35, Almost 18

 

35, Almost 18

Guys who quote themselves in articles are fun to read. So some guy named Kreider opens his opinion piece in the NYT with extensive references to an article he wrote ten years ago--two paragraphs worth of self-congratulation--on the mistake that busyness is a virtue. His conclusion: “Life is too short to be busy.”

Heavy.

Here's the recent article: (There is a wall)

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/07/opinion/work-busy-trap-millennials.html

The following are excerpted paragraphs I picked out as representative. While I disagree with its essence, it is representative of a way of thinking that seems to be growing And its cause, I think, is as old as man.

"Through the internet, we could peer enviously at our neighbors in civilized countries, who get monthlong vacations, don’t have to devote decades to paying for their college degrees, and aren’t terrified of going broke if they get sick. To young people, America seems less like a country than an inescapable web of scams, and “hard work” less like a virtue than a propaganda slogan, inane as “Just say no.”

The pandemic was the bomb cyclone of our discontents; it not only gave all us nonessential workers an experience of mandatory sloth — which, for many, turned out to be not altogether unpleasant — but also dredged up a lakeful of long-submerged truths. It turns out that millions of people never actually needed to waste days of their lives sitting in traffic or pantomime “work” under managerial scrutiny eight hours a day. We learned that nurses, cashiers, truckers and delivery people (who’ve always been too busy to brag about it) actually ran the world and the rest of us were mostly useless supernumeraries.

I think people are enervated not just by the Sisyphean pointlessness of their individual labors but also by the fact that they’re working in and for a society in which, increasingly, they have zero faith or investment.

More young people are opting not to have kids not only because they can’t afford them but also because they assume they’ll have only a scorched or sodden wasteland to grow up in. An increasingly popular retirement plan is figuring civilization will collapse before you have to worry about it. I’m not sure anyone’s composed a more eloquent epitaph for the planet than the stand-up comedian Kath Barbadoro, who tweeted: “It’s pretty funny that the world is ending and we all just have to keep going to our little jobs lol.”

And I don’t believe most people are lazy. They would love to be fully, deeply engaged in something worthwhile, something that actually mattered, instead of forfeiting their limited hours on Earth to make a little more money for men they’d rather throw fruit at as they pass by in tumbrels.

Enough with the busywork already. We’ve been “productive” enough — produced way too much, in fact. And there is too much that urgently needs to be done: a republic to salvage, a civilization to reimagine and its infrastructure to reinvent, innumerable species to save, a world to restore and millions who are impoverished, imprisoned, illiterate, sick or starving. All while we waste our time at work."

This is really worth a thought because its basis is so integral to us. Meaning. The loss of meaning is the fallout of rationalism, of The Enlightenment. It, and the spirochete, drove Nietzsche mad. And if you can somehow create an arbitrary meaning in life, the tenor of the article becomes familiar: the tug-of-war between the spiritual and the temporal. If there is a Good that arches over all our lives, what time and energy can we devote to things outside it? The desert used to be filled with these guys, in huts and caves and on poles, contemplating. Praying. If the world is a battleground between Good and Evil, who has time to throw a ball, to hoe a field? What foolish self-absorption would bring a child into the world?

Yet in spite of this grim, human-less vision of life, these people think that we deserve entertaining, fun work that contributes to the Good. And they know that somehow, as they sit around the table in the coffeehouse, someone will be spiritually rewarded by bringing them a sandwich.