John Maynard Keynes predicted that, a hundred years in the future, the problem for workers would be too much leisure, since they would work no more than fifteen hours a week. Everyone would suffer from boredom. “There is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread,” Keynes wrote. “It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself.”
This resonates. I’d be lying if I didn’t confess to this fear ebbing and flowing in a few waves cycles since the pandemic has affected work here: which is a blessing as I am rather slowly peeling back my layers of past hindrance thought cycles of inadequacy or stuckness or laziness to really get to the Heart of what I Truly want to Do in addition with realizing talents and most importantly volunteering in Necessary roles of our Community. Volunteering along with early am stillness/breathing and going outside have kept me sane when my shadows and doubts and depression insist upon knocking and entering my Guest House.
The 200 Productivity article was super helpful today as well.
I think it feels really good to do stuff - to make and create. I like what Khalil Gibran wrote in The Prophet: “Work is love made visible.” I have been thinking deeply about that five-word sentence for a full decade now and I think it’s my favorite definition for ‘work.’
When I’m making breakfast or tidying my house in the morning, I know in my heart that I’m working, though I regularly catch myself saying stuff like, “I haven’t gotten to work yet.”
The problem with the argument that it’s stupid to look for meaning in work—a form of false consciousness to find purpose in your job—and rare to love what you do is that it’s wrong. All sorts of people doing all kinds of work like the companionship they find in the workplace, the chance to get out of the house, the feeling of doing something, the sense of accomplishment.
After a while, everyone was supposed to love work. “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” popped up all over the place in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, along with the unpaid internship, the busting of unions, and campaigns to cut taxes on capital gains. It soon became, in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, a catechism. “The only way to do great work is to love what you do,” Steve Jobs told a graduating class at Stanford in 2005. “If you love what you’re doing, it’s not ‘work,’ ” David M. Rubenstein, a C.E.O. of the Carlyle Group, said on CNBC in 2014. “Everywhere you look you hear people talking about meaning,” a disillusioned Google engineer told McCallum. “They aren’t philosophers. They aren’t psychologists. They sell banner ads.” It’s not pointless. But it’s not poetry. Still, does it have to be?
This resonates. I’d be lying if I didn’t confess to this fear ebbing and flowing in a few waves cycles since the pandemic has affected work here: which is a blessing as I am rather slowly peeling back my layers of past hindrance thought cycles of inadequacy or stuckness or laziness to really get to the Heart of what I Truly want to Do in addition with realizing talents and most importantly volunteering in Necessary roles of our Community. Volunteering along with early am stillness/breathing and going outside have kept me sane when my shadows and doubts and depression insist upon knocking and entering my Guest House.
The 200 Productivity article was super helpful today as well.
This article pairs well with the tweet that was captured in Jackie Luo’s article ‘all paths lead to extinction.’
Yes! I had the exact same thought.
But of course we're sharing brain waves - we're sharing reading :)
I find this topic fascinating.
I think it feels really good to do stuff - to make and create. I like what Khalil Gibran wrote in The Prophet: “Work is love made visible.” I have been thinking deeply about that five-word sentence for a full decade now and I think it’s my favorite definition for ‘work.’
When I’m making breakfast or tidying my house in the morning, I know in my heart that I’m working, though I regularly catch myself saying stuff like, “I haven’t gotten to work yet.”