Work and play
Aug. 23rd, 2005 01:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avevale_intelligencerThoughts arising from comments to one of ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
telynor’s posts, about the attitude of people whose lives revolve around their day jobs to those who pursue their creative dreams:
Everyone’s heard (or used) the phrase, of anyone who for whatever reason doesn’t have a regular job: “They think the world owes them a living.” This phrase (yes, I know it’s a sentence, and quite a severe one as well, with no time off for good behaviour) bothers the hell out of me. Partly this is because I am by nature idle and hate being made to feel guilty for not loving to work, partly because I have a knee-jerk adverse reaction to the hardline-Heinlein life-is-real-life-is-Algernon work-or-starve gung-ho worldview. Neither of these reactions is significant, both being flaws in my character that I probably won’t succeed in shifting at this late stage.
Partly, though, it bothers me because I dislike the idea of seeing life as a matter of debts and obligations. Clearly, to people who say this, it is a fact that, if the world doesn’t owe me a living, then obviously I must owe it one. I must pay back my life, in daily increments, to strangers who already get the benefit of the lives of many others. There is no element of choice. It’s what you do. Taking time out to be creative, especially unpaid, or even worse simply to play, is wasting something that doesn’t actually belong to me, that was mortgaged when I was born. And there’s no upper limit to the repayments. Even when I get too old to work for a living (however that will be defined by the time it happens) there will be this sense of indebtedness. I should be grateful for whatever microscopic amount of pension I get, because it’s really charity and I should be doing something in return.
This is a rich planet, as John Brunner said many years ago, and I live in one of the richest societies on it, and we are all bowed down by this culture of debt. But life is a gift. It’s not owed; it’s given. Talents are gifts. Strength and wit and even beauty are gifts, with no price tag. And I wonder how it would be if ours were a culture of giving, rather than owing: if we were brought up to believe that we are all immensely rich in ourselves, and that the way to make the best of our riches is to give them to the world, as the world gives to us. Give our time and our energy to help others, as we are given the means to live. Give of our talent to make the world even more beautiful, as others make it more beautiful for us. Give our lives, not because we owe them, but because we have them.
Stupidly idealistic, yes, probably. But do we begrudge our efforts and our time because we feel them being demanded of us, as of right, and that less than the equitable value is being tendered in return? Have we learned to look at the world as a marketplace, where everything has to be haggled over, bought cheap and sold dear, as if there were some scarcity? Can this view be changed, and would the world grind to a shuddering halt if it were?
telynor’s posts, about the attitude of people whose lives revolve around their day jobs to those who pursue their creative dreams:Everyone’s heard (or used) the phrase, of anyone who for whatever reason doesn’t have a regular job: “They think the world owes them a living.” This phrase (yes, I know it’s a sentence, and quite a severe one as well, with no time off for good behaviour) bothers the hell out of me. Partly this is because I am by nature idle and hate being made to feel guilty for not loving to work, partly because I have a knee-jerk adverse reaction to the hardline-Heinlein life-is-real-life-is-Algernon work-or-starve gung-ho worldview. Neither of these reactions is significant, both being flaws in my character that I probably won’t succeed in shifting at this late stage.
Partly, though, it bothers me because I dislike the idea of seeing life as a matter of debts and obligations. Clearly, to people who say this, it is a fact that, if the world doesn’t owe me a living, then obviously I must owe it one. I must pay back my life, in daily increments, to strangers who already get the benefit of the lives of many others. There is no element of choice. It’s what you do. Taking time out to be creative, especially unpaid, or even worse simply to play, is wasting something that doesn’t actually belong to me, that was mortgaged when I was born. And there’s no upper limit to the repayments. Even when I get too old to work for a living (however that will be defined by the time it happens) there will be this sense of indebtedness. I should be grateful for whatever microscopic amount of pension I get, because it’s really charity and I should be doing something in return.
This is a rich planet, as John Brunner said many years ago, and I live in one of the richest societies on it, and we are all bowed down by this culture of debt. But life is a gift. It’s not owed; it’s given. Talents are gifts. Strength and wit and even beauty are gifts, with no price tag. And I wonder how it would be if ours were a culture of giving, rather than owing: if we were brought up to believe that we are all immensely rich in ourselves, and that the way to make the best of our riches is to give them to the world, as the world gives to us. Give our time and our energy to help others, as we are given the means to live. Give of our talent to make the world even more beautiful, as others make it more beautiful for us. Give our lives, not because we owe them, but because we have them.
Stupidly idealistic, yes, probably. But do we begrudge our efforts and our time because we feel them being demanded of us, as of right, and that less than the equitable value is being tendered in return? Have we learned to look at the world as a marketplace, where everything has to be haggled over, bought cheap and sold dear, as if there were some scarcity? Can this view be changed, and would the world grind to a shuddering halt if it were?
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no subject
Date: 2005-08-23 04:24 pm (UTC)Second, I know lots of people whose day jobs satisfy, at least to some extent, their creative urges; this includes lots of jobs that don't automatically appear to include creative elements.
You don't "owe the world a living". But you do owe yourself a living; to use your skills and abilities to feed and house and clothe yourself, and do whatever else you want. You can do that by getting a job, or by making marvellous creative things and selling them to people, or by going and finding some common ground in a warm place, and a couple of goats, and start knitting the wool into ponchos. I don't much mind.
What I do mind is people who could do one of those things, but instead spend their time seeking their inner creative muppet while I pay taxes to support them. Though even so, I don't much mind people doing a little of this for a while; lives are long and things balance out. Where I lose faith is with people who see no reason to spend time toiling for the common good. Life *is* hard; we do have scarcity and poverty even in this rich country of ours, and however much you may wish to believe that a few rich people are hoarding enough wealth to allow us all to live luxuriously without working, it isn't true.
Having said all that, fandom is a potlatch economy in many ways. As an example, I was on a panel at Interaction where some of the panellists were expressing astonishment that people would wander around wikipedia correcting minor errors in a sort of litter-picking way without thought of personal gain; but most of the audience did this or other similar online tasks in a way that we described as 'digital citizenship'. There are lots of things that I do because I get a feeling of satisfaction having done them; that's the primary benefit rather than external egoboo.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-24 07:23 am (UTC)I am a creative: I write, I knit, I make jewelry, I draw. Since none of the above will feed me and pay my bills at this point, I work.
What I think is that it should not be so difficult to support oneself that one does not have any time to create. But I do think that if I am going to take up space on this earth it is my responsiblity to maintain myself, and not that of my friends or my country's government.