Hard work makes me feel full of aches and filled with pain. So full. So filled.
PROMPT: Hard Work
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Tag Archives: Work
PROMPT: Listen
I don’t. I could listen to instrumental music while writing or doing other mental work, but I can’t have anything with words / lyrics involved. It’s distracting and can warp my writing.
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PROMPT: Career Plan
Hah. That ship has sailed. But I could say that it’s to still have something to offer when machines / AI can do all productive tasks better and / or faster than humans — i.e. to be able to convey something of the art of being human. Even though, I suspect, I won’t be around to see that day, it will be catastrophic to the species if people don’t figure these things out in advance — i.e. if we don’t figure out human roles and purpose in a post-human industrial landscape.
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PROMPT: Job… for a day
“Maker of pies” leaps to mind, but then it occurs to me that any baker who worked at it for just a day would be the worst. It seems to me that any job that is interesting would be one that a person would be terrible at if that person did it for only a day. Conversely, any job one could successfully do for just one day would be tedious and unrewarding.
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The Oldest & the Last [Free Verse]
Kipling called prostitution
The world's oldest profession.
Now, I'm pretty sure that it
Will be the last, as well:
The last professional endeavor --
The last profitable activity --
That humans do better than
Machines.
Whores will be the last holdouts
To shift from being workers
To being Artists of Humanity. . .
Or - maybe - they will be
The first in that, as well.
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PROMPT: Job
To pick nits, I think the defining characteristic of a job is that one earns money for one’s time and effort. Otherwise, it’s volunteering or a hobby — both of which are fine activities in which I’ve participated over the years — but they’re not “jobs.” In the case of a hobby, one should do it because one loves it and / or gains from it. In the case of volunteering, if you’re doing the work only because you love the activity, you’ve probably missed the point of the undertaking.
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PROMPT: Five
Daily writing prompt
When you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I think that would have been “race car driver,” between my “cowboy” and “independently-wealthy-masked-vigilante” phases. (I did NOT know how jobs worked.)
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PROMPT: Technology
Technology has changed everything, for good and for ill. It’s the source of our vast growth in productivity, but also at the heart of our modern crises (e.g. I’m almost certain that no caveman ever experienced “imposter syndrome.” But like other crises of modernity, I suspect that technological dependence and an ever-continuing trend toward ultra-specialization are its cause.)
I count myself fortunate to be of an age to (probably) miss the (rapidly approaching) day when machines and artificial intelligence do all “productive tasks” better, faster, and with far less energy consumption than a human being. I don’t think most of humanity will be prepared for that day, and it will – in all likelihood – go down catastrophically. [I think we’re seeing the cracks in the dam already.]
I spend more and more time with the only technology-proof sector of which I’m aware: building a more capable human being.
I believe if every person spent some time learning skills like primitive living (sustainable wilderness survival skills) or unarmed martial arts (that train against armed opponents) society would be much better off. I pick these two as examples of skill sets that give practitioners a deep confidence in themselves [not in themselves + technologies that they can’t build, can’t fix, and which they don’t really understand.] I suspect that the core self-empowerment that would result would ease away much of the general shittiness of character we are increasingly prone to see in the world, shittiness that — like all shittiness — is ultimately rooted in fear.
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PROMPT: Hard Work
In what ways does hard work make you feel fulfilled?
Presuming there is a product or productive outcome, therein lies the fulfillment.
If the work is Sisyphean, it chafes my preference for wu wei.
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DAILY PHOTO: Rainy Day Labors
Image
Tiger Riding for Beginners 