Two philosophers found purpose in the world of work
wsj.com
wsj.com
- The same work can be exciting or traumatic depending on whether it's a task you set yourself or got roped into by some other entity. A CEO can easily be less stressed than a low-level employee despite having tasks of greater responsibility and magnitude (see Whitehall study for instance)
- The adjustment of interest in the same exact task can occur in an instant, as soon as you become aware of the new context, and regardless of whether there's any material change e.g. learning that you are underpaid compared to your coworkers, or having someone tell you to do the chores you were going to do anyway, or if someone tells you they set out the task for you because they think you are the only person competent enough for it
- It's far easier for talented people like Witty or Weil to find self-actualization, because the range of tasks they can try out to satisfying effect is vaster and more compressed in time. Furthermore, they are more adept at lacing their actions with mental or aesthetic qualities such as philosophical statements, which makes rationalization easier.
- Work is becoming more virtualized and hard to pin down, especially in the digital space. Imagine describing to Witty a person whose specialty is to find vulnerabilities in Instagram's network protocols to be able to make enough queries to catch juicy usernames, which will in turn be sold to third parties optimize the sale of a virtual deed of ownership of a virtual picture of an ape. He's smart and would probably get the idea quickly, but still...
Indeed. A question I often think about: How can we keep our work from damaging us? Many of us have experienced damaging work - work (or a work environment) that is actually causing us mental or physical harm. And others can be in exactly the same job/environment and not experience any damage. I haven't come up with much of an answer to the question, but autonomy, control and choice seem to have something to do with it. But there's also futility and frustration that even those who choose a task can feel.
By contrast, illness and soreness are humming background noises that you can get used to.
My experience being voluntarily without home (and living in parks) tells me that erecting a barrier between your work and your material needs, that allows you to more objectively assess the personal value of the work. You need to run experiments of sorts, and imho it's hard to have that liberty to truly A/B test unless the requirements of normal work are relieved (whether through wealth or minimized needs).
In some ways, I felt more kinship with the wealthy and retired when I was being a hobo of sorts.
Kinda like Mike Rowe waxing on about Dirty Jobs and work ethic. It lacks the full weight of the cost of failure.
Set yourself up so you can leave and you’ll have a much better time at work.
It doesn't hurt to remind some of the stressed out and overworked among us that living below one's tech-industry means can pay off in work satisfaction, even if it means foregoing some more immediate pleasures.
Unfortunately it just makes me indignant/kinda depressed.
why did so many people refuse to continue working as before the pandemic? the only thing that changed really, is their attitude towards work.
Some people are infirm, they're a small minority and we should as a society take care of them.
I know waitresses who do it and have sizable amounts in savings.
There's always someone who has a similar life situation and makes less money than you. Just live life like you make 10% less or whatever. There are definitely people who live paycheck to paycheck on that much less than you earn, you can spend that much money and keep the 10% for when it is really needed.
People get mad when you suggest this and have a list of "but I have to X..." which isn't valid because there's always someone who earns less than you who also has X. You don't earn the absolute minimum amount of money for someone in your situation, that's just silly to think like that.
There are people who have serious issues like disabilities or whatever were it is quite hard, to be fair. But it isn't just the "lucky few" who don't.
Or every "CEO mans the grill for a day" garbage. Easy to find service work satisfying when you're not stuck doing it.
I've seen this come up many times in Philosophical discussion. The words to live by are those of privilege, who have rarely experienced the lifelong hardships of slaves.
However, plenty of people have read the words of (stoic) philosophers and have adapted them to extreme environments like torture. They say it worked and got them through. Do we need a modern day slave to independently come up with the same philosophical conclusions to call them a universal nature? Or can we derive them from logic and possibly data?
While I think that the work I do as a software developer is better and more personally meaningful work than the work I did stocking shelves in a grocery store (because it validates my previous efforts), I'm not sure that at the end of the work day that I feel more fulfilled than when I was on a grocery stock crew. Being able to exhaust myself physically through work and then doing whatever my mind wants me to do definitely felt better than working while sitting in an office chair all day and trying to find exercises that give me the same sense of satisfaction.
Another similar essay I liked, contemporary to both Wittgenstein and Weil is "Why Work?" by Dorothy Sayers [1].
[1] https://www1.villanova.edu/content/dam/villanova/mission/fai...
Like a penny farthing or a more-modern Trek (for example)? Or my mum that was known as the town bike, and so here i am - the result of linkage rather than a quick pull?
The Benedictine motto, "Ora et Labora," has also come to be understood as a direction of offering up the hardships of labor so that the offering is a prayer. Work can thus become a prayer in and of itself. Prayer and work are constantly linked, pulling on one another. Together these acts mold us into better people.
By their time physical science had placed upper and lower bounds on what’s possible even if the public was not aware of it.
I get the appeal and went through that phase in life, but no theories have superseded Entropy, Relativity; yes the information we generate is always “out there” but it loses structure, the meaning of it being out there is relative. Information theory is a model for discovery, not memorization.
Daily life is as it looks; work to survive for some, subsist on their work for others. Those who spend more time subsisting might try discovering literal self sufficiency, and those who work to live might try spending more time subsisting. That’s all I get out of past philosophy these days.
When Marx spoke about alienation, he was talking about industrial manufacturing, not producing commodities. Capitalism benefits from production lines, where you're working on a small piece of a product and don't feel ownership of the process. And you don't get financial benefit because any profits go to the people who own production lines.
Early 20th century communist revolutions happened in less industrial countries, on the idea that farmers and miners who owned the farms and mines themselves would get a larger share of the profits. But it never worked out that way, for a ton of reasons -- mismanagement being key, but really the fact that commodities don't produce the kinds of profits that drove Marx's theory. Marx's ideas of alienation were driven by highly profitable industrial manufacturing.
The world today is insanely more profitable than Marx ever dreamed, and that presents a lot more opportunities for workers to feel ownership. We have the luxury of supporting artisans -- including farmers who grow less food for more effort but offer other benefits, even if purely intangible ones.
I don't think there's ever going to be "artisan mining", and I don't think miners were ever going to be well accommodated in a Marxist society. The best you could hope for is turning the mines over to the workers and letting them profit.
It's a shame that there's such a negative knee-jerk reflex to the mention of her name.
At some point, when everybody who reads your books uses them to justify toxic behavior, negative knee-jerk responses become the proper societal equivalent of an immune response.
If a bad actor wants a scapegoat, they will find one.
John Oliver's segment on Ayn Rand (Last Week Tonight, I forget the name of the segment but it was something to the effect of "Why Is This Still A Thing") did an excellent job summarizing the popular case against her, in all of its disingenuousness: without making an effort to view her statements through the lens of the terms she's defined, it sounds bad compared to vulgar neoliberal sensibilities, and because she herself as a human was less than perfect. It, like every mass media analysis of her or her works I've seen, comes from and is marketed towards a pre-established understanding the Objectivism is wrong.
Also, I'd love to see a source on "everyone who reads" Ayn Rand (or Marx, for that matter, or any author of any written work ever) being toxic sociopaths -- it stands to reason that you'd see her closest adherents, like Onkhar Ghate, Harry Binswanger, Yaron Brook, or Leonard Peikoff being known for acting upon bad ideas if that was all that was in their intellectual orbit, not cherrypicked cases of someone claiming to have read Rand before making questionable or unethical decisions.
No, Ayn Rand and Karl Marx are not remotely comparable.
Not until you can point to dozens of countries that tried to put Rand's principles into action, and show how they failed. Can you?
Saying "true communism has never been tried" is to ignore what happened each time. "We'll do better next time" doesn't persuade unless you have a detailed understanding of how someone like Stalin or Pol Pot comes to power, and some plan more detailed than "we won't do it that way."
Productive values are values that let you sustain your life in it's biological requirements and it's requirements for happiness. (E.g. working as a programmer helps satisfy your need for food/shelter/medicine and also allows you to satisfy your passion for a life worth living in programming ). Ayn Rand shows that the requirements to man's life are objective [external to conscious desire]. There is no subjectivity in your bodies needs for energy (via need for food), there is no subjectivity in the use of reason to accomplish values, and that there is no subjectivity in the requirements for how you reach happiness by the use of your individual judgement to fulfill your life.
Productive actions come in many concretes, but all individuals are unified in that they are actions that satisfy the objective requirements of how individual maximally live.
If productivity were truly subjective, anything could keep us alive and happy. But you cannot eat off playing video games [at least not if you aren't a twitch star ;)], and you cannot find happiness by doing a career you hate.
What is it "to live"? Even more of a mystery is what is it to "maximally live"? You are reducing all of life to a single dimension that you haven't even defined. There may be an objective minimum amount of calories that are necessary to stay alive/awake but I don't think that raw survival is super relevant here; what value is there in intaking a single one beyond that? The things that make us happy at one point in our lives aren't necessarily always going to make us happy, in fact our ideas of what it is to be happy can easily fluctuate throughout our lives, and definitely do fluctuate from person to person. There's very little in this world that is as cut and dry as you seem to imply.
No honest philosophy claims to supplant the special sciences, only serve as a foundation, nor will it tell you exactly what you must do to apply those principles to your life. If rigid dogma is what you expect or seek, I suggest investigating religion instead.
I really don't think I am, I'm trying to tell you that you keep referencing subjective values as if they can be assessed objectively. An example from the comment above is the following subjective value implied as an objective value: a long life is a better life than a not long life. I know it may sound preposterous but for every scenario we could imagine there is always a way to look at an action as a good thing or a bad thing depending on your perspective, even chugging rat poison. Perhaps the results of my death from poisoning is that someone else is able to survive due to the whatever circumstances surround the scenario; in this case I may be balancing the value of my own continued existence against that of someone else's and you want to tell me you there's a framework that is somehow going to guide me into making an objectively correct choice about who lives and dies?
> Objectivism deductively and inductively proves that certain actions are an objective good for the soul as a condition of being human
I disagree with this wholeheartedly.
I have seen zero proof of this and I really don't think it can be proved because the objective universe does not track goodness in any way, it is a concept defined entirely within our minds and does not have an objective physical reference we can test or compare against.