Why Art and Play are Essential and Work Is (Nearly Completely) Worthless
If you want to understand the good life, you need to turn our insane civilization upside down.
We are like drug addicts, and despite our moralistic society’s claim to condemn drugs, it peddles them enthusiastically.
Yes, there’s oxycontin and fentanyl. But the real drug they are peddling is rampant consumerism. We are supposed to want stuff, more stuff, all the time. We are supposed to spend every waking moment buying more, or working to earn money to buy more.
This endless hunger for stuff — useless crap, actually — is the true religion of our civilization.
In our civilization, the Earth, and all the life on it, are merely resources to be exploited. Humans are human resources. Life, including human life, including YOUR life, has no intrinsic value. Your life is a means to an end, to make some undeserving asshole richer. As a reward, you get to retain a tiny portion of what you create.
It’s effing absurd.
I never get tired of this quote by Charles Bukowski, the bard of reality. He wrote:
“How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 8:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so? ”
Living In A Society of the Living Dead
We work because that’s how we get money for food, clothing, shelter and medicine. And if we have a little extra, we can buy toys and entertainment.
When we identify with these senseless jobs (and most jobs are senseless), when we see ourselves as our job titles, we surrender our lives. We become automatons, doing what we are told and loving it. We love big brother.
Except we have a nagging feeling that something is wrong. And that feeling never goes away. Because we were once wiser. We began as children and children are wiser. They have fun. They play. They are curious. They express themselves. They enjoy being with other children. They have no agenda except to live.
Maybe you can’t escape the rat race. You need the money. You have bills to pay. That’s the reality for you now, the cruel reality. You do your job — but you don’t need to indulge in the crack cocaine of greed and fear that the bosses peddle. We don’t need to obsess over our jobs. We are not all in this together. The bosses are in it for themselves and they are using you — and both of you know it.
This is all supposed to be okay because YOU are expected to be ambitious, to want to eventually break free and exploit other people. Your boss is happy to use you because that’s how things work.
But they don’t work. Things are failing. Civilization is dying — and it’s killing us, killing our children, killing Nature Herself. Our civilization is unsustainable and it’s committing an Earth-sized mass murder/suicide.
That’s the direction our civilization is headed, and we feel helpless, hopeless, despairing. We’ve been trained to be obedient, to feel powerless, to submit. It’s not the rulers and systems and stupidity that’s doing the most damage. It’s our training. It’s our obedience. It’s our learned helplessness.
The Lie About Power
We think we are at the mercy of powerful people and powerful institutions. Even though we are fed the idea that we have representative government and that business, by design, must make things better for people, that is NOT our actual experience. We don’t feel represented, we don’t see things getting better, and we see nobody catering to our needs.
And we forget that the leaders in government and business and elsewhere are merely people, and they aren’t inherently more powerful than any of us. Their power comes from us taking their orders, doing what they want. We do it out of fear — they can punish us if we refuse — or out of inertia, or out of identification with jobs or ideologies.
But, we and our obedience is the source of all power. Without us, the powerful are powerless. If we reject their self-serving ideologies, if we refuse to give in to fear, and most of all, if we speak out honestly and firmly and refuse to obey…well, we become free and powerful enough and fully human.
Each of Us Can Live A Personal Revolution and Seize Freedom
We may need to work, but we also need to disengage from work, from bills, from perceived obligations. We have obligations to ourselves, to those we love, and to our planet. We must protect and care for each other. And that means less for our overseers — less time, less attention, and less obedience.
We may not be able to quit, but we can slow down, take it easier. Who’ll know? Most bosses are clueless. Whether it’s politicians or businessmen, they don’t see or understand how things get done. They are clueless. Even if they are intelligent, they are simply in no position to see. This is not your problem.
Your problem — no, your responsibility — is to live and enjoy this rare and short and extraordinary experience of consciousness, of life. Your responsibility is to NOT cheapen your life, or waste it, on trivial things and trivial demands that serve the ill-conceived wishes of fools.
Less work. Less stuff. Less panic. Relax and live. Take more life. It’s yours. Even if your time is limited, and you come home tired, there’s no charge for daydreaming, for watching the sunset. This is your life and your planet and, once you decide to grab hold, nobody can take it from you.
Please follow me on Medium. I am the founder of a small but growing movement, The Saners, which seeks to stabilize the climate and build a better society. See WeAreSaners.org.