James Leroy Wilson's one-man magazine.

Friday, October 08, 2004

How to Avoid Work

Claire Wolfe writes:

Jobs are abnormal. For most of human history, most people didn't have jobs. They didn't earn wages for someone else's profit. They worked - hunted, smithed, cobbled, sowed, sewed, potted, gathered, wrote, counted, harvested, cooked, baked, mined, acted, preached, begged, tinkered, weaved, and wainwrighted. They worked their patooties off. But they didn't have to punch in at 7:00 ("Five minutes late; report to the personnel office!") or sit in a cubicle in a windowless, air-recycled office year after year, never noticing the patterns of the day or of the seasons.
For much of human history, people worked when work was needed, spent their days amid their families and friends, hunkered down when the nights were long or the weather too forbidding, and took time off without asking the boss - because they were the bosses of their own time.
"Wage slave" isn't just a clever metaphor. We really have sold ourselves to others - even if we like what we've received in return.

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