Recently I've been thinking a lot about work. Work not just in the 9-5 sense, but in the general sense of doing something with your time on this planet.
Now I realise that I am not the first person to ponder this (hell, I suppose this is the basis of philosophy in general), but it's something that I think we should ponder more.
Over the last several years as a tour guide one truth has become so overwhelmingly clear to me:
we are the products of our environment and individual thought is limited. This means that our perspective on work, what work is, how much we should do and how society should be structured are underpinned by where we grew up.
The best example I can give of this is the way East and West Germany are viewed by the vistors of different countries coming to Germany & Berlin.
NB: What I am about to talk about are anecdotal stereotypes and should by no means be taken as a definitive study or list. I have met thousands of visitors, but that is a small sample size considering many millions visit Berlin & Germany yearly and only those with certain means / interests visit here.
The classic is that East Germany was evil (largely English-speaking countries perspectives) and that West Germany was the good guy. This broadly fits in the capitalism = good, communism = bad viewpoint and sure, there were a lot of really terrible things about the communist / socialist / dictatorship systems of Central / Eastern Europe, but there were also some good things.
Healthcare, Education, Women's freedoms, just to name a few were IMO better than in the West.
Work, however, is a more complicated topic. (c.f. This German article)
While there was a lot of control and enforcement of 9-5ish style work system by the East German government, there were also some more flexible elements to their system:
Work also wasn't limited to what you did to survive / raise a family, it also included the way that you worked for the state and contributed to society as a whole.
Now, I know that I am getting into rather problematic territory here (propaganda, brainwashing, etc), so I'm not going to write more about that, but what I hope I am expressing is the one-sided nature of today's attitude towards work is problematic. And more specifically our attitude towards what has value as work. Is a mother's work intrinsically less valuable than that of a senior banker simply because of a dollar value attached?
I don't know the answer here, but I certainly think we should spend more considering what work actually is, what it means to us, how we should work, in what way we should interact with each other at work and how we can make the distribution of the rewards of work more equitable.
So through all of this I will keep writing, keep working ;) and we shall see what comes in the future, but I hope that we all reflect on work more constructively.
Wishing you a great day! Take care :)
William
