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We can help, just to start, by working to expand the imaginative range of your prose, which now reiterates talking points from Koch-funded blogs and culture war polemics from the 90s. (These are old ideas, Bill, and they're not your own.)
We can help replace the wooden cliches of half-catchy journalism ("what’s on offer today isn’t your father’s English degree") with prose that's rich and punchy and informed by the widest possible range of human expression --
(I think you'd like Tommy Pico, for example, who knows how to mix registers so that high-order ideas get cut through with common speech, thinking metaphysically through the vernacular. He can sound casual when most serious, & vice versa. Can you do that?)
We could help you, also, to see your own (very sad!) input-output, monetary logic in historical context, & trace the history of spreadsheet-style thinking across a longer history of how cultures & individual humans have thought about value —what you call "worth";
We could read *Hard Times* together, maybe, & see how Dickens blasts exactly the kind of utilitarian, calculation-based way of thinking you take to be natural, & shows how it's fundamentally opposed to human flourishing. It would be so fun, talking with you about Gradgrind!
And we could even show you--in a class on dystopian literature--what a world that was reorganized along the lines you call for would really look & feel like, the social form of it, the misery:
...how the body might respond to a world where code words like "use" and "earnings" have been raised to something like a secret religious creed, but w/ the mystery & power of real religion drained out. We could watch Black Mirror together!
And we could end, maybe, by sharing with you the mission statements of companies like Apple, say, who explain over and over again that what real companies want is imagination, flexibility of mind, the capacity to see problems in the long arc of their unfolding.
They don't want drones, bundles of ready-made "skills," or calculators. (In the nineteenth century they'd have said "hands" to mean this type of standardized and replaceable, because dehumanized, worker -- we could talk about that too!)
"Do you possess a passion to think differently and challenge conventional approaches to problem solving?" (jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/…). I don't know that you do yet, Bill -- or I haven't seen it yet. But we can help you. It's what we do here. Come hang out! -NH
