No Virtue in Working Hard

A great swimmer is known for their efficiency to cut through water effortlessly, not for splashing it around. But our neurotic culture has become addicted to splashing. Spending more hours in the water doesn't mean covering more miles.

Evolution doesn't work hard, it takes the easy route. It will decide to reach the smallest fastest route, with least resistance to reach its goals.

Humans on the other hand have crafted a culture to overly respect hard-work. We have moved away from hard-work as a by product of intelligent thinking to hard-work having a virtue of its own.

There is no virtue in working hard without understanding (before-hand or shortly into the process) if its the only route available, if it is the optimum route, the efficient route.

Part of the Japanese Metro rail system was designed using the intelligence of nature. A single-cell slime mold mapped / re-mapped the shortest most efficient ways to the railway stations. Nature likes to conserve energy to feed itself and propagate. It doesn't run into deserted spaces to affirm to its fellow beings that it has worked hard. Nature probably considers working hard as stupid.

We are addicted to hard-work like opium. A façade of effort is used as social proof to broadcast that we are worth existing. People who get things easily are often considered cheats by people who are using their muscle instead of their brains.

Inferior intelligence will always accuse the superior of cheating. - Alan Watts

The feeling of working hard should instead instigate a starting point of enquiry. It should assert clearly that something in this process is wrong, inefficient, unoptimized. How might this be made easy? How might evolution work in this case? What would it do instead of what is currently being done?

Things are not meant to be difficult. The universe is meant to be harmonious. Nature has no place for useless effort.

Idolation vs Creation

One of the realizations as an artist or a creator is that you are not here to adore or respect anyone else's work. You have a job and it is to constantly look for raw materials amongst all the resources life throws at you and use them to express what You feel.

The French call it Bricolage or "the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available"

You might respect a Bob Dylan, a Rothko, a Coppolla or a Rushdie and it might have its place. But respect and adoration is not creation. To create you need to pick things apart and be more interested in what might be of use to what you want to express. The legends might lead the way and be the giants that you step on to go higher. But the work you got to do doesn't involve staring at them from the ground.

I'm an artist man, give me a tuba and I'll get you something out of it - John Lennon

And we are all looking for a tuba to make the sound that echoes the depth of what we want to say.

I am hard pressed to think if true creatives really respect each other in the same idolatry sense that others do. The relationship can be that of amusement or rivalry but to be idolatry is to disrespect one's own capacities and to hang your shoes pre-maturely.

To idolate is to see a hierarchy of yourself to be on a lower rung than that of your heroes. But even more than that, to simply spend your life idolating is to not live your own life fully, as Seneca puts it in his angry rant to Lucillus:

This is why I look on people like this as a spiritless lot - the people who are forever acting as interpreters and never as creators, always lurking in someone else's shadow. They never venture to do for themselves the things they have spent such a long time learning. They exercise their memories on things that are not their own. It is one thing however, to remember, another to know. To remember is to safeguard something entrusted to your memory, whereas to know, by contrast, is actually to make each item your own, and not to be dependent on some original and be constantly looking to see what the master said.....Let's have some difference between you and the books! How much longer are you going to be a pupil? From now on do some teaching as well. Why, after all, should I listen to what I can read for myself? 'The living voice counts for a great deal'. Not when it is just acting in a kind of secretarial capacity, making itself an instrument for what others have to say. - Seneca

In a culture of follows and likes, manufactured and shoved down our throats and up our bottoms, its hard to take the time and respect that we need to believe in ourselves to create something unique. We spend more time consuming than with ourselves. We have all the tools in the world to broadcast but are numb to what we want to say.

The uniqueness of your soul can come through only when you listen to it and tend to it and express it.

Do what nobody else can do, except for you - Wim Wenders

I believe what Wim means here is to learn from everyone else but use it to the service of You. In doing so you create that which nobody else can.

It doesn't matter how great someone is or was that you can replicate. We are not here to amplify other's lives, rather pick pieces of them and amplify our own lived reality.

A man who follows someone else not only does not find anything, he is not even looking......The men who pioneered the old routes are leaders, not our masters. Truth lies open to everyone. - Seneca

A break from ourselves

Giving ourselves a break from ourselves is the biggest endeavor that everyone undertakes, some use substances, some relationships, some work, some games, some go on bike tours, etc.

We sometimes term it as escape and look down upon it. But as creatures with so little to do in life as their purpose and capable of seemingly infinite energy in comparison, we are like young dogs who by the end of the day have to expend their energy so as to not explode. Like it or not, we will inevitably end up doing some or the other tasks which to our core is totally unnecessary.

Most of the things that we engage in, right from frivolous social media, to what David Graeber calls 'Bullshit Jobs' are nothing but ways to get away from ourselves. A self that is empty and meaningless subjected to a boredom that has been created by the time expanse that is forced upon us to live with.

Faced with this boredom and the increasing lifespan that we keep gifting ourselves we invent systems (or believe in existing ones) and make ourselves a part of it. We give ourselves an identity and we fight tooth and nail for it. We create differences, feuds, religions, politics, businesses of inequality and wars to feel on top of things. We try to give ourselves unattainable long term goals, most of them that stretch beyond our lifespan and make ourselves part of projects that are extremely challenging.

An illusion of our future, to rule the systems that we are part of (or keep going ahead in the hierarchy) keeps us away from the living. In our fear of noticing that we are dying everyday we subject ourselves to an eternal death that resides in our minds in the form of plans for a future that doesn't exist.

This is not to say that these plans don't work or we have to be single-mindedly focused on death and be paralyzed. This is only to say that the plans of the future are to serve living in the present. Just by themselves, they belong not, to the living.

Every endeavor is a game that we invent (or be a part of), they don't necessarily exist beyond the entertainment of our mind. To be cautious, that these games allow us a present that is loving, harmonious and joyful is to live wisely.