You are arguing for your own character all the while complaining of the past that brought you to this point. This sounds like some angsty teen bullshit about your own choices or frustration at your parent’s expectations. Either way a bunch of sour grapes about your station in life before you clawed your way out. Good on you for climbing out of it, seems to me like you’ve done pretty well for yourself, but nobody owes you anything. How are the powers that be to even know you exist? The unalloyed egotism that it takes to say “Why don’t they see the glory that is me?” is some spectacular narcissistic navel gazing. This line of thought is at best myopic and shortsighted. Because you got some good grades in high school and college? A dime a dozen. You volunteered at church and charities? Darn common among the striving. The biblical curse exists as an admonition to all men, not just the losers or those who lack ambition. Your menial labor history has certainly proven effective in galvanizing your mind as to what you don’t want to do and can be considered valuable in that respect alone. As hard as it may be, writing articles for a living while pursuing a doctorate strikes one as pretty cushy gig on the whole. The most frustrating part of this screed is how you seem to lack gratitude for how much you have benefited from the extant system. As much as there are problems with the current paradigm, the ancien regime will gladly be “vampiric” of ambition and intelligence as easily as it will be of a strong back.
OK, boomer. Your generation inheirited more than any generation in history, signed it over to the banks. You imported the 3rd world to take the heritage of the historical American nation and wear it as a skinsuit. You made women who would have been mothers into concubines of corporations to keep wages down. You handed over all increases in productivity to parasites. You sold your children into slavery, worse than slavery, we must apply hundreds of times to be exploited and be paid below subsistence.
As you have sown, so you will reap. The menials you despised and exploited will be your only "caregivers" in your final frailty. You will die, cursed and unmourned, you will lose all you had and have nothing. Forever. Yet this will be only a down payment on your just rewards. Repent, you generation of vipers! Give up your delusions of entitlement, particularly that you desrve mercy from God or man.
Sorry, not a Boomer anymore than more than he is. My beef is him acting as if he hasn’t benefited from the system (far more than I have) all while railing against performing menial labor as if it is beneath him. You’re angry at the wrong person. I still do manual labor for a living.
Oh and haven’t received any inheritance from my “Boomer”parents nor did they receive any from my “Greatest Generation” grandparents”. I’m not for illegal immigration, mass immigration or for immigration in general. I’m not for women working, globalization or for trade deals that undermine the American worker. And on top of that I’m not saying the system isn’t broken, just that his complaint sounds like a whiner complaining that he didn’t know what he didn’t know. Maybe he is so glorious that it is all beneath him and maybe his parents should have seen this, but more likely it is egotism on his part.
Yes, absolutely! The implied suggestion that me calling him out for sounding like a whiner when he is one of the winners is somehow siding with the “Boomers” or selfish parents in general doesn’t make sense.
I think the issue here is that you, like most of the modern Anglosphere, are confusing your work with your job.
Your work is the thing which you feel makes the best use of your creative and productive powers. Your job is the thing which earns you money. You need work for your soul, and you need a job for material goods and services.
If you are lucky, or educated, or have chosen well, then your work and job may be the same. But it won't always be so. For example, a man's work may be to be husband and father, while his job is cleaning public toilets. If he has no wife and children to give him work, then his job cleaning public toilets will be nothing but a grinding misery to him. But if he has a wife and children, then his job cleaning public toilets will still often be unpleasant or dull, but it will have meaning for him.
In the modern Anglosphere, many people lead atomised, alienated lives. They spend many years in education seeking the highest-paying and most prestigious job possible. They thus never find their work.
If you have no work, only a job, it is natural to resent your job for being unpleasant, dull, and not paying you enough.
If you have merely a job, then that job being hard is an imposition on you, pointless drudgery and misery. But if you have work, then you can pass many hours doing it. You will count your hours at your job, and give it your minimum efforts. You will not count your hours at your work, and will give it your all.
It need not be so. There's an authour who realised that his IT job was something taking him physically away from the work of his wife and children, and the work he wanted to do on the land, and it was also a set of skills which he couldn't pass on to his children. He looked into what he called the "durable trades", work which has existed for centuries and is likely to exist for centuries more, which could be done at or close to home, and which could be passed on from parent to child.
His book has an introduction with something of a polemic against homosexuality and abortion, which you may or may not agree with, but is really irrelevant to the rest of the book - I suppose as a North American conservative Christian he felt obliged to toss it in there. But you can flip over that bit, and read the rest, and I think you'll get something out of it.
It's a ripoff and development of ideas by Erich Fromm, a psychiatrist writing mostly in the 1950s, who pointed out where tyranny comes from, and what market thinking does to relationships. I strongly recommend his writing to people.
Probably not, certainly didn’t knock any hard edges off his arrogance. He had as much agency and understanding as much as anyone else when they started working.
The hard manual labor is supposed to teach smart and ambitious young men that entrepreneurial or intellectual pursuits pay better and provide more satisfactory rewards. You’re supposed to come to this conclusion after a single encounter, not multiple retries 😭
But it’s great you’re realized the truth in the end.
As an old joke goes
A Jewish guy in the Soviet Army is ordered to dig a trench. He stands and keeps turning his spade around looking for something. His sergeant asks
This is something I never see talked about: lets say we accept the premise that hard work, long hours, enduring humiliation and "sucking it up" do build some kind of mental toughness that has value beyond simpy getting paid for the work.
Ok then, well what is the "minimum effective dose" to acheive that desired mental toughness? And what's the kind off point where more suffering no longer produces more character?
I'm going to make up a reasonable sounding number and say one year. If you have done one full year of shitty work (which would have to apply to 99.9% of adults on the planet) you get to tell everyone who talks about the magical transcendental beauty of hard work to shut their fucking mouth
You know reading these reactions really illuminates for me how we got here in the first place.
For whatever reason we had 2-3 generations during the 20th century that saw their birthrights fading as somehow “ok” and a testament to a “real meriotcracy” where capable people were supposed to “find a way” every time anew even with a boot on their face and if they didn’t well that just proved they weren’t righteous and pure in the first place.
What are we even doing? Are we here to create a better life for our kids or to worship labor?
The other thing is it seems in the past things were “hard” as a virtue of the goal itself being difficult to reach/only the strongest survive type of thing.
Today, it’s ARTIFICIALLY hard. It’s “hard” for everyday capable guys because the fruits of our labor are taken and given to others who, without us, wouldn’t be able to survive.
It’s one thing when life sucks for everyone and only the strongest get ahead, it’s another thing when life is mid for everyone and if you pull ahead from the herd your head and feet get chopped off and donated to the guy next to you who’s never lifted a finger.
I don't agree. I am a professional engineer, nearing retirement, and did all the same kinds of mostly menial jobs before graduating from university and working as an engineer, and I now value every single one of them, and can see how each menial job added to my knowledge and experience warehouse. I regret none if it. I would not be where I am today without having done all that scutwork.
I disagree. Doing some scutwork, serving others, focusing on the needs of others and living in humility is sometimes the VERY best experience one can get. No one is above any job. Every single job teaches something. That said, knowing when to move on, and up, is also important.
In fact, I would be thrilled if they were managing a Panda Express, at any age, but especially if they were under 30, and planning to eventually buy a franchise and build a Panda Express empire.
65k for being an assistant manager and 94k for being a general manager at a Panda Express doesn’t seem like a half bad living, especially for someone under thirty. It’s on their website.
If you have the financial independence to avoid low end jobs then good on you, no one is forcing you to do that. Most folks don’t have that freedom. People have to have a place to live, food to eat and you need money to do that. Whether you are moving up in the world or not.
Steven lightfoot straight up said he did do unskilled and menial labor, so that sounds like he practiced exactly what he is preaching. Probed and found worthy.
The type of "hard work" that actually builds character is pushing your physical, mental and creative limits in pursuit of something YOU really want or believe in, not someone else. It's insidious and vile when people conflate this with low paid menial labor.
Also, good to see someone shares my disgust at the demands the youth sacrifice their best years for the elderly during COVID. The same old people who moan about how no one is as tough, heroic or self sacrificing as back in their day.
Great post! The concept of Opportunity Cost is something the non-elite are discouraged from considering, especially when it comes to their own lives. A willingness to work hard and overcome adversity (fortitude) is certainly *a* virtue, but it is definitely not the *only* virtue, and in the absence of virtues like wisdom and temperance, fortitude can easily be taken to a vicious extreme -- and it can be easily taken advantage of by a vampiric elite that wants the proles to stick to a one-sided social contract.
A lot of cope and one-dimensional thinking from the Boomers in your comment section. "I did pointless make-work when I was young and back when there was a promising future ahead of me that I didn't have to do much planning for because an upper middle-class lifestyle was still the default, so today's youth need to STFU and bust their asses in the dead-end service jobs that will enable my standard of living to remain high in my retirement!"
Wow! What an incredible piece! I'm old, and look back on all the totally meaningless work I did and regret it all. To get to your 70s and have lived a meaningless life is difficult to bear. I keep it to myself.
You are a talented writer. By that I mean you make me think and feel deeply.
Yes. The bootstraps argument is outdated. It is clear to those of us who are paying attention that the boomers are double dipping in the wealth pool. Menial work serves the purpose of filling the gap between childhood and becoming an adult. This has been extended to life for the young. The old refuse to retire and in real estate they aren't downsizing but are selling to each other because they see some vulgar need for a 5th airbnb. By nature, they should be selling to the young in order to allow procreation and family life with dignity to continue. No, they are far too greedy to comprehend such a thing. When they were young, the bootstraps philosophy had credibility because they actually were paid appropriately for the work. Many of us, through their convincing, joined the debt arms race. A sick combination of mediocre job options and the farce of college. All of which are the results of their bad choices. As it is, they refuse to retire and continue to acquire.
The assumption behind 'hard work builds character' is that every man is a sinner and that all are in need of correction in equal measure. It's a conception of man which descends from the doctrine of Original Sin. It's not an accident that Catholics and the Orthodox (at least outside the peasantry) are much less likely to see humanity in this undifferentiated way. The pre-Reformation and still more the pre-Christian aristocracy *certainly* did not, and they were right not to.
All men are not equal: some are born to higher character than are others. Therefore hard work is not likely to conduce *equally* to character building in *all* men.
I take your point that certain kinds of brainless hard labor could feel soul crushing if that was your entire life, rather than a summer job or a stepping stone. But arguing it’s actively harmful to engage in is misguided.
I think digging ditches and moving piles of rocks from one place to another and clearing brush DID build my character. In the same way getting the crap knocked out of me in football and getting up every time taught me something about manhood, working hard labor also taught me something about manhood. Especially when I wasn’t doing it because my Dad had set me to it, but when I was providing for my wife and new baby
Whatever your hand finds to do, do it unto the Lord.
As a misquote, "Whatever your hand finds to do, do it unto the Lord." is down there with: "Do unto others." and: "Go and sin on more."
Ecclesiastes 9:10 (KJV)
"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest."
*
Regarding the earlier part of your comment, hard labor does not provide a stepping stone to better things now, nor has it for 40 years, perhaps longer. What managerialist / corporatist/neoliberal-feudalist tyranny does to laborers is all four of "the sins that cry to heaven for vengeance": murder (taking untold billions of hours of youth, as well as thousands of lives every year), sodomy (Ezekiel 16:49-50), injustice to the wage-earner and oppression of the poor. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sins_that_cry_to_Heaven_for_Vengeance)
Labor does not pay enough to afford the cheapest apartment for most, let alone to support a wife and child; such things that your generation took for granted are pipe dreams for all but a tiny percentage of working adults of any age today.
Dying in an accident on the job isn’t murder and paying you for your time isn’t either.
Sodomy? Is there a lot of rectal and oral violations happening for you to keep a job? News to me. I wouldn’t work at anyplace that demands that. I haven’t ever worked for anyplace that expects that.
Most unskilled labor has never allowed a man to support a wife and child. Not in my time, my father’s, my grandfather’s or my great grandfather’s. Skilled labor still does and always has. Things are harder now, but that happens from time to time and it sucks. It’s fair to be angry about it sucking, but let’s not act like it hasn’t always sucked one way or another, basically forever. There isn’t a man on the planet young or old that doesn’t wish he could live a life of leisure, but youth isn’t stolen by your corporate boogie man, it’s time that takes it. That was put in place by God to draw you closer to him in realization of your impending mortality.
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
Lord makes vessels for different purposes; how does it glorify him when the vessel he made intellectual excellence subordinates that to tasks which could have been automated 3 decades ago?
More than hard work, it is work against one's nature, faith, and being, that undoes the mind and spirit — and the physique along with those, as it is linked to them —.
And that's why people who nurture a desire to undo who has character, a mind and spirit, seek the subjection of the targets of their will-to-ill to hard work, with a special preference for "work" that denies, offends, buries, in a word humiliates, their genuine being,faith and nature.
Enjoyed reading this. I have personally gone to college AND got a trade so I’m well versed on the hard-work-meme.
The truth is everything has been devalued and you’re supposed to work MORE for significantly LESS and not only that you have to maintain a fake stoic attitude and keep engaging in a pattern of behaviour that doesn’t benefit you.
One thing I’ve experienced is the second you resist and express dissatisfaction, people shame you and pressure you to ignore and suppress this instinct. It’s quite disturbing.
I really enjoyed this piece probably in no small part because it validates many of the decisions I made growing up. Its quite remarkable the number of similar decisions I faced while always choosing the easiest possible path to get where I wanted to go. I'll work hard if I really need to, and have, but I'm too lazy to work hard for no good reason.
You are arguing for your own character all the while complaining of the past that brought you to this point. This sounds like some angsty teen bullshit about your own choices or frustration at your parent’s expectations. Either way a bunch of sour grapes about your station in life before you clawed your way out. Good on you for climbing out of it, seems to me like you’ve done pretty well for yourself, but nobody owes you anything. How are the powers that be to even know you exist? The unalloyed egotism that it takes to say “Why don’t they see the glory that is me?” is some spectacular narcissistic navel gazing. This line of thought is at best myopic and shortsighted. Because you got some good grades in high school and college? A dime a dozen. You volunteered at church and charities? Darn common among the striving. The biblical curse exists as an admonition to all men, not just the losers or those who lack ambition. Your menial labor history has certainly proven effective in galvanizing your mind as to what you don’t want to do and can be considered valuable in that respect alone. As hard as it may be, writing articles for a living while pursuing a doctorate strikes one as pretty cushy gig on the whole. The most frustrating part of this screed is how you seem to lack gratitude for how much you have benefited from the extant system. As much as there are problems with the current paradigm, the ancien regime will gladly be “vampiric” of ambition and intelligence as easily as it will be of a strong back.
OK, boomer. Your generation inheirited more than any generation in history, signed it over to the banks. You imported the 3rd world to take the heritage of the historical American nation and wear it as a skinsuit. You made women who would have been mothers into concubines of corporations to keep wages down. You handed over all increases in productivity to parasites. You sold your children into slavery, worse than slavery, we must apply hundreds of times to be exploited and be paid below subsistence.
As you have sown, so you will reap. The menials you despised and exploited will be your only "caregivers" in your final frailty. You will die, cursed and unmourned, you will lose all you had and have nothing. Forever. Yet this will be only a down payment on your just rewards. Repent, you generation of vipers! Give up your delusions of entitlement, particularly that you desrve mercy from God or man.
Sorry, not a Boomer anymore than more than he is. My beef is him acting as if he hasn’t benefited from the system (far more than I have) all while railing against performing menial labor as if it is beneath him. You’re angry at the wrong person. I still do manual labor for a living.
Oh and haven’t received any inheritance from my “Boomer”parents nor did they receive any from my “Greatest Generation” grandparents”. I’m not for illegal immigration, mass immigration or for immigration in general. I’m not for women working, globalization or for trade deals that undermine the American worker. And on top of that I’m not saying the system isn’t broken, just that his complaint sounds like a whiner complaining that he didn’t know what he didn’t know. Maybe he is so glorious that it is all beneath him and maybe his parents should have seen this, but more likely it is egotism on his part.
Its called a "paragraph"
Fair.
Yes, absolutely! The implied suggestion that me calling him out for sounding like a whiner when he is one of the winners is somehow siding with the “Boomers” or selfish parents in general doesn’t make sense.
I think the issue here is that you, like most of the modern Anglosphere, are confusing your work with your job.
Your work is the thing which you feel makes the best use of your creative and productive powers. Your job is the thing which earns you money. You need work for your soul, and you need a job for material goods and services.
If you are lucky, or educated, or have chosen well, then your work and job may be the same. But it won't always be so. For example, a man's work may be to be husband and father, while his job is cleaning public toilets. If he has no wife and children to give him work, then his job cleaning public toilets will be nothing but a grinding misery to him. But if he has a wife and children, then his job cleaning public toilets will still often be unpleasant or dull, but it will have meaning for him.
In the modern Anglosphere, many people lead atomised, alienated lives. They spend many years in education seeking the highest-paying and most prestigious job possible. They thus never find their work.
If you have no work, only a job, it is natural to resent your job for being unpleasant, dull, and not paying you enough.
If you have merely a job, then that job being hard is an imposition on you, pointless drudgery and misery. But if you have work, then you can pass many hours doing it. You will count your hours at your job, and give it your minimum efforts. You will not count your hours at your work, and will give it your all.
It need not be so. There's an authour who realised that his IT job was something taking him physically away from the work of his wife and children, and the work he wanted to do on the land, and it was also a set of skills which he couldn't pass on to his children. He looked into what he called the "durable trades", work which has existed for centuries and is likely to exist for centuries more, which could be done at or close to home, and which could be passed on from parent to child.
His book has an introduction with something of a polemic against homosexuality and abortion, which you may or may not agree with, but is really irrelevant to the rest of the book - I suppose as a North American conservative Christian he felt obliged to toss it in there. But you can flip over that bit, and read the rest, and I think you'll get something out of it.
https://www.thegrovestead.com/durabletrades/
I wish I could like this twice.
It's a ripoff and development of ideas by Erich Fromm, a psychiatrist writing mostly in the 1950s, who pointed out where tyranny comes from, and what market thinking does to relationships. I strongly recommend his writing to people.
There's nothing here about hard work destroying character. At best you provided examples of how you found your jobs annoying.
Lol, fuck off Jewgene.
Probably not, certainly didn’t knock any hard edges off his arrogance. He had as much agency and understanding as much as anyone else when they started working.
The hard manual labor is supposed to teach smart and ambitious young men that entrepreneurial or intellectual pursuits pay better and provide more satisfactory rewards. You’re supposed to come to this conclusion after a single encounter, not multiple retries 😭
But it’s great you’re realized the truth in the end.
As an old joke goes
A Jewish guy in the Soviet Army is ordered to dig a trench. He stands and keeps turning his spade around looking for something. His sergeant asks
- What are you looking for, private?
- A motor.
- Where have you seen a spade with a motor?
- Where have you seen a Jew with a spade?
🤌
This is something I never see talked about: lets say we accept the premise that hard work, long hours, enduring humiliation and "sucking it up" do build some kind of mental toughness that has value beyond simpy getting paid for the work.
Ok then, well what is the "minimum effective dose" to acheive that desired mental toughness? And what's the kind off point where more suffering no longer produces more character?
I'm going to make up a reasonable sounding number and say one year. If you have done one full year of shitty work (which would have to apply to 99.9% of adults on the planet) you get to tell everyone who talks about the magical transcendental beauty of hard work to shut their fucking mouth
Really great stuff; the vitriolic reaction was quite informative
Thanks. I need to write a response
You know reading these reactions really illuminates for me how we got here in the first place.
For whatever reason we had 2-3 generations during the 20th century that saw their birthrights fading as somehow “ok” and a testament to a “real meriotcracy” where capable people were supposed to “find a way” every time anew even with a boot on their face and if they didn’t well that just proved they weren’t righteous and pure in the first place.
What are we even doing? Are we here to create a better life for our kids or to worship labor?
The other thing is it seems in the past things were “hard” as a virtue of the goal itself being difficult to reach/only the strongest survive type of thing.
Today, it’s ARTIFICIALLY hard. It’s “hard” for everyday capable guys because the fruits of our labor are taken and given to others who, without us, wouldn’t be able to survive.
It’s one thing when life sucks for everyone and only the strongest get ahead, it’s another thing when life is mid for everyone and if you pull ahead from the herd your head and feet get chopped off and donated to the guy next to you who’s never lifted a finger.
Looking forward to it
I don't agree. I am a professional engineer, nearing retirement, and did all the same kinds of mostly menial jobs before graduating from university and working as an engineer, and I now value every single one of them, and can see how each menial job added to my knowledge and experience warehouse. I regret none if it. I would not be where I am today without having done all that scutwork.
So you are NOT into serving customers, working hard, and always learning, starting from the bottom?
I disagree. Doing some scutwork, serving others, focusing on the needs of others and living in humility is sometimes the VERY best experience one can get. No one is above any job. Every single job teaches something. That said, knowing when to move on, and up, is also important.
In fact, I would be thrilled if they were managing a Panda Express, at any age, but especially if they were under 30, and planning to eventually buy a franchise and build a Panda Express empire.
I’m not seeing anywhere where he said what his children do. You’re making a hell of a leap.
65k for being an assistant manager and 94k for being a general manager at a Panda Express doesn’t seem like a half bad living, especially for someone under thirty. It’s on their website.
If you have the financial independence to avoid low end jobs then good on you, no one is forcing you to do that. Most folks don’t have that freedom. People have to have a place to live, food to eat and you need money to do that. Whether you are moving up in the world or not.
Do you have a point or just enjoy injecting your random comments?
Steven lightfoot straight up said he did do unskilled and menial labor, so that sounds like he practiced exactly what he is preaching. Probed and found worthy.
To think that is an either/or proves you are as taken in by a Boomer worldview as they are.
The type of "hard work" that actually builds character is pushing your physical, mental and creative limits in pursuit of something YOU really want or believe in, not someone else. It's insidious and vile when people conflate this with low paid menial labor.
Also, good to see someone shares my disgust at the demands the youth sacrifice their best years for the elderly during COVID. The same old people who moan about how no one is as tough, heroic or self sacrificing as back in their day.
Keep up the good work
Great post! The concept of Opportunity Cost is something the non-elite are discouraged from considering, especially when it comes to their own lives. A willingness to work hard and overcome adversity (fortitude) is certainly *a* virtue, but it is definitely not the *only* virtue, and in the absence of virtues like wisdom and temperance, fortitude can easily be taken to a vicious extreme -- and it can be easily taken advantage of by a vampiric elite that wants the proles to stick to a one-sided social contract.
A lot of cope and one-dimensional thinking from the Boomers in your comment section. "I did pointless make-work when I was young and back when there was a promising future ahead of me that I didn't have to do much planning for because an upper middle-class lifestyle was still the default, so today's youth need to STFU and bust their asses in the dead-end service jobs that will enable my standard of living to remain high in my retirement!"
Wow! What an incredible piece! I'm old, and look back on all the totally meaningless work I did and regret it all. To get to your 70s and have lived a meaningless life is difficult to bear. I keep it to myself.
You are a talented writer. By that I mean you make me think and feel deeply.
Ken Upstate SC
Yes. The bootstraps argument is outdated. It is clear to those of us who are paying attention that the boomers are double dipping in the wealth pool. Menial work serves the purpose of filling the gap between childhood and becoming an adult. This has been extended to life for the young. The old refuse to retire and in real estate they aren't downsizing but are selling to each other because they see some vulgar need for a 5th airbnb. By nature, they should be selling to the young in order to allow procreation and family life with dignity to continue. No, they are far too greedy to comprehend such a thing. When they were young, the bootstraps philosophy had credibility because they actually were paid appropriately for the work. Many of us, through their convincing, joined the debt arms race. A sick combination of mediocre job options and the farce of college. All of which are the results of their bad choices. As it is, they refuse to retire and continue to acquire.
Yes sir
The assumption behind 'hard work builds character' is that every man is a sinner and that all are in need of correction in equal measure. It's a conception of man which descends from the doctrine of Original Sin. It's not an accident that Catholics and the Orthodox (at least outside the peasantry) are much less likely to see humanity in this undifferentiated way. The pre-Reformation and still more the pre-Christian aristocracy *certainly* did not, and they were right not to.
All men are not equal: some are born to higher character than are others. Therefore hard work is not likely to conduce *equally* to character building in *all* men.
I take your point that certain kinds of brainless hard labor could feel soul crushing if that was your entire life, rather than a summer job or a stepping stone. But arguing it’s actively harmful to engage in is misguided.
I think digging ditches and moving piles of rocks from one place to another and clearing brush DID build my character. In the same way getting the crap knocked out of me in football and getting up every time taught me something about manhood, working hard labor also taught me something about manhood. Especially when I wasn’t doing it because my Dad had set me to it, but when I was providing for my wife and new baby
Whatever your hand finds to do, do it unto the Lord.
As a misquote, "Whatever your hand finds to do, do it unto the Lord." is down there with: "Do unto others." and: "Go and sin on more."
Ecclesiastes 9:10 (KJV)
"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest."
*
Regarding the earlier part of your comment, hard labor does not provide a stepping stone to better things now, nor has it for 40 years, perhaps longer. What managerialist / corporatist/neoliberal-feudalist tyranny does to laborers is all four of "the sins that cry to heaven for vengeance": murder (taking untold billions of hours of youth, as well as thousands of lives every year), sodomy (Ezekiel 16:49-50), injustice to the wage-earner and oppression of the poor. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sins_that_cry_to_Heaven_for_Vengeance)
Labor does not pay enough to afford the cheapest apartment for most, let alone to support a wife and child; such things that your generation took for granted are pipe dreams for all but a tiny percentage of working adults of any age today.
Dying in an accident on the job isn’t murder and paying you for your time isn’t either.
Sodomy? Is there a lot of rectal and oral violations happening for you to keep a job? News to me. I wouldn’t work at anyplace that demands that. I haven’t ever worked for anyplace that expects that.
Most unskilled labor has never allowed a man to support a wife and child. Not in my time, my father’s, my grandfather’s or my great grandfather’s. Skilled labor still does and always has. Things are harder now, but that happens from time to time and it sucks. It’s fair to be angry about it sucking, but let’s not act like it hasn’t always sucked one way or another, basically forever. There isn’t a man on the planet young or old that doesn’t wish he could live a life of leisure, but youth isn’t stolen by your corporate boogie man, it’s time that takes it. That was put in place by God to draw you closer to him in realization of your impending mortality.
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
Genesis 3:19
King James Version
Yes, it was a misquote. Of Colossians
“And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men”
Colossians 3:23
Spoken to literal slaves.
And I’m 33 dude
Then you should know better.
Lord makes vessels for different purposes; how does it glorify him when the vessel he made intellectual excellence subordinates that to tasks which could have been automated 3 decades ago?
Regime critic : see these reactions?
This is what happens when you question a system people believe in with all their hearts.
They become illogical and react aggressively.
More than hard work, it is work against one's nature, faith, and being, that undoes the mind and spirit — and the physique along with those, as it is linked to them —.
And that's why people who nurture a desire to undo who has character, a mind and spirit, seek the subjection of the targets of their will-to-ill to hard work, with a special preference for "work" that denies, offends, buries, in a word humiliates, their genuine being,faith and nature.
Enjoyed reading this. I have personally gone to college AND got a trade so I’m well versed on the hard-work-meme.
The truth is everything has been devalued and you’re supposed to work MORE for significantly LESS and not only that you have to maintain a fake stoic attitude and keep engaging in a pattern of behaviour that doesn’t benefit you.
One thing I’ve experienced is the second you resist and express dissatisfaction, people shame you and pressure you to ignore and suppress this instinct. It’s quite disturbing.
I really enjoyed this piece probably in no small part because it validates many of the decisions I made growing up. Its quite remarkable the number of similar decisions I faced while always choosing the easiest possible path to get where I wanted to go. I'll work hard if I really need to, and have, but I'm too lazy to work hard for no good reason.