Human beings are creatures who act and engage with
actions, activity, movement………
we do things every single day…
we wake up and we go to work
and we make love and we run traffic signals…
in fact, we do and engage with hundreds of
actions a day…
what we do is try to create value and meaning in those actions…
for example, when I give my wife flowers… that action has value,
giving flowers “means” I love my wife… the action, flower giving,
has value and meaning to me…
we try to give our actions value and meaning…
let us try a thought experiment…
let us think about work and work in a factory or
a factory light… factory light is a supermarket
where checkers stand all day and scan items or
weigh items…as I have done that for over 10 years,
it is something I am rather familiar with…
the reason why factor work is so dehumanizing and so devoid
of meaning is because of the nature of the work…
what meaning or value can I give or create from
scanning bread or cans of corn or weighing apples all day long……
the very repetition of the work means it has no value or meaning, no point
to it…… I cannot create value or meaning out of scanning bread all day long…
and we humans, that is what we do, try to create value and meaning out
of our actions……….
some actions don’t need that… that are of value just by their doing…
for example, playing a game or watching a game has its own value,
its own meaning… when I played baseball, I enjoyed it and it had
value for its own actions… tonight, I watched the SF Giants played
the LA Dodgers in baseball… that act was its own meaning,
it was its own meaning or value……… play and games don’t need to search
for some value or justification…their have value just by their doing…
that activity of playing or watching baseball has some value already…
we don’t need to search for meaning in baseball or in play…
baseball has value and meaning to me already……
we also have value and meaning in the arts…… we don’t need to
find value in the creation of art…we can just engage in art, whatever
art that maybe or we can look at art and we don’t need to find some
external value or meaning in doing or looking at art… doing so
is its own value, meaning… unlike scanning items all day which has
no value or meaning… it is simply busy work… we cannot find
value or meaning in such work as in scanning items all day…
so we try to discover value and meaning in our actions by such means
as the myths and habits and prejudices and superstitions and biases
of our childhood indoctrinations…
work is suppose to have some higher value, but that is a lie, meant
to give us some reason to work…
in our efforts to find meaning and value in all our actions, we
sometimes lie to ourselves…… and pretend that these actions,
or those actions have some value, have some meaning…
but we find as we grow older… that actions we thought
were of value, actions that did have meaning, don’t have value or meaning…
I find work to be of no value or no meaning……
it is a pointless exercise of futility with no value or no meaning in our lives…
we engage in actions all our live and the point of those actions is to
find some value or meaning within them………
Kropotkin