And I have a question!
What is work?
What is work?
Work-e-e-e-e
Is it giving up?
'Cause that's not how you raised me, yeah.
Does it make sense? Totally. Actually it seems to make more sense than the original lines, written by two guys (who gives a rat’s ass on their names now?) for a song played by Haddaway (now we talk!)
Now I will launch a debate with myself by raising questions and answering them. And in the process faking the surprise (Honestly, I didn't expect such a question...) You wish. Of course it’s going to be lots of bias here, because I pretty much know what I will ask and what I will answer, but my goal is to bring you in that place where you start thinking by yourself and launch your own debates. And sure, faking the surprise (Hmm, this guy I'm debating with is smarter that I initially thought...)
Is it work something we need?
Definitely. For multiple reasons. First off we need a steady income to cover our basic or less basic needs. If you have taken an early morning walk in the woods (and I do that a lot!) you will see the living creatures doing their daily job, the only job they'll ever have: looking up for food. That’s all they seem to do. It’s unpaid work that covers their nourishment needs. Late in the summer they start building nests or shelters for the winter, and that’s work too. Our needs are a little bit more sophisticated, and since we are past the point where we see food, we grab food (most of these actions being now under the criminal code of any country), we surrounded ourselves with a system of laws, procedures and regulations that allows the physically weak to feel strong and the strong to feel weak. Through our work we create wealth for ourselves and for others (including the community, they say.) With the income we get we pay for food, clothes, shelter, health, police, social services, environment and media poisoning, lower cultural standards and (very, very important!) the right to have undisturbed sex in the tranquility of our own bedrooms.
Do we like work?
The overwhelming majority of us says “no” and they have their reasons: work is tiring, challenging, boring, unfair, unjust, etc. They are right: work is all of these and more. Work is what remains after we filtered out through gradual elimination all the good intentions and dreams we had during our formation years. The workplaces hire common people, with average intelligence and skills, and a total lack of sense of humour. Everyone needs to work some place, right? Because everybody needs to live and reproduce her or his life in their offspring. And even if, by some miracle, you’d be able to put together in the same workplace a bunch of brilliant guys (why not geniuses?), the result of their work would be poor, if not catastrophique, for the simpel reason that they're going to hate each other to death. The personalities clash will be the norm. For these brilliant to genial guys the idea of "team" is still to be invented. For now all they know is “Me, me, me.”
Can we live without work?
No. Even the people who keep repeating that they hate work and they’d do better in a god forsaken island picking up tropical fruits (take for instance the Commonwealth of Dominica), they either lie or they fool themselves. Nobody can live without work, one of the reasons being that God created us as enterprising creatures. We cannot rest more than eight hours a day, we cannot spend more than thirty minutes looking up at the deep, blue sky, we cannot sit on a chair for more than ten minutes looking without purpose in a distant corner of the room: we have to do something with our hands or with our brains. If there's nothing to do, then start counting the sheep in your mind: "three million one sheep, three million two sheep..." That’s the way we are been built. Like the beavers, our soul mates when it comes to the idea of enetrprising creatures. While the beaver supports a well defined natural purpose, what we do is not necessarily good: could be total non-sense or plain evil, but even evil is the result of hard work.
Why do we complain about work?
Because it takes too much time of our day time. Most of us work at least two hours over the statutory eight hours of work. That makes it 10 out of 24, or almost 42%. If we subtract the 10 hours for sleep, showering, eating, looking for the car keys or the tv remote, we remain with a bare 4 hours for us, or 16.67%. And what do we do with those 4 hours? The lucky ones spend a portion of it on sex and entertaining (sex with wife or watching crappy TV shows), the rest only entertaining (watching crappy TV shows.) But let’s consider for a second the scenario where we to shouldn’t spend 10 hours working. What would we do with this time? Entertainment, mostly. Thinking about bad things and make them happen. Better being worked to death. Literally.
