Why do we work? It came to my mind just now, and it’s not strange: I just told my boss that I’ll quit my job yesterday, and it’s not strange that a person who doesn’t want to work will think something about not to work.
So we didn’t have to work, and we didn’t have such abundance of goods at that time. We plant the seed, wait for the crops to grow, and feed on them. Even further, once we didn’t farm, and feed on the natural environment, although that we were hungry and vunerable.
But did work (and industrialization) make our lives better? We’re feeding more people, we’re consuming more luxuries, but does that mean we’re living better lives? Not too long ago, most people would say yes, because everything was “growing”, and everyone seemed to have a chance to make something huge. Except that we didn’t, and now suddenly everyone realizes that they’re not happy, and they start to question the “system”, like me.
Poverty has not been eliminated yet, but most people have the privilege to stay away from it. So does work save those living in poverty? They’ll be saved someday, but I wonder whether it’s because others are working hard, anyway the gap of wealth is getting bigger every year, and I’m curious that how much money do we really need to eliminate the poverty. The rich just don’t care, maybe they have many reasons (to keep the people fighting for better life!), but ultimately they don’t care. How much money do we need to keep everyone way from poverty, 5 percent of global GDP? If we don’t want to “waste” 5% GDP now, we won’t “waste” them in future.
For those who won’t suffer from poverty, today is still not a good day, and everyone is still suffering from all kinds of suffers. Expensive education, bullshit jobs, and there’s no “hope”, althought I don’t know what “hope” is. It feels like some kind of motivation, something that you can drink energy from, instead of draining energy from you. How do we feel that “energy”, given that we’re fed well and living well?
I have been writing codes for long enough, and sometime I feel like the guy in the , repeating my life for a year and a year. Yes, I’m solving problems for people! That was the motivation, until I realized that there’ll always be problems, and they all come from people that I can’t control, and they really don’t matter. They were just some tiny puzzles that kept me motivated and feel entertained, not something that really fixes. They’re repeating, thus I am repeating. So I want to quit the loop.
There’re so many loops nowadays, you can pick one easily from your parents, your friends, or even some fiction figures on the internet. And you play within the loop, figure out the rules, fight against each other, just to stay in the loop. Luckily you might make it to the “top” of the loop, but that really depends on your viewpoint. So the viewpoint matters too.
How will my colleagues think of me? I’m picky to the solution, I’m stubborn to the problem, and I’m not good at “dealing” with people. Why do we “deal” with people, it sounds like others are predators and preys. Oh yes they’re, the world we live in are constructed by individuals bearing different skills, not communities, not relationships, we are all some kinds of atoms. It’s hard to deal with atoms, you need to understand them, you need to predict their behaviors, all because you have no control or relationship with them. There’s nothing grows naturally, shared by both sides. We don’t communicate, we just command and get commanded. The language starts to vanish, now we have a large collection of fancy buzzwords to get engaged in the control system. Everyone learns them, and I don’t think they really understand them, and I don’t think they share too much opinion on them.
We pretend to know each other, in different workplaces, except that we don’t. We share goals, but we don’t share consensus on the goal. We share language, but we don’t share consensus on the meaning. We speak and repeat speaking just to get things done, and at last we don’t share the joy of achieving, most people don’t understand why we achieve. And I don’t understand, either.
But it’s really easy to make money from something you’re good at and get awarded well by the system, for me it’s coding. Repeat it again and again and I get paid well again and again, why bother quiting the loop? Everything works well until my energy drained and I start to feel disgusted, and I don’t understand where the disgust come from. Is it the unconformatable seat in the office? Is it the occurring stupid questions? Is it the tiredness of communicating trivial details?
Maybe it’s the growth, everything stops growing. People start to design things, even though they don’t know about the problem. People start to polish things, but only by those who really cares about the details. There’s no culture of planting something, waiting for it to grow up, and enjoying the caring and waiting. People set too many targets, those too abstract to express precisely. And yes we need precision to align each other, and no one understand the point of either alignment or precision. They will make someone happy, but most people don’t care, and I don’t care. So I don’t understand why bother with them.
Precision is the enemy of growing. When something grows, any observer will enjoy it, it’s the joy of life. Precision is about control, and there was no control too long ago, it starts to appear when mechines appeared, only machines need precision, because they have no life, they are as static as rocks, although people don’t control rocks.
So here’s the trigger: I have a kid now, and the kid is growing. Compared with the joy of growth, all other things become obsolete and dull. The kid is changing day by day, while the world doesn’t differentiate much from when I was born. And it’s even worser, people once cared about the system, now they only care about the identities. It might be too pessimistic to say “only”, but for the system, what drives the system nowadays is identity. Identity drives the internet and the internet drives the world (see Trump).
So I don’t see the point of work, at least this moment. I want to share the joy with my kid, like what we once shared with each other long time ago. My parents will say no that’s not how it worked, although they’re not much wiser than me, they grew up at a very strange era, and living in a distorted reality distorted their minds. The world was growing rapidly while people in China fight with each other. The world was enjoying the rebirth and abundance while people in China fight with the hunger. The world was dreaming of better system, better future while people in China study Mao speeches. And now the world merged and starts to separate again, the lessons learnt from 1980s in China doesn’t help much with today’s modern life. Maybe the old wisdoms about humanity always work, but people at my parents’ age can’t care less about humanity, the success and happiness comes from everywhere, but humanity seems never played a role in the process.
I want to be a human again, after playing roles in different loops for a long time. The loops runs the world, maybe, who knows? But we’ve build so many stuffs that we’ll never exhaust, it’s time to enjoy them, right? It’s a pity that everyone’s busy building and it become luxury to enjoy what they built. This phenomenon was once called capitalism, once set as everyone’s destiny, until people rise and wrecked the system. We can play with the system, but there should be other ways to play, not just by the loops.