salvific — Bitter Crank

A good new word for my list. Thanks.

Very Funny,. You guys kill me. You act as if you had a choice. Ha Ha Ha. For a fun little change, take a sec and think of the most profound thing you could do and imagine doing it. Why aren't you then? I am interested to know. Perhaps life just is. The least, most, best, only thing to have. Change it, i dare ya.

I guess I could get affordable weekly brain surgeries by just waiting at the curb for the brain surgery truck to roll by. — Hanover

God knows you need them. Let's start a collection.

@schopenhauer1 Funnily enough, I had just been thinking along related lines when I came across this discussion. When most people speak of “work”, they refer to tasks that they would not voluntarily do but require some form of monetary incentive for due largely to the boredom you mentioned. And so when we put efforts into what we enjoy doing and for which no pecuniary recompense is forthcoming, we are widely regarded as “not working” and by extension of not being productive. Of slacking off, lounging about, or—with vicious ethical precision—of being takers rather than givers. So why is it that work, that socially necessary currency of mutual respect, should be generally defined as boring with non-boring alternatives treated with such suspicion, and what does that say about the way we live now?

Very Funny,. You guys kill me. You act as if you had a choice. Ha Ha Ha. For a fun little change, take a sec and think of the most profound thing you could do and imagine doing it. Why aren't you then? I am interested to know. Perhaps life just is. The least, most, best, only thing to have. Change it, i dare ya. — Franklin Crook

Arguing with @schopenhauer1 can seem like a pointless exercise. No matter how often you tell him you kinda like your life and don't feel like things are so bad, he refuses to accept that most people are glad to have been born. His inability to recognize that others don't see things the way he does makes it hard to take his arguments seriously.

What is needed is a way for every able-bodied person to have a job which is safe and which pays them enough for them, and their families, to live a decent life with decent housing in a reasonably safe neighborhood, good healthy food, health care, good education for their children, etc. etc. Let's do that. Then we can worry about boredom. — T Clark

Decent housing, healthy food, health care ... wouldn't it be nice if our education was actually focused on teaching us how to create decent housing for ourselves, how to grow healthy food for ourselves, and how to take care of our health?

We do care about housing, food, health, but we often don't care about our boring job, we just do it to get indirectly the things we care about, so I see a huge inefficiency here, I think we would be much more productive if we were directly working for those things we want, and we would be rewarding ourselves accordingly.

And it would be even nicer if each family was given at least a small plot of land, we all inhabit the Earth yet it is seen as normal that a few own most of the land, which leads many to be forced to get a boring job or end up homeless.

I think just those two measures would eventually improve the lives of many people. In the current system there are plenty of bullshit jobs and jobs that make the lives of others worse, which induce huge inefficiencies, so I don't think giving a job to everyone would improve things that much. Able-bodied people rather ought to be given the opportunity to work for themselves, to build their house, grow their food, take care of their health, that work would not be effort wasted.

I think just those two measures would eventually improve the lives of many people. In the current system there are plenty of bullshit jobs and jobs that make the lives of others worse, which induce huge inefficiencies, so I don't think giving a job to everyone would improve things that much. Able-bodied people rather ought to be given the opportunity to work for themselves, to build their house, grow their food, take care of their health, that work would not be effort wasted. — leo

I have three children. Youngest 29. Oldest 37. All three went to college, although only one graduated. Two of them are now farmers and the third became a butcher, then moved on to bartender. All three are very good at what they do. They did it on their own initiative, so the opportunity is there for people who want to do it. Giving people land won't work. Most people don't want to build their own house or grow their own food. This is not a realistic alternative for the great majority of people.

take a sec and think of the most profound thing you could do and imagine doing it. — Franklin Crook

Some of us have not only thought about some of the profound things we might do -- we did it. I spent 2 years in VISTA (now Americorps) working with children at a mental hospital in Boston. Later I volunteered much time and some money for a socialist organization. I worked very hard for 4 years doing street-level safer sex education in the early days of AIDS. In the 1970s I volunteered lots of time for the then-new 'gay liberation' movement.

I did these and other activities because I think life can be made actually meaningful by the better kinds of work we do, voluntary as well as paid. Like most people I have spent a lot of time working jobs that were tedious and dull. They were socially useful but personally not very meaningful. That's just life.

Other members of TPF have also made significant personal contributions to the life of their communities, more than I have.

So, what would be a significant personal contribution that you would like to make to your community?

The world is an incredibly complex place; it takes a tremendous amount of work to keep all the necessary and complex systems running. A lot of that work is, inevitably, going to be boring -- especially when you get into the tertiary level of jobs.

Just take, for example, all the focused attention it takes to get a box of strawberries from a farm to your table. It's very complex, and that includes produce grown within 100 miles. Picking strawberries, for instance, isn't a mindless job. Pickers have to identify which berries are ripe enough but not too ripe -- it's not a "grab everything that is vaguely red" type job.

I've grown strawberries in my garden--they weren't worth the trouble. Raspberries -- much easier, because they just take over and rule. The soil on my lot is either poor or way too shady. I know how to grow vegetables and corn, but one needs a large garden, decent soil, and little shade to grow a significant amount of food for a family. Plus, I'm getting a little old to undertake urban agriculture.

I've grown strawberries in my garden--they weren't worth the trouble. Raspberries -- much easier, because they just take over and rule. The soil on my lot is either poor or way too shady. I know how to grow vegetables and corn, but one needs a large garden, decent soil, and little shade to grow a significant amount of food for a family. Plus, I'm getting a little old to undertake urban agriculture. — Bitter Crank

We moved into our house in 1979. When we got here, there was a small garden including a few unhealthy strawberry plants. My wife is a gardener. She completely reworked the garden and always kept those strawberries around out of sentimentality, even though they never produced more than a few berries for 40 years. Then, this year, we have gotten 10 pints of the best strawberries I ever tasted - red all the way through. I've never seen anything like it except in a farmers market in Paris.

What's my point? Hey, you brought up strawberries.

If we're doomed anyway (many think we are) we might as well enjoy the show. Throwing in the towel, leaning back against a tree, and just observing might actually have some salvific power. Ceasing to strive, is, after all, the opposite of what has gotten us to our sad state of ourselves being bored to tears by technological production even as we breed our way to a more complex destruction. — Bitter Crank

Absolutely. But not everyone can be a Jack Kerouac watching the world progress away in tedium.

Funnily enough, I had just been thinking along related lines when I came across this discussion. When most people speak of “work”, they refer to tasks that they would not voluntarily do but require some form of monetary incentive for due largely to the boredom you mentioned. And so when we put efforts into what we enjoy doing and for which no pecuniary recompense is forthcoming, we are widely regarded as “not working” and by extension of not being productive. Of slacking off, lounging about, or—with vicious ethical precision—of being takers rather than givers. So why is it that work, that socially necessary currency of mutual respect, should be generally defined as boring with non-boring alternatives treated with such suspicion, and what does that say about the way we live now? — Baden

I agree. I would suspect because non-boring alternatives would leave little to be desired for getting all this "stuff done". Someone needs to make the water meters, no? Someone needs to make the bricks, the sidewalk, the electronics on your air conditioner, the copper that transmits bits of information, the etc. etc. etc. ..someone has to monger all this minutia!! Someone's happy invention on a team somewhere in GE corp. makes it that millions of tedium has to get done to produce it for the output.. My point is, how do we quantify all the tedious boredom such that it is measured against the "satisfaction" of the output?

I've grown strawberries in my garden--they weren't worth the trouble. Raspberries -- much easier, because they just take over and rule. The soil on my lot is either poor or way too shady. I know how to grow vegetables and corn, but one needs a large garden, decent soil, and little shade to grow a significant amount of food for a family. Plus, I'm getting a little old to undertake urban agriculture. — Bitter Crank

Your garden is just a hobby.. You need the plastic, the concrete, the pipes, the water, the billions of other things that engineers and happy inventors thought so that there can be output which costs billions of units of Boredom to produce. Your hobby garden is someone else's widget hell.

not everyone can be a Jack Kerouac watching the world progress away in tedium — schopenhauer1

Is that what he did?

Now wait a minute. I learned how to garden from my dad. He had a shovel (a spade), a pitchfork, 2 heavy garden rakes, and a hoe (the implement, not the other kind). He also used a hand-pushed cultivator. I'm still using his pitchfork. That's it. He did all his work himself by hand after work and on weekends. Never used artificial fertilizer (he used leaves). On this ground he grew beets, carrots, onions, Swiss chard, leaf lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, pole beans, and corn. The beets, tomatoes, pole beans, and corn were canned in a pressure cooker or big kettle of boiling water (depending). Cucumbers were made into pickles and canned. Apples were bought from orchards and canned.

So, these tools were made once and have lasted many years. Very simple metal working, wood turning for the handles.

I suppose packaging seeds was a boring job. And somebody had to drive around the countryside stocking seed displays in hardware stores. Hey, you could do that. It would be fun. Out on your own; going into small town hardware stores, selling seeds and preaching the anti-natalist gospel.

If you want to know what was boring, it was canning hundreds of jars of food every summer and fall. It was tedious and hard work at the same time.

Are you sure your wife didn't sneak in some new plants? Or maybe birds dropped some good seeds there.

Now wait a minute. I learned how to garden from my dad. He had a shovel (a spade), a pitchfork, 2 heavy garden rakes, and a hoe (the implement, not the other kind). He also used a hand-pushed cultivator. I'm still using his pitchfork. That's it. He did all his work himself by hand after work and on weekends. Never used artificial fertilizer (he used leaves). On this ground he grew beets, carrots, onions, Swiss chard, leaf lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, pole beans, and corn. The beets, tomatoes, pole beans, and corn were canned in a pressure cooker or big kettle of boiling water (depending). Cucumbers were made into pickles and canned. Apples were bought from orchards and canned. — Bitter Crank

Yum. Sounds healthy.

I suppose packaging seeds was a boring job. And somebody had to drive around the countryside stocking seed displays in hardware stores. Hey, you could do that. It would be fun. Out on your own; going into small town hardware stores, selling seeds and preaching the anti-natalist gospel. — Bitter Crank

I suppose this would be ideal..I'd use the spade to dig the ditch I would inevitably defecate in, and sleep under the bridge for my shelter as I peddle the seeds to the hardware stores :).

If you want to know what was boring, it was canning hundreds of jars of food every summer and fall. It was tedious and hard work at the same time. — Bitter Crank

I can imagine!

Giving people land won't work. Most people don't want to build their own house or grow their own food. This is not a realistic alternative for the great majority of people. — T Clark

But you agreed that the great majority of people want decent housing, healthy food and health care, so people want these things but they don't want to work for them directly, they prefer to do something else?

If you focus on people who love their job and earn decent money in a society where they are constantly stimulated to buy the latest shiny thing, watch the latest movie, play the latest game, take care of their persona on social media, then sure they don't care about building their own house or growing their own food, other people can do that for them.

But when you focus on people who hate their job and earn just enough money to pay for rent and food, and have a poor health because they're constantly stressed because of the job they hate that they have to go to every day, and 40 years later they're still not owning a house and they live in poor health or die because of it, I think these people would have liked to have the opportunity to work on building decent housing for themselves and grow some of their food and take care of their health, making use of what they would have learnt in an education that taught them to take care of themselves.

It's misleading to look at what I'm saying through the prism of our current society and our current education system, our education system doesn't teach us to take care of ourselves but to become a useful tool doing some specialized task, so then by the time we become adults who don't own any land, who don't know anything about building a house or growing food, and who have to pay rent, what other choice do we have besides taking a job serving as a (more or less) useful tool for others? By that point building our house or growing our food doesn't seem like an option at all, we feel like we wouldn't have the skills nor the time, and if we hate our job then that takes a toll on our physical and mental health that cannot be reverted by simply trying to take care of ourselves on the weekends. And then some decades later people wake up asking themselves, where has my life gone?

So yea if you love your job and your kids love their job, giving a job to everyone seems like the solution. But when you look at all the people who hate their job and all the negative consequences that has, more jobs doesn't solve the underlying problem.

So yea if you love your job and your kids love their job, giving a job to everyone seems like the solution. But when you look at all the people who hate their job and all the negative consequences that has, more jobs doesn't solve the underlying problem. — leo

And I say a good job with enough pay to live a good life is good enough. As the wise woman said, the ideal is the enemy of the good. Good enough is good enough.

But when you focus on people who hate their job and earn just enough money to pay for rent and food, and have a poor health because they're constantly stressed because of the job they hate that they have to go to every day, and 40 years later they're still not owning a house and they live in poor health or die because of it, I think these people would have liked to have the opportunity to work on building decent housing for themselves and grow some of their food and take care of their health, making use of what they would have learnt in an education that taught them to take care of themselves. — leo

Good housing, good food, good health care, good education, good jobs (that people actually like)--all good and desirable things. No one will argue with you that these are not good. The issue that is arguable is, "How?"

Well, start by radical changes like getting rid of the capitalist economy which drives a lot of what is you are identifying as bad. People will then have to organize their lives along different lines: cooperatives, community based food production/management, very locally controlled schools, focus on public health promotion more than terminal disease treatment, and so forth. Work will have to be organized quite differently than it is now, and so on.

All this might produce a simpler society where people were much happier. Or maybe not.

Large populations either maintain complex systems or they crash and burn. Nowhere can hundreds of millions, billions, of people be fed, housed, and cared for without extensive networks of technology and trade. "A simple good life" of the sort you are suggesting can be had only in very protected environments for a small portion of the population--not only the rich, but of course being rich helps.

Even at a time when the world's population was much smaller, when aspirations for goods and services were much more modest (say, the average person in the mid-18th century) having "a good life" was still complicated--involving trade, imports, exports, a complicated supply chain of food, goods, and services.

I empathize strongly with people who are dissatisfied with their work lives. I'm retired now, but much of my time working involved unsatisfactory work experiences. I put up with it, like everybody else does, in order to continue getting paid. There isn't any solution to the problem of unsatisfactory work, poor housing, poor education, poor health care, poor food procurement systems, and so forth WITHOUT radical changes. A thoroughly organized, unionized work-force would be one necessary step. A very strong progressive political party would be another minimal step towards extensive change. Involve the mass of people in demanding and forcing change, and you can get big changes.

Let me know as soon as you figure out how to organize and unionize the people. It's an uphill struggle, not because people are stupid and uninterested in something better, but because there are power forces interested in keeping things the way they are. You have heard that 1% of the people own more wealth than 90% of everybody else? Well, they are very focused on keeping things that way, and they own the means to do it.