Since about 1991, it’s been like that for me. From the moment I woke up till the moment I went to bed, I was working on something. The day job or the cartoons or something else. Sure, I’d have girlfriends come and go out, but the girlfriends never lasted too long, and I also ended up inventing, in 1997, an art form that would allow me to carry on working WHEN I was going out to the bars i.e. the “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”.

I’ve not had a proper vacation in ten years, either. Nor am I planning one.

Call Chris and myself, and probably over 50% of the people who read this blog, members of “The Overextended Class”.

You know who you are. And you know what? In terms of percentage of the population, there were less of us twenty years ago. And there’ll be more of us in two decades.

Our parents and grandparents spent their Cognitive Surplus watching television. That’s a thing of the past… a historical accident of the old factory-worker age meeting the modern mass-media age. Of course it wouldn’t last forever. We humans as a species were designed to compete, not to sit around on our asses.

Welcome to the Overextended Class, People. You may opt out of it if you want, but over time it’s going to get harder and harder to make ends meet, let alone be successful, if you do.

gapingvoid: welcome to the overextended class

There’s a much older word for this: precarity. It’s a long and storied labor concept. It’s nothing new, and for most people it’s nothing good (it can be good if you have a choice in the matter, and fewer and fewer people do).