Certainly this is the path to a happy, healthy, well-adjusted citizenry and a truly productive economy. The Onion:
Find The Thing You’re Most Passionate About, Then Do It On Nights And Weekends For The Rest Of Your Life
It could be anything—music, writing, drawing, acting, teaching—it really doesn’t matter. All that matters is that once you know what you want to do, you dive in a full 10 percent and spend the other 90 torturing yourself because you know damn well that it’s far too late to make a drastic career change, and that you’re stuck on this mind-numbing path for the rest of your life.
Is there any other way to live?
I can’t stress this enough: Do what you love…in between work commitments, and family commitments, and commitments that tend to pop up and take immediate precedence over doing the thing you love. Because the bottom line is that life is short, and you owe it to yourself to spend the majority of it giving yourself wholly and completely to something you absolutely hate, and 20 minutes here and there doing what you feel you were put on this earth to do.
It’s why we can’t have nice things… because too many people really believe this is the way it should be done.
I read this on my lunch break at work and had to leave to go to the bathroom and cry.
Made me cry, too.
Most worker ants don’t need a grasshopper to tell them that their lives suck. They need someone to give them an alternative. For some reason, grasshoppers never seem to have time to provide one. And when they do, it’s usually a system whose primary beneficiaries tend to be grasshoppers.
And yet when you say “actually, the economic and technological miracles of the last fifty years have been so amazing that we could afford to give everybody in the world enough to live on with only a few of them actually needing to have jobs” you get called a weirdo…
HELL yes.
Seriously, if we have more workers than work, why shouldn’t we have a 4-day work week, provided wages are high enough to allow a life? Imagine all the extra time people could have for non-profit volunteer work and creative projects.
Sounds like something is missing from the picture. What does “enough to live on,” mean, and who decides who has the jobs?
Ay, there’s the rub. Then again I’ve come across quite a number of those new jobs made possible by new technology and the results are often even more dehumanizing than the assembly line jobs my older cousins used to do. Yet I generally get greeted by a chorus of crickets whenever I try to point that out.
Escape, evolve, or endure. That about sums up the options, and the purpose of art.
True.