Unsurprisingly, O’Reilly believes that tech firms, particularly those led by people he knows personally, are in the best position to push society forward. [...]

[...] His comment is, independent contractors are what makes the wheels on the Uber go ‘round, so it’s fine. He rips into big retail companies later for using tricky scheduling algorithms to keep workers on benefits-less part-time status and goes after Walmart for relying on the welfare system to subsidize its poverty level wages. He doesn’t realize that these companies originated the playbook Uber adapted: selling a model of precarious labor based on on-demand piece-work, masked with the prestige of being a “flexible independent contractor.”

If you’ve lost your job, and can’t find another one, or were never able to find steady full-time employment in the first place between automation, outsourcing, and strings of financial meltdowns, Tim O’Reilly wants you to know you shouldn’t be mad. If you’ve been driven into the exploitative arms of the gig economy because the jobs you have been able to find don’t pay a living wage, Tim O’Reilly wants you to know this is a great opportunity. If ever you find yourself being evicted from an apartment you can’t afford because Airbnb has fatally distorted the rental economy in your city, wondering how you’ll pay for the health care you need and the food you need and the student loans you carry with your miscellaneous collection of gigs and jobs and plasma donations, feeling like you’re part of a generational sacrifice zone, Tim O’Reilly wants you to know that it will be worth it, someday, for someone, a long time from now, somewhere in the future.

[...] Yes, my own personal brain chemistry is something I must reckon with, but doing so while navigating a cruel health care system, with the goal of remaining healthy enough to face a laughably uncertain financial future, all in service to surviving a world that is everywhere immiserating, hardly seems a good way to answer “how do I live.”

The best answer I’ve managed to come up with is that you live with intention of making that question easier for other people to answer. For me, the worst aspect of chronic depression (besides the boredom of it all) is the urge to be alone. If you’ve read my previous columns, you’ll notice that I almost always find a way to bring up our beholdenness to others. This is because I’m a lazy writer, but also because the fact of mutual obligation is what gives me the motivation to write at all. It’s also what animates any politics worth having.

I’m not sure if that’s an answer, really, and maybe we all need to fumble towards our own. All I know is that my occasional inability to bear the world is, in meaningful ways, a response to living in a world made unbearable. This can bring you to despair or it can bring you to purpose — today I chose the latter, and I hope I do again tomorrow.