Cultural Conditioning: Work — The Cultivation Of Courage

[Explor­ing Life] We spend the major­ity of our lives involved in some form of work. It is a means to con­tribute to and to be assim­i­lated into soci­ety. In our child­hood we are intro­duced to work in the form of school­work and home­work. To not work in school often labels an indi­vid­ual as unmo­ti­vated, lazy, or if the out­come below stan­dard, a fail­ure. In our adult years we work in order to meet social expec­ta­tions and acquire finan­cial resources. To not work in our adult years is an imme­di­ate sen­tence to poverty, exclu­sion and prej­u­dice. And through­out this life in time we qui­etly hope for the absence of work in our retire­ment years, if we are for­tu­nate enough to live that long. It is easy to imag­ine many peo­ple who spend vast amounts of time wish­ing they were doing some­thing else. Work in a soci­ety founded on con­sumerism and con­sump­tion becomes some­thing less than sur­vival of the fittest; it is the cul­ti­va­tion of greed, want and delu­sion. To dis­miss the social norms and expec­ta­tions that sur­round work and choose to live through a dif­fer­ent set of assump­tions results in phys­i­cal hard­ship and psy­cho­log­i­cal excom­mu­ni­ca­tion.

How­ever, we can also think of work in dif­fer­ent terms. For exam­ple, the phrase “life’s work” invites us to con­sider the pos­si­bil­ity of work a the cul­mi­na­tion of our expe­ri­ences in life. In this sense, pur­su­ing the fullest pos­si­ble expres­sion of our life can be viewed as our most essen­tial work. This kind of per­spec­tive is com­mon among artists who have spent a life­time cre­at­ing and express­ing them­selves to the world. The idea of work in this con­text orig­i­nates in a pas­sion for cre­ative expres­sion and is a nat­ural and per­haps nec­es­sary com­pan­ion to liv­ing. The artist some­times feels that their soul called them to their voca­tion in life.

The two descrip­tions of work above rep­re­sent extremes, but help to point out how dif­fer­ent our under­stand­ing of work can be. Work is a place where we can build our­selves, or tear our­selves down. It can be a means to giv­ing back to our world, or a means self­ishly take from the world. Work can be an act of sub­mis­sion or a path­way of exal­ta­tion. In those final moments when we real­ize that death is approach­ing, our work can be a source of con­tent­ment and sat­is­fac­tion or deep regret and loss. Work can refer to career, labor, employ­ment, occu­pa­tion or job. Work can also refer to influ­ence, behav­ior, to give shape to, cul­ti­va­tion, expres­sion, energy, motion, com­po­si­tion, and total cre­ative out­put. Our work in life is a envi­ron­men­tal sur­round that pro­vides a means to inter­act with the world and defines the nature of our expe­ri­ence in it.

1. Work as Sur­vival: At a pri­mal level, work is an act of sur­vival. For some peo­ple in our world, work is sur­vival. In mod­ern soci­ety, work is a means to pro­vide the finan­cial resources to pro­vide the basic neces­si­ties of food, shel­ter and cloth­ing. This is sur­vival medi­ated by money. Those of us with lit­tle money strug­gle to pro­vide the basic neces­si­ties and live a life that is abstractly referred to as “below the poverty line.” Those of us with ade­quate money can com­fort­ably pro­vide the basic neces­si­ties. Those of us with exces­sive amounts of money often lead lives of excess. How we sur­vive deter­mines the class we are placed into. If we strug­gle to sur­vive we are lower class, while exces­sive lifestyles are socially ordained to be a higher class. Iron­i­cally, all sur­vival strate­gies unavoid­ably end in death. Once the imme­di­ate threat of sur­vival has dimin­ished, we enter into style of work ori­ented toward consumption.

2. Work as Con­sump­tion: We may also work in order to increase our abil­ity to con­sume goods and ser­vices. While we may not actu­ally need all the goods and ser­vices we con­sume, we have been con­di­tioned to want them. In a world of con­sump­tion, mar­ket­ing and adver­tis­ing are the pre­dom­i­nant lan­guage and inter­face with life. The Inter­net is becom­ing increas­ingly con­t­a­m­i­nated by instan­ta­neous dis­tri­b­u­tion of super­fi­cial­ity. Amount dis­places qual­ity; wants dis­place needs. We are not sure what we have is what we want, but we do know that what we want is more. This men­tal and emo­tional con­t­a­m­i­na­tion is a pri­mary source of dis­con­tent, con­flict and vio­lence in the world. We are even quite will­ing to destroy that which give us life, the earth itself, in pur­suit of want.

3. Work as Belong­ing: We all desire a sense of belong­ing in our soci­ety. Our work can serve to fos­ter a sense of iden­tity and belong­ing in soci­ety; with­out work we might feel iso­lated and alone. Work that orig­i­nates in con­sump­tion cre­ates the illu­sion of belong­ing, and it is in the absence of this kind of work that we dis­cover our true iden­tity. That is to say, we find true iden­tity and belong­ing when we are iso­lated and alone. How­ever, the mod­ern cul­ture of work encour­ages us to belong to the sta­tus quo. The basic aim of the edu­ca­tion sys­tem is to encour­age and instill a depen­dence on belong­ing. Cre­ativ­ity and inde­pen­dence are encour­aged only to the point of not chal­leng­ing the under­ly­ing assump­tions of mod­ern soci­ety. Belong­ing, as a method of mind con­trol,  serves to pre­pare an indi­vid­ual to make a con­tri­bu­tion to the social and eco­nomic progress of the soci­ety they live in.

4. Work as Progress: Social and eco­nomic progress com­monly require intel­lec­tual sub­mis­sion and the adop­tion of anonymity. We sub­mit our minds to the require­ments of par­tic­i­pa­tion in a world of con­sump­tion. We accept a sense of belong­ing to the anonymity of social belong­ing. As we invest our­selves in this kind of belong­ing, we divest our­selves of our true iden­tity. It is obvi­ous that our basic def­i­n­i­tion of progress in the world is dis­eased. The effects of progress con­tinue to reveal them­selves in vio­lence, con­flict, star­va­tion, pro­tec­tion­ism, and the degra­da­tion of the earth. Lan­guage is crafted on a cul­tural level to make us believe in progress as an eth­i­cal pur­suit; the real­ity of progress is some­thing less than ethical.

5. Work as Courage: Stand­ing out­side the cul­tural and eco­nomic lines of force and influ­ence that sur­round us is fun­da­men­tally an act of per­sonal courage. Choos­ing not to par­tic­i­pate in forms of work that orig­i­nate in mod­ern cul­tural assump­tions of sur­vival, con­sump­tion, belong­ing, and progress is an act of pos­i­tive defi­ance. It is from this per­spec­tive, stand­ing out­side and observ­ing the imposed beliefs and norms of our own soci­ety, that the deep value of work as it relates to an individual’s life can be explored and cul­ti­vated. We begin to see work as a means to embrace the pur­suit of pur­pose and mean­ing in our lives. In this way, work is a nat­ural exten­sion of our cre­ativ­ity and com­pas­sion the embraces the imper­ma­nence of all life.

The nature of our work is inti­mately con­nected to our thought, emo­tion, and behav­ior. Work, through­out a life­time, is a total sur­round, an envi­ron­ment we immerse our­selves in, and a medium of incon­spic­u­ous influ­ences. The effects of work on our inner and outer life is exten­sive. We unavoid­ably and often uncon­sciously absorb the effects of work in our thoughts, feel­ings, atti­tudes, emo­tions, beliefs, behav­iors, addic­tions, habits, cus­toms, rit­u­als, tra­di­tions, and dreams. The nature of our work shapes the qual­ity and char­ac­ter of our expe­ri­ences in life.

Cul­ture seeks to assim­i­late the indi­vid­ual into a col­lec­tive sense of belong­ing and mutual par­tic­i­pa­tion. Our work in life is a fun­da­men­tal tar­get for assim­i­la­tion. This is not to say that cul­ture is always a neg­a­tive force, but it is to say that cul­ture can and does serve to limit pos­si­bil­i­ties for liv­ing. Since work is an expe­ri­ence that we travel through from early child­hood through to our senior years, it is a pow­er­ful source of con­trol and manip­u­la­tion. Work can den­i­grate out expe­ri­ence of life; work can exalt our expe­ri­ence of life. In this sense, it is the capac­ity for courage that is the most essen­tial source of power in defin­ing a life­time of work.