work15 quotes

“Division of labor multiplies inconvenience, obnoxious intermediaries, liaisons and representatives. Zeno’s paradox of infinite middlemen between middlemen. People make their living by making my living harder to make. Division of labor is subtraction of organic bonds. Almost everyone I know I met through an economic or electronic exchange. No human contact without an application, contract, a bill or an app. Professional and romantic relationships dissolved with a message, a phone call. Cutting someone out takes less than a gesture. Whole networks pulverized and reformed every six months.”

“As you become an adult, you realize that things around you weren’t just always there; people made them happen. But only recently have I started to internalize how much tenacity everything requires. That hotel, that park, that railway. The world is a museum of passion projects.”

“To pursue a life-work is to create order amidst the overall disorder of the world. It is a flower in the tumult, meaning in the midst of meaninglessness. Even if the work does not express anything great, it mysteriously bears witness to what man is. It is a sign of the depth of humanity and as such establishes a sure link with symbolic immortality. Through it, man defines himself as a being who can escape the chaos of contingency to dominate the passing of time, a being who resists the absurd by trying to shape scattered bits and pieces into a meaningful whole. In other words, he is a being who challenges the necessity of death, both hopelessly and with confidence. Since one day he must shuffle off the stage, he hopes to leave behind a sign of his presence, a minute yet significant trace: an existence with a name. The life-work is a reflection of its author and remains after him, as if the image lingered in the mirror after the person himself had left.”

“There is always a way to trade time for ever-increasing sums of money, and once you start making that trade, it becomes harder and harder to draw a line, easier and easier to convince yourself that your obligations to someone else—spouse, kids, aging parents—demand that you stay where you are.”

“I never worried about making a living,” he said, “but I’ve done thinking about making a life. It’s hard to know the difference sometimes, and it must be getting harder, judging by all them that don’t know the difference now.”

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

“...there are several stages of creative thought: first, a stage of preparation in which the problem is consciously worked over; then a period of incubation without any conscious concentration upon the problem; and then the illumination which is later justified by logic. The parallel between these important and complex problems and the simple problems of judging weights or the circle-triangle series is obvious. The period of preparation is essentially the setting up of a complex struction together with conscious attention to the materials on which the struction is to work. But then the actual process of reasoning, the dark leap into huge discovery, just as in the simple trivial judgment of weights, has no representation in consciousness. Indeed, it is sometimes almost as if the problem had to be forgotten to be solved.”

“Man is the only amateur animal; all the others are professionals. They have no leisure and do not desire it. When God made the beasts dumb He saved the world from infinite boredom, for if they could speak they would all of them, all day, talk nothing but shop.”

“‘I have led a toothless life’, he thought. ‘A toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on—and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone.’” – Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason, 1945.

I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”

“If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work.”

“Art is high-Quality endeavor. That is all that really needs to be said. Or, if something more high-sounding is demanded: Art is the Godhead as revealed in the works of man.”

“The past and present live alongside each other in our working lives, overlapping and intertwining, until it is sometimes hard to know where one ends and the other starts. Each annual task is also a memory of the many times we have done it before and the people we did it with. As long as the work goes on, the men and women that once did it live on as well, part of what we are doing, part of our stories and memories, part of how and why we do those things.”

“By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

“The most revolutionary act is to actually make something.”

“Factory work’s easier on the back, and I don’t mind it, understand, but a man becomes what he does. Got to watch that. That’s why I keep at farmin’, although the crops haven’t ever throve. It’s the doin’ that’s important.”