Wandering is Revolutionary

Wandering connects you to people, places, and ideas that you wouldn't have otherwise encountered.

It dispels the alienation, isolation, and indoctrination produced by industrial society, and makes you more curious and compassionate along the way.

But what does the industrial system want you to do?

It wants you to work and consume and increase your lifetime unit value of to the owners of the industrial system. End of story. Shepards do not care about the inner lives of their sheep.

They are far more interested in ratcheting up the tension on you to keep you working.

So while the global elite want you to spend every day grinding, much of your time might be better spent exploring the world around you. You might make less money, but you'll a lot more enjoyment out of life.

And the more of us that wander, the faster we break down the barriers between us, instead of building them up. It helps you see others and their experiences with more nuance and compassion.

That's why the 'owners' have always taken it deadly-serious when people leave the fields or the factory and start milling about on the earth. It means the trickery isn't working (and the coercion will ratchet up soon).

The artist and revolutionary Guy Debord called this trickery The Spectacle - the pernicious and persistent need for industrial society to manipulate us by inserting imagery and meaning between we individual humans and our own lived experiences.

Debord and other members of the Situationist International used wandering to great effect, especially in the movement's early years, playing games in the urban landscape that laid the foundations of the significant-if-not-successful world-spanning humanist uprisings of 1968.

So yes, millions of people downing tools to go wander would spark revolutionary change. But even at the individual level, you can use wandering to dissolve the propaganda beamed at your brain.

Ask yourself this:

When did you last feel unharried or unhurried?

When were you last free to be curious and playful and absorbed in the world around you?

When did you last not have something you were SUPPOSED to be doing?

You should have time to relax and think and explore and the less you have it the more need it. Taking time for your thoughts and feelings and sorting out what actually matters to you versus what - if that ain't revolutionary, then I don't know what is.

Like Guy Debord said...

“Just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.”