Work and money from a psychonauts view

[.Felix.]

The only bill I could imagine would be mortgage. I wanna grow most of my food anyway, and would love it if i lived without electricity. I don't need any of the terrible things modern society considers "comforts," but once im out of high school im going to do my best to get away from all of it..

That sounds cool.

Just hold on and do your part in society right now. There are a lot of negatives, I know, but there are twice as many positives. You just have to have perspective.

%)

 

[Xorkoth]

I love programming, robotics specifically, but even when I'm doing it I cant get over the fact that its pointless and means nothing.

I would love lo live "off the grid." I wish i could start a colony or something of the sort like that, but it just sounds to fantastic..

What makes it pointless? If you look at the grand scheme of things, the fact our lives are blips, a speck of dust on a speck of dust on a speck of dust on a speck of dust, into infinity, anything we do is pointless.

But the fact that we experience anything at all in that brief clip of time is amazing. To love is the point, to enjoy and to love. You say you love programming. I say, then, that programming is not pointless. Far from it... programming is one of the things that makes your life have a point at all.

 

[bighooter]

working sucks ass

Im 22 have no qualifications other than the basic school ones, I have no career and work in a crappy job putting stuff onto a conveyor belt 30hours a week.

Minimum wage has got my adrenaline caged... I feel like my soul is getting destroyed every time I work.

I want to go to college and learn a trade but I need the money to pay for the course... and that means working. Crap state of affairs and it seems like im wishing my days away but hey thats life. We're a slave to the wage then we die.

 

[Iodjini_dk]

I study at the university. I dont have a great need for a job because studying here is free, hell, we even get paid for going to school here.

Naturally it feels very meaningful for me to go to school. I love it. Though im getting a job alongside my studies after Ive finished my bachelor degree. At the moment I have no motivation for taking a job which doesnt require some sort of relevant education.

I worked for 4 years in a department store, but that sucked ass. So many fake people only talking about sale numbers and celebrities. Not to mention the whole customer interaction. Just wasnt me. It was a relief quitting that job, but I guess I managed at the time I had it.

For shorter periods (ie. a few years) one can be able to cope with a shitty job. But I think you owe it to yourself finding something more meaningful to do. Unless youre tied down by responsabilities as being a provider for a family or similar, then personal goals and interests should come in second place I think.

 

[Mjäll]

You could try to use the perspective shift to your advantage. Perhaps it's not necessary to think about nihilism and how we are all really apes when trying to work.

 

[invert]

I love programming, robotics specifically, but even when I'm doing it I cant get over the fact that its pointless and means nothing.

'Meaning' is something that humans do. We ascribe meaning to things. Nothing, in my view, has an inherent meaning or point to it. If you love programming, then programming means something to you. You are a type of creature that loves programming; thus the point (one of the points) of programming is to satisfy your love of it; and the point (one of the points) of you is to program.

I would love lo live "off the grid." I wish i could start a colony or something of the sort like that, but it just sounds to fantastic..

I'm fairly sure there are plenty of small self-sufficient communities like that already in existence.

ETA: Oh, and to answer the question in the OP...

What do you do for work and how do you go through with it? I'm curious as to how you can deal with all the pointlessness, or how you get around it and do something else?

My work involves a combination of conducting research on human perception and behaviour, and programming models of human perception and behaviour; and I love it. It serves my point (one of my points, anyway), which is to find out new and interesting things about the human mind. In a different way, psychedelics serve that same point for me. So my work is not pointless (to me), although of course in another sense it is - like everything - completely pointless (objectively; because pointfulness and meaning are inherently subjective, human things anyway).

 

[anarchogen]

The matrix has you.

 

[adrian89987]

Yes in some sense or another everything can be considered pointless, So....we might as well take heed in this experience that we have named life and make it as enjoyable experience as possible in the long run.

If you don't have a passion in something that can become a career and wish to just live a solitary life off the land with no more monetary worries (well nobody WANTS monetary worries) because this is the life that would give you the most joy...well then your life may be more enjoyable in the long run if you work for a little while in whatever job you choose so that you can afford the supplies, land costs, etc that are needed to begin living off what your plot of land gives you.

As for me, I have a passion for learning about the universe, primarily biological related stuff to do with chemistry(aka biochemistry). That is why I take time for school giving it my full devotion as well as doing protein research as my job. In the grand scale of the universe, discovering how some particular protein functions is pretty pointless. However in the graaand scale of MY universe (the one that I directly experience), I enjoy it to no end and wish to do work like this all of my life. Theres the added bonus that I will get MONEY throughout this time, but that has no influence as to why I picked this particular area for my WORK....also personally I feel like stuff I contribute to is also definitely capable of helping some people even if it is only helping the body of human understanding in this universe.


Allll I'm tryna say with that overly drawn out response is that in my view, money is not what is important...what is important is to have a very happy life and leave a positive influence behind you. BUT in order to do this you have to be able to feed yourself and have a place to live. Most animals have to fight for their food and for their terretory with literal fighting, however we humans do that with money. So if you can channel your passions into an area that can supply you with the means to live that hell yea, sometimes its not possible to do that for whatever reason and so you might have to take jobs that don't make you happy so that you CAN do what makes you happy.

 

[hjj]

No one can escape greed in my point of view.
Even if you are the most genorous person in the would, you still do the things you do because YOU want to.

though.. that doesn't mean you are greedy to the way most of society is when they want want want there tvs and cellphonetelephones(<one word).

 

[joanmiro]

A Graduation Speech By Gary North

NSFW because it's long, but worth it.

NSFW:

I have two major unfulfilled goals in life. First, I want to get an article published in the Reader's Digest. Any article will do. Second, I want to give a speech at the graduation ceremony of my high school. I could probably have done this in 1959 – I was student body president and the best stand-up comic on campus – but I decided not to. I now want to make up for lost time and a lost opportunity.

So, on the outside possibility that some editor at Reader's Digest will read this and then decide to publish it, which will then catch the attention of the principal of Mira Costa High School, I have decided to give my speech here. (Note: "mira costa" is not Spanish for "mired in costs." The Spanish phrase for "mired in costs" is "graya davisa.")

Before I begin my speech, I want to take a quick survey. I direct this question to the guests, not to the graduating seniors.

"How many of you recall clearly your high school graduation – I mean before the all-night party?"

Please raise your hand.

Leave your hands up, please. Now I have a second question.

"How many of you recall anything from the speech delivered by the distinguished orator who was brought in by your principal to inspire you on gradation day?"

If you don't recall anything he said, put down your hand.

Now, for those of you who still have your hands raised, I have one more question:

"How many of you were so inspired by a remark made by the distinguished orator that it in some way shaped your life?"

If you cannot think of anything, please put down your hand.

Now take a look around the stands. How many hands do you see?

Thank you for helping me conduct this important survey of public opinion.

Now for my speech. . . .

THE ALARM CLOCK OF LIFE, AND WHY WE HATE IT

I want to thank Principal McCormack for inviting me to give this graduation speech, a speech which I feel certain will inspire today's graduating seniors for the rest of their lives, as graduation speeches invariably do, as we have just seen.

Anthropologists can tell you what high school graduation is: an initiatory rite. It is a major point of transition which, for those of you who will not go on to college, will mark your transition officially to adulthood. For those of you who do go on to college, high school graduation marks a major point of transition for your parents: from borderline financial solvency to monthly panic. You, on the other hand, can postpone your transition to adulthood for another four years – or maybe even ten, if you follow my academic path and go to graduate school.But maybe you don't think of yourself as an adult yet. Maybe you're wondering when the bell will go off that announces: "Adult here. The world is now free to kick the daylights out of me."

I know when the bell went off for me. Maybe you have heard a similar bell. Maybe you didn't recognize it for what it was. I'm here to tell you: "That was it. It's too late to turn back."

I was fortunate. I heard that bell very clearly. Of course, in high school, you hear a lot of bells, all day long. One of the marks of your transition to adulthood is that you won't have to listen to these bells any more, unless you come back as a teacher. But I'm talking about an internal bell. You will hear this bell more and more as you grow older. I suggest that you pay attention to it early, preferably the first time you hear it.

I can remember it with amazing clarity. It was the clearest bell in my high school experience. I was sixteen years old, just about to turn seventeen. I was a senior. It was election day. I was running for student body president. It was lunch hour. I was in the same room where I had been waiting, one year earlier, for the results of another election. I had been running for president of the high school honor society, the California Scholarship Federation. I had won that election. One year later, I was wondering if I would win this election, too.

It seemed to me that I had been waiting for the results of that other election only a few weeks earlier. I my mind, the time had been dramatically compressed. The other election had taken place exactly one year earlier. I could date it easily, yet it seemed so recent.

At that moment, my internal bell went off. To mix metaphors, it hit me right between the eyes. Time was moving very fast. It wasn't just moving fast; it was moving like a freight train, and I was caught on a trestle over the Grand Canyon. It was time to start running.

At that moment, I recognized how little time I had left. I knew how soon I would be an old man. And now I am an old man. Yet I can hear that bell in my memory so clearly.

I mark my transition to adulthood on that day. I won the election, but winning that election was not the most important event of that day. The most important event had taken place a few hours before, around noon, when the bell went off in my self-awareness.

I began hearing the clock ticking.

THE TICKING CLOCK

Over 250 years ago, Benjamin Franklin wrote a clever aphorism:

"A child believes that 20 dollars and 20 years can never be spent."

Actually, he didn't say 20 dollars. He said 20 pounds. Back then, 20 pounds were worth about $3,300 in today's money.

What Franklin wrote then is still true. A child thinks of $3,300 as a lot of money. He thinks of 20 years as a lot of time. The child is wrong.

You may already have figured out that $3,300 is not very much money. But you may not have recognized emotionally that 20 years are not a lot of time. Your internal clock may not have rung its alarm bell. For most people, it goes off sometime between the ages of 17 and 23.

When your internal clock goes off in your head, pay attention to it. I regard the ringing of that alarm clock as marking the first major transition to adulthood. Some people hear it later than others. Others hear it, but then ignore it for years.

When you hear it and then act on it, you have become an adult. But if you roll over and whack the snooze button another time, then you haven't become an adult. I don't care if you are fifty years old, you have not yet made the transition to adulthood.

Those two high school elections were fixed time markers for me. I knew exactly how long it had been since the previous election: one year. We usually think in terms of one-year intervals. There was no doubt in my mind that a year had elapsed, yet it did not seem very long ago on that second election day.

The importance for me of those two elections was very high, or so I thought at the time. That's why the ringing of the bell in my consciousness was so loud. I did not know at the time that the real importance of those two elections was the loudness they imparted to my lifetime alarm bell.

I knew that day that time was running out. I knew that I would hear the sound of the approaching freight train grow louder in my ears.

When I was a boy, there was a weekly radio show called "The March of Time." The narrator's voice still shouts in my memory, "Time marches on!" Well, I'm here to tell you that time doesn't just march; it jogs over your back, knocks you to the ground, and steps on the back of your head when you're lying face-down in the mud. It doesn't even bother to say, "Oops. Sorry about that." It just keeps moving forward.

RACING AGAINST THE CLOCK

Less than a year after I heard that bell, I decided what I wanted to do with my life. I became interested in economics. I also became interested in the Bible. I wondered what, if anything, the Bible had to say about economics. I decided that I would study for the rest of my life to get an answer. I was not sure what I would discover or how I would discover it, but I began what I thought would be my life's work. Today, over four decades later, I have written thirteen volumes in my series, An Economic Commentary on the Bible. I have also written several books summarizing what I have discovered so far. My first book on this subject was published in 1973. It was not my first book. My first book, Marx's Religion of Revolution, was an extension of a term paper that I wrote in my senior year in high school. It was published in 1968, nine years after the bell first went off in my head.

I knew at age 16 that I would have to get busy. Time was running out.

I have stayed busy. Time is still running out. But when you're my age, time doesn't jog. It speeds up. By now, I'm in something more like a sprint.

Why does time speed up? Because there are a lot of years behind me, and one more year isn't a big percentage of my life. For a child of five, a year is 20% of his life, and half of what he can remember. For me, it's one-sixty-first of my life. That's not much. So, the older you get, the faster time runs.

As you slow down in life, time speeds up. So, I have decided to race with my old enemy. I'm going to make him beat me fair and square. I'm going to run faster. I plan to start a new business this year. I'll start another next year, if not sooner. There is an old saying, "Never give a sucker an even break." That's what time says to me, louder and louder. I'm saying it right back.

ARE YOU WINNING?

Ultimately, no one beats the clock. No one gets out of life alive. But you can make time work for his victory over you. You can make him sweat.

At this point, I'm going to direct my remarks mainly to parents and especially grandparents in the audience. That's because the clock is starting to make its move on you. Tonight's graduates are only facing a jogger.

Are you winning the race so far? Here's a good way to find out. Ask yourself these questions:

"Am I able to do anything important that I could not do a year ago? Am I able to do it better, faster, or cheaper?"

If you can honestly answer "yes," then you're still ahead of the clock. You're still moving forward ahead of time.

The more things you have learned, the more skills you have acquired, the more effective you are, this year vs. last year, the tougher you're making it for time to beat you. You're forcing time to earn his victory.

To every grandparent in the audience, I ask this:

"If your grandchild were to come to you tomorrow and ask, 'Can you tell me one area in which you've made progress since last year?' what would you answer? Could you honestly point to some area of your life where you are clearly doing better?"

It's a lot easier for young people to answer "yes" to this question. They are in school. They keep learning new things. Then they get new jobs. They keep on learning. Then they have children. At that point, their education begins in earnest.

But, at some point, people usually stop listening to their annual bell. They stop comparing their position today with what it was last year. They stop running. They start jogging. Meanwhile, time starts picking up the pace.

GRADUATION DAY AS A LIFE-MARKER

To the seniors, I say that high school graduation serves as a success marker for millions of people. They look back on their graduation day and mark their progress in life since that day. Maybe this day will serve as your personal life marker.

If you are wise enough to write down your life's goals, and break your plans into five-year segments, you will be able to mark your progress. Set aside a blank page for your comments a year from today. A year from today, think back a year and write down what you regard as your improvements: a year well spent.

If you don't already have your own goal-setting planner, make one. Buy some lined paper and a 3-hole binder. Do this before next Monday. There are few things more important or less expensive than a lifetime goal planner. Break each year's goals into four-month segments, and then come back every four months to review your progress. Break your five-year goals into one-year segments. Come back each year to review your progress.

Every time you do this, you're listening to your internal time clock. Don't ignore it. Use its sound to increase your pace.

The main reason why most people never make a goal planner is that they worry that they'll be embarrassed every year by how little progress they have made. But by sticking to a schedule, your productivity builds up over time.

I devote ten hours a week, 50 weeks a year, to working on my lifetime study of what the Bible teaches about economics. I have stuck to this schedule since 1977. Today, I have about 9,000 pages published. It adds up.

THE CLOCK SPEEDS UP

I have one other major time marker in my life. It took place on my 25th birthday. My grandmother told me, "You'll be 30 before you know it." I was 50 before I knew it. But at age 25, I knew she was right. I planned for turning 30, so turning 50 was no big deal. I was not surprised by 30 or 40 or 50 or 60. I saw them coming. I ran harder.

At some point, I'll fade in the stretch, I intend to keep that stretch as far ahead of me as I can.

You have a long race ahead of you. It's not a sprint for you yet. The pace hasn't noticeably sped up. But I promise you: it will.

Listen to the ticking of the clock. If this is too much trouble, at least listen to the alarm bell. It's going to ring one of these days. Pay attention to it when it does.

Ten years or fifty years from now, you won't remember much of what I said this evening, but maybe you'll remember that some old guy said you needed to write down your lifetime goals and then review your progress every year. My hope tonight is that you will think back and say, "I'm sure glad I followed his advice" instead of "Maybe I ought to get started on that project."

To the grandparents in the audience, I say: "It's never too late to get started. You're running out of alarms."

 

[tekkeN]

why not do charity fund raising? not sure about your area but in the UK it pays well, is good exercise (if your doing door to door) and you can sleep easy at night knowing your helping the countries where your lucky to get to your 5th birthday without shitting yourself to death

 

[socalBUD]

Alright here's how I see it...

As others here have said, pointlessness and meaning, are all subjective terms...As Huxley pointed out in the Doors of Perception, a chair is only a chair because we use it as a chair. Thus we can recognize it and call it a chair. By using the chair, we instill the meaning and render it useful to us.

Money is the same concept. To society as a whole, money has a real value. Some of us acknowledge that this "real" value is actually only perceived, but we go along with the story anyway because we can't just reject it outright. (We must use something to buy food at the grocery store) Depending on who you are, you will have your own subjective value of a dollar. To a homeless man 100 dollars may be an utter fortune...and that same amount may be toilet paper for a billionaire. And you may be someone who believes that money is only necessary to provide you with all your meals, viewing everything else as really just extra.

So the question really comes down to you...What value do you give a dollar? If you see your work as pointless, boring, and dehumanizing you're in the wrong line of work. Reevaluate the things you believe to be important in this world. Someone who views their work in this negative manner must question why they are working in the first place. If it only gives them access to things that they deem extraneous and unnecessary, then by all means, quit the job! If it consistently puts dinner on the table for you and your family, then it can't really be pointless, no matter what the work is. I would argue that there are very, very few jobs in this world with altruistic goals, and those jobs most likely have a large paycheck anyway! I think that bottom line it all comes down to perspective...Why do you need money? What does your job physically provide you and your family? How does that job fulfill you at the end of the day? In answering these, you may determine how pointless/meaningful your job is to you...

As far as the pursuit of money saddening you, it shouldn't. We have to do something on this earth. It may as well be accumulating berries or twigs or rocks. What do you care if the object of our desire is a piece of paper? Even if you have some sort of moral objection to the masses pursuing something that you believe that they really don't need, then you should do something different. I can't tell you what will fulfill you. Simplest advice is to follow your passions and if you're lucky enough, just maybe you will be able to get to do something you love/enjoy on a daily basis. That is the ultimate. But don't complain because the ideal situation hasn't just fallen into your lap yet. We all must work in our time here and you are no different. Look hard enough and you will find it...

PS...We can't all be professional baseball players

Edit:
To the OP: After re-reading my original post I realize that it may seem that I don't sympathize with you and it may look as though I'm speaking past you. I do and I'm not. I completely understand where you're coming from. I've battled that and in some ways I believe I will always be battling that. I understand that you're really protesting the validity of a capitalist-minded society that only seems to be focused on moving up and getting more. I'm with you, man. I would agree that blind pursuit and lust for something that we've both acknowledged to have only a real surface value is in many ways disgusting at best. But you must realize that you have the choice. You don't have to chase these same things and you also don't have to completely despise the other people that do. Just consider yourself lucky to be able to see past the trap and be thankful that you've realized you're in search of some deeper pursuits on this earth, whatever they may be...It's great that you see the flaws in a system that preaches "getting somewhere" as opposed to "being somewhere". It's also great knowing that at the end of the day you can smoke a bowl, eat some shrooms, and say "FUCK THE SYSTEM!"...

 

[Xorkoth]

One other thing... you're very young, with quite a tendency towards cynicism it seems from this thread. All I want to say is, please try your best to avoid developing too much cynicism. It has a tendency to happen as you get older anyway, and if you end up too cynical it can really take the joy and sparkle out of life. There is no reason to always see the bad in situations... you can just as easily see the good, for there is always good in every situation.

I don't mean to devalue your dilemma because it's a good question you've posed and a good discussion thread. But please keep what I say in mind.

 

[MistaJeff]

If it don't work I can't afford to trip. I've come to terms that I have a shitty job that requires no skill just tedious repetition. I have to work to get money, there is no way around it. I just suck it up and get over it.

 

[killo]

NSFW because it's long, but worth it.

NSFW:

BIG TEXT ect. ect. ect.

That's not a psychedelic point of view.

There's no such thing as time, it's just an illusion created by human beings perceiving a mold created by other human beings.

If we learn to live in the now then there is no regret or "what if's".

There is no reason to worry about time, if you are in the now then it's so useless.

 

[malakaix]

I use to think the exact same way about a year ago.

You have to push past the 'pointlessness' of it all.. and realize its whats happening at this very moment that matters more then anything. Your putting it on a time-line.. and by doing so making yourself realize everything people do is benign unless it supports meaning.

I work a pretty crap warehouse job for a courier company, mainly doing manual labor, unloading box's and cargo.. this place is the epitome of 'pointless' most of the employee's there are the typical beer drinking alpha males who act more like apes then humans. But even though i experience all this.. i'm still able to enjoy the work by looking at the positives to what i do. I'm getting exercise and staying fit while earning money and having some cool conversations with some of the more intellectual Uni students i work with.

I've been working this job 2 years, for money so i can pay rent, buy food and support myself in general.. until i find a passion or an interest i want to pursue (which is getting quite close). I understand where your coming from in terms of 'living simple, turning down money etc'. I live my life more detached from possessions then i guess the typical person would be.. I could fit my life in a few box's, but you need to take pleasure in life sometimes.. and reward yourself with desire, life is meant to be fun and enjoyable after-all.

Xorkoth said it well.. you need to avoid looking at the negative in situations, and look at the positives, then work on those positives, easier said then done i know.. but it is possible.

Peace.

 

[pattbateman]

iwork for a major company (35 billion in revenue and 6 billion in profit last year) i work for a union which i hate very much but i make a decent wage starting at 20/hr. and it has nothing to do with the car industry. i cant stand the union way of work. nothing matters at all in a union except how long you have been there. no matter how qualified you can be over someone to do something if they have beeen there longer they win the job over you. so in a union you pretty much dont gotta do shit just be there the longest and eventually you will have the best job.

 

[pattbateman]

another funny thing is i have a few friends that make over 100,000/yr selling cell phones. and thats no exaggeration

 

[Roger&Me]

I love programming, robotics specifically, but even when I'm doing it I cant get over the fact that its pointless and means nothing.

I disagree wholeheartedly; robotics has so many possible applications to tangibly help people. If you think a little bit outside of the box, you can really find some superb applications for robotics.

Anyways, back to the original question: I think that work is one of the most fundamental aspects of being a human. To be a healthy, decently happy individual you need to work hard most days of the week. I can't stand the feeling after a long weekend off, having not worked at all for a while-- I feel so lazy and worthless.

I'm a student right now, chemistry/mathematics double major with minors in physics and business. What I'm really trying to do right now is develop analytical thinking skills so that I can solve problems-- eventually very complex ones. I would like to use these analytical thinking skills to help people. I don't know what I'm going to do as a career yet (I still kinda want to play in a good ol' rock n' roll band! ) but I know that I want to contribute something tangible to the world that is going to make people's lives a little better.

Anyways, I have more to add later but I'm late to class! :D

 

[invert]

I disagree wholeheartedly; robotics has so many possible applications to tangibly help people.

But what's the point of helping people? Sorry, I agree with you essentially, and I think most people do basically want to help people, so for most people that would be a point in itself without further need for justification. But there's nothing inherently worthwhile about helping people: it's still just people ascribing meaning and worth to things, whether it's 'helping people' that you're ascribing worth to, or if your ascribing worth directly to 'programming' in and of itself. Pure research with no possible applications to help people (if such a thing exists) can still be a point, a worthwhile pursuit in itself, simply because someone ascribes meaning to it and makes it their pursuit.