rhetoric around burnout and rest in the mainstream culture has been about resting for the purpose of getting back to being productive, but there is also a more anticapitalist movement towards resting for resting's sake, because you as a human deserve rest, or for the purpose of healing from a society that never taught us how to have work-life balance. We talk about how our current mindset will potentially harm us in the future if the economy does begin to shift towards mass unemployment with the automation revolution and what we would all choose to do if we were truly given the choice to do whatever we want.
The reset afforded to many remote workers by the pandemic allowed so many people to look inward and think about topics like gender and the nature of society in ways that our parents' generations and many generations before them likely did not have the bandwidth or energy to imagine on the scale that we are now as a generation, simply because they were too exhausted at the end of the day from working.
Obviously the Girl Moss tweet is a repudiation of modern-day hustle culture, but we also talk about what would happen if we were suddenly thrust back into a state of needing to grapple with nature, such as in the scenarios posed by the world of Station Eleven, a popular fiction book that talks about what would happen if there was a pandemic that wiped out 99% of the global population, or by Tim Urban on a recent episode of the Lex Fridman podcast where they talk about a hypothetical in which a witch came and took away all of our modern-day technology and we had to re-create society with only the knowledge in our heads now. We decided it probably wouldn't hurt to start learning some survival skills.
Links:
Girl Moss Tweet (the original tweet seems to be deleted so this is a link to a screenshot from another person's Instagram): https://www.instagram.com/p/Cehw4pmNNGe/
Instagram Isabel References with the Frog with Stilettos and a Mushroom Hat: https://www.instagram.com/maybell.eequay/?hl=en
KnowYourMeme Article explaining the "Stop Galmorizing the Grind and Start Galmorizing Whatever This Is" Meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/stop-glamorizing-the-grind-and-start-glamorizing-whatever-this-is
Lex Fridman podcast episode with Tim Urban where they talk about the hypothetical in which a witch takes away all our technology: https://lexfridman.com/tim-urban/
We don't talk about this book explicitly, but much of what we talk about in this episode is also discussed in Tricia Hersey's book, "Rest is Resistance": https://thenapministry.com/
National Home Funeral Alliance: https://www.homefuneralalliance.org/
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

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