What clicked and made you have a different mindset? How long did it take to start changing and how long was the transformation? Did it last or is it an ongoing back and forth between your old self? I want to know your transformation and success.
Any kind of change, big or small. Anything from weight loss, world view, personality shift, major life change, single change like stopped smoking or drinking soda to starting exercising or going back to school. I want to hear how people’s life were a bit or a lot better through reading and your progress.
TIA 🙏
I don’t fault your interpretation. There is a reason Vonnegut uses the term “spiritual” throughout the book. At least for me, I would describe my understanding of the book to have required a spiritual/moral shift before I could really understand the image being painted.
I also read God Bless You Mr. Rosewater first of the two, so maybe that colored how I interpreted Player Piano. It is a more direct argument that humans need to be cared for, independent of their economic utility.
So when I read Player Piano, it didn’t strike me as an argument against automation (which, being an engineer myself, I am entirely for), but moreso as a warning that freedom from labor doesn’t alone make a perfect life. Especially in the mid-20th century context Vonnegut was writing in, it’s an argument against the “American” style of automation, wherein you displace people from their jobs and discard them entirely. They serve no further purpose to your economy, and since your society is tightly adjoined to the economy, they serve to purpose to society…
So it’s not really a book about automation, if if I said that in my first post. It’s a book about failings of American culture, which happens to be revealed through automation. It’s about the inconsistency of a society where one’s usefulness to others is determined solely by their labor, and where that labor is constantly sought to be devalued and eliminated, and what the end of that process looks like for humans who want to find meaning in their activities.
A. The outcasts of that society weren’t exactly homeless. The utopia Kurt describes is one with the largest welfare state of all time.
B. Maybe people shouldn’t be friends with people who only like them because of what they can do for them at work. I am far from perfect but I don’t think I would divorce my wife if she got laid off.
C. It isn’t the best idea to tie your sense of self worth to one aspect of your life.
As I said they live in a utopia, getting better and better, but still complaining.
