Work may be thought of as a form of self-expression. For instance, when I worked as a physicist, I considered the programs I wrote to simulate neutron stars and the papers I wrote about my understanding of the results a form of self-expression much in the same way a musician picks up a guitar.
There’s also a lot of work which can not be considered as such. The Ancient Greeks thought that such work was slavery. Their solution was to own slaves. Being more modern and delusionally sophisticated we have financialized slavery and created something called jobs. While people can no longer be owned like slaves, jobs can certainly be bought, sold, and owned. And seeing how most people need jobs, it’s effectively the same thing, plus ca change…
In fact a great deal of our culture deals with preparing people to live in a system where their jobs can be bought and sold. And like it!
The way out of working jobs is owning jobs. As a financially independent person who don’t need to work but who have achieved this state through investing, that is, job-ownership, I’m essentially just the parallel of a slave-owner, a job-owner.
I don’t really think this ongoing slave-mentality elevates humanity in any way. It may be more difficult to see these days as people have more rights, but most are still not free. This doesn’t reflect well on neither people who have jobs nor people who own the jobs through their investments.
This is not elevating humanity. It’s just a more sophisticated version of the same old.
An improvement would be a system where nobody need “jobs” whether that be as job-owners or jobbers. A system where living itself becomes self-expression.
I need to think about this…
Originally posted 2011-07-28 13:26:10.
