A few mornings ago, I was in one of those blah moods, not really looking forward to doing the same old bullshit yet again (i.e., The Tedium) to accomplish ... what? It made me think on my drive to my morning dawn patrol run/walk about how purposeless and meaningless my daily work/life feels. It's like I want to get to the end of this period and accomplish The Thing, but then I wondered what even is The Thing? Because even when I finish working for money, I still have to answer the question "What am I going to do today?"
I read over and over again that people who are retired can struggle to find a sense of meaning and purpose, so many of them turn to volunteer work or they get involved with their church or some other community group. And so that got me thinking about what meaning and purpose is. And I went down the path of thinking that meaning requires an interpretation and purpose requires intention, and both of these verb-to-noun morphemes require a doer. At first I wondered if these doers had to be conscious, but then I think it applies throughout the animal kingdom and even across the plant kingdom to some extent as well. Animals hunt or graze intentionally when they are hungry; their purpose is to eat; they follow trails, interpreting scents or movement or whatnot along the way. Plants can grow towards the light. Perhaps consciousness occurs along a spectrum, but regardless of the depth of that rabbit hole, it's clear that intention and purpose don't require consciousness.
But then what is the difference between light-seeking plants and hungry lions and human office workers? Oftentimes what we humans do when we discuss meaning and purpose is we adopt much grander geographies and timescales than "sunlight patch of forest floor" or "local food source", and "now" or "in the next hour". Reminds me of Tolstoy's struggling with this idea of trying to map our finite lives to an infinite universe or David Foster Wallace's "constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing." Humans want our actions to have universal impact and also eternal impact. It struck me that perhaps this is a consequence of not merely being an animal that can have intention and can interpret its surroundings, but it's borne of humans being social, cooperative animals. Having a common sense of purpose and a common interpretation of surroundings furthers survival. In short, having a sense of community is important, more important than the self through which any individual human can only experience the world. This leads to a constant struggle in an individual between the localized self and the larger community, even if it seems this struggle has become more and more blurred.
This theme of mission, purpose and community has been used with great effect by nation states, religions and now corporations for millenia. My corporate employer has a dumbass mission statement that's intended to inspire us to "go above and beyond in service to our customers", to work harder than we otherwise might than if we were merely collecting paychecks. But why must there be more? When did "I'm going to provide for my family" become "I'm going to change the world"? Being inundated with these messages from the state, the church and the employer, one can't help but be influenced in thinking that if there's cognitive dissonance, it's not society that's wrong - it's you.
Companies now talk about this in terms of "employee engagement" - workers who are "engaged" in their work are happier, more productive, more profitable, etc. Of course employers have massive incentives to have "engaged" workers and to not focus too much on the question of how the extra value created by engaged vs "quiet quitting" employees is shared. An employer is interested in value capture, not with sharing the benefits of an "engaged" employee with the employee. To me, that seems exploitative. After all, we are told, if we're not "engaged", there's something wrong with us. This leads me to lend a skeptical eye to such messages.
Perhaps, as noted in another thread, this is a consequence of cultural / societal values and pressures:
In addition to the American-cultural productivity / work ethic angle (in addition to a recent thread here titled "How efficient/productive are you?", there was even a recent thread here titled: "Optimizing Sex", so you know, this impulse seems to run pretty deep), I wonder if some of this need for "engagement" is fed by our constant modern need to be mentally engaged or entertained or stimulated. Our smart phones are gateway drugs to not having patience for doing boring tasks when the task's purpose is not to "be engaged" or "change the world", but merely to hunt and gather food; to gather sticks for the fire; to make minor repairs to the shelter. Perhaps the so-called "crisis of meaning" is more of an attention deficit disorder brought on by this constant need for stimulation.zbigi wrote: ↑Wed Aug 10, 2022 3:16 pmWhat's also interesting, the people in Poland don't largely have "hobbies" per se. They may putter around in the garden, constantly fix their old (and only!) car or go fishing, but they rarely think of it as their official hobby, as people in the West do. I suspect the Western approach may be a fallout of the protestant work ethic, where even the things people do for fun have to fall under something that can be framed in terms of productivity ("he's working to get better at his hobby").
In any event, I come back to this idea of why must we always be searching for meaning from our jobs, our hobbies, our relationships, our every minute of every day? Perhaps if my reach exceeds my grasp, it's not the grasp that requires adjustment. Notwithstanding the (culturally inflicted? genetically imposed as a specimen of a social, collaborative species?) impulse to find meaning in anything and everything, I can refocus my attention. Sometimes, all I'm doing at work is earning money. Sometimes, all I'm doing at play is playing. Sometimes, all I'm doing is ... filling up the hours. So rather than buying into this ... marketing angle? that I need to have some grand, universal purpose ... what if I just accept the fact that this life is but a fart in the universal wind? The question for the fart is not "what eternal, universal significance is there to my actions and my life?" but rather simply "What am I going to do today?"
What. Am. I. Going. To. Do. Today? Such a simple question, to be asked of anyone and everyone, every day, regardless of their social status, their job status, their family status, their hopes and dreams, their FI status, their values. Nothing will ever change this question. There is no "The Thing" that makes this question redundant. There is no achievement that makes this question irrelevant. There is no crossing the finish line that finally (and with finality) answers the question. Every. Single. Day. We have to do something, regardless of what yesterday saw achieved. The only question is what?