Daily High Culture # 9: What if I Don't Like Work?

Classical Rebellion

“I don't like work... but I like what is in work - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself, not for others - which no other person can ever know.” Joseph Conrad I must agree with Joseph Conrad, the author of Heart of Darkness, on this one. I don’t like work either, except for its benefits. I’d never considered work from this perspective but it does make sense. I certainly don’t find myself or my own reality while I’m watching Game of Thrones or The Mandalorian. Those are alternate realities that are the result of someone else’s work. We can, and do, lose ourselves in alternate realities, regardless of whatever truth or artistic merit they contain. I do enjoy the realities that others, such as Beethoven or J.R.R. Tolkien have put forth but as I consider Conrad’s quote, I have found out more about myself by doing work than by consuming the work of another. We could be looking at these alternate realities because our work has revealed that our personal realities are dull and uninspiring. Conrad did not say that we will discover our personal reality and be thrilled. It could be that through work we realize that we hate our reality. That information gives a chance to change our reality but how do we do that? A good start would be to change our work. One option is to take the perspective of others, as we’re currently doing with this episode and Joseph Conrad’s quote, and apply it to my work. When we do work any work, it is an act of self-discovery. Manuel labor might be some of the best work for self-discovery. How many ideas have you had while washing the car or folding laundry? The simplicity of manual labor is almost meditative. The idea of changing our work is a little bit scary. Our vocational work does define us in a very real way. We are certainly more than our work but we aren’t not our work—if that makes sense. I like that Conrad emphasized the personal quality of the reality we can discover through work. I would say that his final line could be modified to “which no other person can ever fully know.” By writing Heart of Darkness, Conrad let us know something of his personal reality but we most definitely do not know if completely. I’ll mention, just as a reminder, that when we do work, inspiration follows. The piece of music for this quote is Brahms’s Symphony No. 1. Brahms claimed that he worked on it for 21 years from the first sketches to the final touches. He had previously started a symphony but it became his Piano Concerto No. 1. As the years went by, the musical world wondered why Brahms hadn’t written a symphony. Brahms was all about work and the fact of the matter is that it took him 21 years of work to find his symphonic reality. The piece of art for this The Potato Harvest by French artist Jean-François Millet. Millet used rural life as the subject matter for most of his paintings. How many generations of humanity found their reality in the basic labor of surviving? I feel grateful to be living in an era where my work can exceed raw survival. Yet I do find a certain nobility in the idea of laboring in order to survive the winter. Do I want to be in that situation? No, no I don’t! However, I find nobility in manual labor and that’s a theme we’ll explore with Tolstoy and Wittgenstein.