JONTILLMAN.COM | part of the problem since 1976

This seems like a stupid question, doesn’t it. We work because we must, because we have to “earn a living”. Right? The economic truth of life is harsh and brutal, and only hard work and sacrifice will provide us with any measure of security or leaisure, right? From a young age we are indoctrinated with the Puritan idea that suffering is required to redeem our “original sin” as human beings and that “hard work” was not only our curse because of this “original sin”, but that hard work is both the main factor in producing material wealth and that it is character building and morally good.

Consider for a moment, the mind-boggling stupidity of saying that in order to be happy you must be unhappy. Ridiculous, isn’t it? Now consider that that idea is the central theme in your life. It drives everything you do. That silly statement is responsible for the near-religious adoration of “retirement” that you have. It is responsible for the deification of your weekends and your dread of Mondays. Truly, Puritanism is the national religion in America.

We work because we believe that we have no right to be happy, or even alive. We work because we feel guilty for every pleasure we experience, because we are infinitely undeserving, according to the Puritans. We don’t work because we enjoy it, or because we are fulfilled by it, unless you count not feeling guilty as “fulfillment”. We work because we have unconciously become Puritans - laziness is devilish and hard work is the “road of the righteous”. Of course, given the righteousness of our work penance, we should enjoy it, right? By happily accepting our punishment in the form of long hours and lost sleep we demonstrate our moral fortitude - we are one of the blessed.

The saddest thing about all of this guilt and anguish, this arbitrary concept of original sin demanding unpleasant work, is that it is completely unnecessary. Religious masochism is not the only, or even the best, way to motivate ourselves to accomplish whatever it is that needs accomplishing. Of course, we are unwilling to entertain any such ideas, deriding all of them as “communism” or “anti-capitalist”, when most of the alternatives are more pure expressions of the free market ideal than anything that has happened in Western culture since the Industrial Revolution.

(I understand that I cannot simply make that final statement and walk away, but it deserves its own post, so it will arrive tomorrow.)