Posted by swah 16 hours ago
Is this correct? From the footnotes.
>> Gogol makes much of Akaky's name in the opening passages, saying, "the circumstances were such that it was quite out of the question to give him any other name..." The literal meaning of the name Akaky, derived from the Greek, is "harmless" or "lacking evil", showing the humiliation it must have taken to drive his ghost to violence.[citation needed] His surname Bashmachkin, meanwhile, comes from the word 'bashmak', a type of shoe. It is used in an expression "быть под башмаком" which means to be "under someone's thumb" or to "be henpecked".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Overcoat#Interpretations
Literally in the first paragraph it states what when p. was born they used the church calendar to randomly choose the name but they all were sounding unpleasant so the mother chose to use the father's name. There are multiple saints with this name and they are celebrated on Name day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acacius
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Orthodox_liturgical_ca...
https://www.seangoedecke.com/good-times-are-over/
> In other words, your interests now conflict with your company’s interests.
> It’s okay for your interests to conflict with your company’s. You get to decide what you care about, and what you’re willing to fight for. But when you act in ways that don’t further your company’s interests, you risk being seen as ineffective or unreliable. In 2025, that makes you vulnerable to being laid off.
And this one:
https://www.seangoedecke.com/a-little-bit-cynical/
I personally don't have the mental fortitude to enjoy most things about my job. There are several reasons: 1) selfishness, my interests not aligning with optimizing shareholder value, 2) shared dysfunction, all the ways we work in bad ways that is not good for anyone, 3) the sense that we are convincing managers to shove our product down the throats of their underlings, 4) laziness and other transient states (or maybe not so transient)?)
The Cynical article was curious to me. But just because I expected it to be Cynical in the sense that the author thought things were bad. But Cynical just meant merrily working within the gears of the professional system. Then having no complaints about it. No commentary beyond gaining both money and pleasure from aligning with optimizing shareholder value.
It's not always healthy; at my current job (started 8 months ago) I see tons of issues to fix. Some of them are explicitly mine to fix, some close enough to my area of responsibility, but some of them are well outside it. And I'm annoyed that nobody has fixed these problems, because everybody is aware that these are problems. But the entire way the organisation works, seems designed to make it as hard as possible for me to fix them.
I'll probably burn out and leave in a few months to do something I care less about.
The day-to-day gets so much better when you can do a few of these fixes every so often, after a few months it really adds up when you compare to how things used to be.
I haven't been able to find a source for this, but I remember reading that Marx believed that doing productive work for the benefit of human beings was part of the "species essence" of humans. Needless to say, he did not approve of how this tendency was expressed under capitalism. He said that working for compensation alienates people from their work, prevents them from fulfilling their species essence, and therefore prevents them from being fully actualized human beings.
If you're working for the satisfaction of being useful to others, that's not dysfunction. That's you beating the odds and having a healthy relationship to your work despite the external social pressure to make it about the money. I think there's no irony in the fact that you have better working conditions; in fact, it makes perfect sense: you are privileged and insulated from the harshest pressures of capitalism that force people to think only about the financial benefit to themselves and not the benefit they provide to other people.