From: murphyg@Software.Mitel.COM (Gary Murphy)
Newsgroups: alt.support,misc.jobs.misc
Subject: Re: life and work
Date: 19 Aug 92 15:55:37 GMT
	<1992Aug6.174731.12324@eskimo.celestial.com> <Bt6vGx.4BF@news.udel.edu>
Organization: Applications Software II, MITEL Corporation, Kanata, Ontario,
	Canada
In-reply-to: bew@brahms.udel.edu's message of 18 Aug 92 17:05:21 GMT

In article <Bt6vGx.4BF@news.udel.edu> bew@brahms.udel.edu (Ben Williams) writes:
	   I hope that Bob Black's essay, "The Abolition of Work" talks about
   things we should all be talking about.  Such as the way our society makes us
   all feel worthless and degraded if we aren't "working".   

Patent nonsense (I mean that in the nicest possible way ;-)

Who is this society?  No one can _make_ you _feel_, they can only set
you up; there are plenty of people out there who feel no remorse for not
working, others quite happy to be contributing to running the social
machine, others quite happily hacking down precious rainforest.  There
seems to be little evidence for any cut-and-dried cause and effect.

   We are all born
   guilty (is it perhaps the Christian "original sin" turned into the service
   of the capitalistic mega-machine known as America). And what ultimately does
   this Work we must all do to be able to redeem ourselves accomplish:  the
   destruction of the natural world, the turning of it into artifacts that allow
   us to escape.

More nonsense.  Here's an exercise for you, and since you have the time,
I hope you will try it.  At your next meal, before you begin eating,
consider 20 people who's labours have made that meal possible.  You need
not know their name to know who they are, and you can trace back
arbitrarily far, to even the person who cleared the field the farmer now
works to raise the grain in the bread or the person who designed the
tractor that pulled out the stumps (or raised the horse, if the field is
that old).  Even your supermarket must have someone who put the food on
the shelf for you to leasurely peruse, and the building itself had an
architect, a foreman (gender non-specific), and a project go-fer.  As
you eat, with each bite, thank another person on your list.  The next
time you play, use 20 _new_ people.

The world is not nearly so one-sided as you paint it ...

   What?  The dinning noise of the mega-machine going about its
   business of destroying the world.  Its seems to me that the more people who
   choose (or are forced to) not work, the better are the chances of the human
   race surviving (note to prospective employers - just a little joke, eh :-).

Global hermitage is no solution.  But I will offer this: an economist
once calculated nature's investment in each gallon of gasoline would put
the cosmic-energy accounting cost at $1,000,000 (1980) per gallon!  It
is certainly cheaper to encourage everyone _not_ to commute.  If you are
interested in the alternatives (and also some more alarming statistics
on the progress of industrialization, I highly recommend R.Buckminster
Fuller's "Grunch of Giants")

   quit your job (if you are lucky enough to have one) and walk down the
   street and think, I feel OK about my life, about who I am and what I am.

Why not?  I've done this several times, sometimes because the job wasn't
worth the trouble, because I'd been asked to do things unethical, and
once because of problems at home that required my full-time presence.

   Just don't talk to any of your friends.  They might ask you what you have
   been "doing" lately...

All my friends know I am always in need of a job that doesn't interfere
with my work ;-)  May I ask this (since this is alt.support): where do
YOU _want_ to be?  How do you want the world to remember you and what
achievements do you want to leave behind you?  Given these lists, what
can you do today toward these goals?

   Ben (sorry, I tend to rant sometimes).

No need to be sorry, Ben; we are not responsible for how we feel, only
for what we do, and what you have done by sharing your views here is to
open the floor for other with your concerns and those like myself who
want to share their ideas of a way out.  Thanks!

--
Gary Lawrence Murphy - Gary.Murphy@software.mitel.COM - (613) 592-2122 x3709
          "Forget about trying to cure yourself." --- Morita
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