Some recent posts on work and job, here and there, lighted a
bulb on my mind. For every week, 40–48 hours of my most ‘productive’ time is
spent in the workplace. My employer and manager’s views are quite obvious than
the dawn of sunlight at the end of the night: to ever increase my productivity
and gel along with other people who we clubbed together as colleagues, like
chipping in together in our project work like some animals bound by territorial
pissing. Working 40–48 hours is quite a long time, isn’t it?
Is livelihood what defines our life? I don’t think so. Financial
things and philosophy are strange bed-partners. There are several reasons for
this statement. Livelihood is not life. For that matter, no fragmented parts of
human existence can define what a life is. No politics. No education. No
science. No religion. Not even our beliefs. None of them can explain why we are
living. We need to understand the ‘whole’ to know the essence and its parts.
So, to put it bluntly, life is not work. To hell to those people who pray work
is worship. Forty to forty-eight hours are more than enough, but not enough to
give us an essence of life. And what are we without a life?
So reassuring it was when I read Oscar Wilde, when he wrote,
“Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.” Why cannot we
live without work? Work, I mean, going to office every day — worrying about the
salary, running for paying the bills, brooding for the sake of future. I want
to go back to the state of nature. But since it is not possible, I would keep
searching for the alternatives to find more meaning in our existence. Please
don’t tell me it would be hard after ‘killing’ more time at the workplace than
where it really matters. Surely, this world is so full of contradiction. Perhaps,
the sustenance of life, in or out of 40 hours, is our work even if life is not
merely sustenance.
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