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Permalink Reply by SparTom007 - Tom on May 14, 2012 at 3:47am

You work because you have to because you need to get money to survive. It's wrong considering today we have the technology to free all humanity from the servitude of labour. If you didn't have to work you would do whatever you want. What is that? What would you do if you didn't have to work? Do that instead. Make it your job, put all your effort into that and make it into your work if you can. That will lead to happiness and fulfilment, even if you don't end up with lots of money or a long life etc.

 

 

 


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Permalink Reply by Will Hope on May 14, 2012 at 9:51am

What is work?  Work is doing.
If you cycle because it's connected to a grid and powers your house's battery for the day, you would think that you are "working" for the electricity.
If you cycle every morning because you like to do it, and didn't even know it gave you electricity, are you cycling everyday for electricity?  What are you working for?  Are you even working?
You are doing the same "work" in example one and two.  I could give you another example where she was paid money to cycle, but that's pointless because she would have to use the money to pay for electricity anyway. 

My friend says work is when you're doing something you don't want to be doing.
Buddha says you can control what you "want", but there's one caveat: you have to be in good condition.  Working every night until 2am can make anyone start to wonder "Why I work, god damnit!?"

When I hunt my first turkey out of hunger, I don't think about why I'm going to kill it.  I think about how and I think about ingenious ways to outsmart the wind and the turkey.  When I'm on my 100th turkey that I killed today, I reason - I cannot possibly eat that many turkeys nor do I want to.  Thus I may begin to wonder: Why am I doing this?  What is the reason for killing so many turkeys?  I get and I eat less than one-half of it a day.  Obviously, the rest of the turkey is going somewhere else.  Where is all the fruits of my labor being stuffed????  I want to know.  That is what all this work is about anyway. 

Perhaps we should discuss the possibility of voting people into and out of corporate positions.

Long story short, we work for the money and the man.  Why do we work for them?
We used to work for value and for Our selves.  Jewelery was made to your liking and people liked what you liked and gave you something of theirs in return, which you liked.  Today, we sometimes fall into traps of making things for an imagined expectation.  We cater to a virtual reality that becomes a synchronous trap like the heaven of hollywood.  Many times it betrays the lot of us, because it blocks inherent differences from being expressed, communicated, and integrated into community.  This whoring extends to the way we behave ourselves, dress, talk, and appease.  Suddenly small-talk, maintaining 300 friends, defending your diet, and not getting pick pocketed while you take a walk, life in general seems to be Work.  We are not even being who we want to or were meant to be.  We work to fit in.
Why does it take so much work to keep our lives together?  Why so much of what I do-not-want-to-do, all these mediocre tasks, these middling steps, these equivocating means, these redundant re-do's!

We used to learn what we do from people we loved and trusted, people within a community of shared values, histories, stories, futures, worldviews, and jokes  (Imagine a world you'd love fitting into).  Also, the things we did had visible effect back into the well-being of the community.  The feedback loop was transparent and the means to preserve this feedback loop was the naturally built in ability to learn through meaning - meaningful tasks via meaningful people. 
Currently, we are in a transition phase where we are fragmented, have lost previous foundational worldviews, have a new mixed global stage and conscientiousness, unresolved differences of all sorts among many cultures and geographies.  The internet and interactivity seems to be bringing us back or bringing back old values.  We are figuring out how to re-infuse our fragmented world with the cohesion of love and community and sharing and nurturing of Value.  People are realizing the importance of work/break, work/play, work/meaning, work/pay, work/independence.  Gamifying or prettifying the workspace or commute, online universities, online emotional shelters, you can even kill people from your living room if you're in that career path.  Work is improving in all sectors.  Who knows, work may be totally outsourced to (non-human)automatons. 

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Permalink Reply by Jesse C on May 14, 2012 at 10:15am

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Permalink Reply by The Shiznit on May 14, 2012 at 3:21pm

Good find, Jesse!  I love Alan Watts. He was very instrumental {and he would have loved that I used that word, hehe}  in helping me to realize how important perception is in how I define myself, reality, and how I feel about things.  Which is to say that how I choose to "view" and interpret things is always a choice,.. and "Life is a dance."  ;-)

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Permalink Reply by Will Hope on July 2, 2012 at 11:11pm

Hey Jesse.  Thanks a lot for this.

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Permalink Reply by Arjuna aka sdsad on May 14, 2012 at 8:05pm

Humans are social and dependent beings, meaning it's nearly impossible to completely self-sustain ones own family (with food that might work if you are a farmer but you also need tools, cloth and many other things). Also no one should, and would want to do that nowadays since you would have to cut most of modern technology and go back to the middle ages to do that.

That means we work for each other.

Everyone specializes in one field and as a community we complement each other, to be much more productive and to make or lives more joyful.

We NEVER work for money.

That is just an intellectual concept we invented to make trade easier(and as a byproduct the inventors made it in a way, so it would give them power to control others, but never mind about that). Money never can power you computer, feed you stomach, give you shelter or do ANY real world task.

Money serves as a bridge from good to good. So it's good to abandon this bride in the thinking process and think in goods only. Work is, when we produce things for the direct benefit of others(and partly ourselves). That's why I consider Banking or bureaucracy for example as activity but not as work.

So to sum it all up:

We work to make others happy. If we work with this mindset, any real work can be happy making, since making others happy makes ourselves happy (this is not just stupid bla bla mumbo jumbo, try it if you don't believe me, it works!!!)

If you are interested in the spiritual meaning, meaning from a "love-exchanging-perspective", I can recommend to you to read these two articles of my beloved teacher(we will leave by the end of this week and with him his site, so you might want to take to chance to read a littel bit ;) ):

http://www.kriyayoga.com/love_blog/post.php/410
http://www.kriyayoga.com/newsletters/newsletter200107-2.htm

With much love
<3 <3 <3 <3

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Permalink Reply by March E. on May 16, 2012 at 5:19am

Most of us in the developed nations work for cash in order to get our basic necessities of life. In other words, our right to money comes first before our right to life. From early childhood, you are brought up to the idea that you must work and work very hard in order to "exist," to "live," or to be recognized by society. You have to conform to what the system demands in order for it to be sustained. We based our entire lives on "work." You don't work, you don't exist. It's like you're outside the system. The system will deny your existence. We work to get cash. Cash is for survival, but the question is: Is all this entire system really necessary to get our very basic needs met? Does the system work for the happiness and needs of individuals or do individuals sacrifice their own happiness and needs to sustain the system? And does it all have to be this way? All about values. 

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