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Why Art and Play are Essential and Work Is (Nearly Completely) Worthless
If you want to understand the good life, you need to turn our insane civilization upside down.
We are like drug addicts, and despite our moralistic society’s claim to condemn drugs, it peddles them enthusiastically.
Yes, there’s oxycontin and fentanyl. But the real drug they are peddling is rampant consumerism. We are supposed to want stuff, more stuff, all the time. We are supposed to spend every waking moment buying more, or working to earn money to buy more.
This endless hunger for stuff — useless crap, actually — is the true religion of our civilization.
In our civilization, the Earth, and all the life on it, are merely resources to be exploited. Humans are human resources. Life, including human life, including YOUR life, has no intrinsic value. Your life is a means to an end, to make some undeserving asshole richer. As a reward, you get to retain a tiny portion of what you create.
It’s effing absurd.
I never get tired of this quote by Charles Bukowski, the bard of reality. He wrote:
“How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 8:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a…
