The Hatred of Work

Leo Babauta wrote a post on his blog called "I am not a brewer." Here are the key lines I want to focus on:

I am not a blogger. I am no author. I am a simple man who enjoys a simple life with his family. I write to be able to afford living that simple life.

The gist of Leo's piece is that we work in order to live. Basically, he blogs to make money, so he can live a simple life with his family. This is quite simply bullshit. He might live this way now, but this was not always the case. This present mindset is the Achilles heel of the minimalist movement, and why it is dying and decaying. I will elaborate.

When Leo first started blogging, it wasn't for money. It was a project for him. There was no money. He simply wanted to chronicle his lifestyle changes from an overweight stressed out smoker with a mountain of debts to a non-smoking debt free vegan runner minimalist triathlete. Along the way, he inspired a lot of people, and his project became insanely popular. At no point in time did this project become about making money. The money part was a happy accident that took even Leo by surprise. Now, if we apply Leo's present mindset to his past self, we wouldn't know who the fuck Leo Babauta is.

What we are dealing with here is the fundamental nature of work. If you ask people what the purpose of work is, they will give you some basic answer about making a living. You work in order to eat and buy shit. Working beyond that is pretty stupid to them which is why they work as little as possible and think workaholics are foolish people. Leo is now numbered amongst these slackers by his own admission. This may also explain why he posts less in a month than I post in a week. The irony is that he gets paid for his gig while I don't.

Why do people hate work? The answer to that is simple. Mark Twain says it best, "Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do." The hatred of work comes from the obligation to work. People work because they are required to work, and this requirement is what makes them hate the work that they do. This is why people try to do it as little as possible. It also explains why materialistic people are even more prone to hating work. They have to work to make the money for those payments on the McMansion, the BMW, and the credit cards. The minimalist seeks to escape work by reducing those payments to utilities, food, and the monthly rent. But either way, you have the obligation to work. The result is that neither the maximalist nor the minimalist is especially happy.

Let's apply this thinking to another area of life--sex. We have sex to procreate. Sex is necessary for reproduction. Therefore, we should only have sex to conceive 2.5 kids. Then, we need to stop having sex. Sex beyond reproduction is just stupid. The idea that sex can be fun is just insane. If you think this line of logic is insane, this is exactly how I feel when someone says they work merely to pay the bills. This thinking drains life of all meaning, purpose, enjoyment, and everything good that makes life worth living and better than just cows eating grass.

I write this blog because I enjoy doing it. It is a form of work. I don't get paid for it. I just do it. There is joy and fulfillment in the creation of something. I feel accomplishment and satisfaction when I put words on the screen. I know others will read this. Some will ignore it. Others will love it. Others will hate it. But it does not diminish the joy I feel in making this. All my work is like this. I feel the same way when I do the work I am paid to do or when I do the work I need to do to maintain my life such as washing the dishes and sweeping the floor. Even if I got paid to blog, it would change nothing for me. I only have so much in my brain, and I am creatively tapped now even working a full time job. Having nothing else to do is unlikely to improve the quality of this project. In fact, I think it would diminish it since most of my inspiration comes to me when working my job.

Work is fun for me. Granted, I have to work. But I also choose to work. Work is the most fulfilling activity I do. I enjoy working, and when I am off work like today, I really hate it. Writing and chores are like a nicotine patch for me until I can pull a drag on a Marlboro. When I leave work, I leave with a certain sadness. The fun has ended. But it ends as my mind turns immediately to the next activity. Mark Twain wrote, "To be busy is man's only happiness."

I have a simple test for seeing if someone is happy or not. I ask them what they would do if they won the lottery. If their answer is to quit their job and retire to a life of leisure, I know they are not happy. If their answer is to take a risk on starting a business, I know they are happy. That lottery test is my way of divining whether people work out of joy or obligation.

Happiness comes from activity. A job for me is a self-sustaining activity. A hobby is an activity that is not self-sustaining. A chore is a neutral activity. They are all the same, but the job is the one that supports itself. This is because a job is where you work for others, and they pay you for it. Where others see the obligation, I see it as a bonus.

There is nothing intrinsic in an activity that makes it fun. I like to compare a house painter to Picasso. Both use paint and try to make beautiful things. The house painter is usually more successful. At the end of it, they can step back and appraise what they have created. Painting a house is no less a work of art than painting a portrait. Cleaning a house is just as artistic. They even have TV shows where they just clean up cluttered homes with a before and after. All work is fundamentally the same.

This brings us back to the obligation. If it is the obligation and not the activity that makes people miserable, what is the answer? I think I just gave it. Acknowledge that you are free to do what you like. You can always quit and be a bum. But this will not make you happy. You can try and win the lottery which will only make you a rich bum. You can do activities that you like to do and hope someone will pay you for it. Or you can choose to like the activities that you are already paid to do.

This is the argument that I have with the Marxists and their concept of "wage slavery." Marxists argue that workers are obligated to work which is what makes them slaves. And what makes them obligated? Their need to eat, wear clothes, live in homes, and heat those homes. Since these needs are finite, workers should be able to work as little as possible to meet those needs. Well, they can, and they do. I worked for quite a few years for less than $20K annually while I attended school. But this will not do for the Marxist. They direct their anger at the corporations and the capitalists as if they have pulled some trick on the proletariat. But it isn't the fault of the capitalists. It is the fault of existence that you must work. Fields do not till themselves. Clothes do not make themselves. Houses do not build themselves. This is a desire for Heaven where no one works.

The Puritans had a much different take on work. Calvin pointed out that Adam and Eve worked before the Fall. It says it in the Bible:

And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.--Genesis 2:15

There was work in the Garden of Eden. Work did not begin with the Fall. Frustration began with the Fall. Here is what the Bible says:

And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed [is] the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat [of] it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou [art], and unto dust shalt thou return.--Genesis 3:17-19

The curse was not the labor but that the labor would be frustrated and difficult. In other words, you might labor and fail. You will plant crops that wither and die. You might build a house that gets knocked down. You get the picture.

Now, I am an atheist. I don't believe in this silly story. But I quote from it the same way I quote from Twain's fiction. It is the idea that matters. Work itself is not a curse. The Puritans ran with this idea where the Catholics saw work as cursed. The result was prosperity and flourishing for those Puritans. They were also happy. Attitude means everything. For the Puritans, work was a consecrated activity and done as an act of worship. This is why they worked so much and gave us the Puritan work ethic. Just because there is no God does not mean that the work cannot be enjoyed.

When you read interviews with billionaires like Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, or Carlos Slim, you realize that they are not motivated by greed. Everyone else thinks of money purely in terms of acquiring consumer goods. Since these guys are so filthy rich that they can buy any conceivable consumer good the world offers, why do they work? Why do they amass wealth they couldn't even live long enough to spend? And in the case of Warren Buffett, why do they still live so humbly? This is simple. It is the Puritan Paradox.

The Puritan Paradox is this. If you decide that money and consumption does not bring happiness, you will become rich. This is because wealth comes from hard work and thrift. Wealth is merely a byproduct of living what the Puritans considered a godly life. As an atheist, I would simply say that wealth is the byproduct of living a rational and virtuous life. By focusing on wealth as a means to consume, you are unlikely to have it or keep it. But if you focus on work for its own sake and eschew the hedonic lifestyle of consumerism, you will be wealthy. But it won't matter to you whether you are rich or not.

The Puritan work ethic is what has made the USA such a rich country. The idea that it was greed just doesn't hold. Greed is the undoing of this nation as I define greed in terms not of savings but consumption. It wasn't Scrooge who was the greedy bastard but all those consumers wanting to spend his money that he saved by not consuming. Charles Dickens should be resurrected and skullfucked to death for writing such stupid shit as that story. If you doubt this, recall all that holiday cheer you felt at the mall as you fought with other people to buy a bunch of shit for other people knowing you would still be paying for it on your credit cards in May of the following year as the gift you bought lies in some closet collecting dust.

Wealth is merely the means of sustaining one's rational activities. Cows eat grass, so they can later create manure and other cows. But mostly they eat grass, so they can stay alive to eat more grass. At some point, they become steak. People are like those cows consuming and working in order to consume more. But there are those rare people who create and simply want to create more. Like the cows, they eat, but they consume in order to keep doing what makes life worth living which is creation. In short, they work in order to keep working. This virtuous cycle brings happiness. It is beyond just eating grass. This is what it means to be autotelic.

The lie is that there is something higher and better than work. This lie is known as hedonism. This is why work is always describe by these people in terms of austerity, deprivation, depravity, and insanity. Work is treated as a vice while leisure is held up as a virtue. I disagree. I think leisure is the vice while work is the virtue. Work is self-sustaining. Leisure is not. Work leads to wealth, health, and well being. Leisure leads to poverty, illness, and despair. And the biggest bit of PR for this hedonism is calling it "family time." It is all done for the sake of the family. What a load of shit. I will explode this in my next piece on this subject called "Leisure Nation."

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