When work is mere work, when it’s not naturally prayerful, not naturally communal, when your grandparents and children are not a part of it in some way, when it’s fragmented from your existence so that your co-workers are in a separate communal category from your family and friends, or when earning a paycheck dominates your waking hours and you are not free until five o’clock, this pattern, to me, has something dead in it. […]
In the traditional Ladakhi culture, writes Helena Norberg-Hodge in her book, Ancient Futures, work and festivity are united:
Even during the harvest season, when the work lasts long hours, it is done at a relaxed pace that allows an eighty-year-old as well as a young child to join in and help. People work hard, but at their own rate, accompanied by laughter and song. The distinction between work and play is not rigidly defined.
I have no problem idealizing a traditional culture. Of course individuals have surely been flawed wherever they’ve shown up. But industrial culture as a culture is so extremely de-graded, probably like civilizational cultures in general, that the search for any particular good takes us outside of it. We require inspiration and ideals to make our way out of industrial work, and the variety of traditional cultures can suggest patterns of daily life that match our own intuitions and deepest longings. […]
In seeking a different vessel for work, I suppose I always come back to subsistence work, though not in the meager sense of merely meeting one’s basic needs, which is actually the secondary definition of “subsistence.” The primary definition is “real being: existence,” which aligns with the meanings of the word’s various Latin roots: “actual existence, real being,” “substance, reality,” “stand still or firm.“ The word is related to the Greek “hypostasis, meaning “foundation, substance, real nature,”“that which settles at the bottom.”
Subsistence work, then, means existence work, or work that makes you a real being; foundational work, or work that makes you stand firm. And what work makes us into real beings? What work helps us stand firm? Certainly the answer is not work that turns time, labor, and nature into profit, that grinds all of Creation into raw economic material […]
In a culture that works like a machine, most of us cannot give our full attention to working like humans.
Degraded as it is, the culture has us.
But while subsistence work isn’t attainable for us, it’s the sane orientation for those trying to course-correct away from industrial work. There are never solutions to machine culture, only abandonment of its strange ideals and a walking toward reality.
Also, I will be getting myself one of these t-shirts:
Machine culture says this: No work, no play.
The pithy threat means that if you want leisure that is mere leisure, you earn it through work that is mere work.
When she was 10 my daughter gave me a t-shirt that she’d painted with fabric paint to say this: “All work, all play.” I don’t think she was attempting with this Christmas gift a grand statement about culture; she was simply saying something that sounded right to her ears. And she was sharing a gift.
He closes the essay with this: “In a culture that uncreates the human through work that is mere work, what else can you do but play within the pattern like this…? … In a culture where work generally desecrates human experience, to giggle while you kneel in the soil and harvest tomatoes is to undermine the machine. In a small way it is to recreate, to truly recreate.”
(See also this reflection from Jeremy Abel.)