Nobody ever liked shopping for insurance. Nobody ever liked trying to find a job. Nobody ever liked "find a market niche" and "marketing their unique skillset." The Neoliberal fantasy is that all life choices are reducible to consumer decisions, and people love to pull out their spreadsheets and calculators and make those decisions in the most rational way possible, and it just isn't true. We want healthcare, we don't want to shop around for health insurance every single year, terrified that we will die (or be bankrupted) if we make the wrong decision. We want meaningful work, we don't want to negotiate terms on 85 different freelance contracts per year. We want government services, we don't want to stand in line at 87 different agencies and try to understand the difference between SNAP and CANF or the DMV vs the DPS vs the County vs the City. We want a home, we don't want to read the tea-leaves of what the Federal Reserve is doing with interest rates and what the Case-Shiller index says this quarter. We want a good education for our children, not a consumer choice amongst 3 different competing charter schools.
In general, we want to run our lives like people instead of like miniature conglomerates. Peoples' tendency not to want to live like automata is not the problem: the problem is the system they are trapped in which forces them to live as automata.
In general, we want to run our lives like people instead of like miniature conglomerates. Peoples' tendency not to want to live like automata is not the problem: the problem is the system they are trapped in which forces them to live as automata.