Boring is somber, unexciting, unremarkable, and yet it’s the opposite of these things. This is daily work. There’s nothing here that stands out from the backdrop of everyday life. Perfection. This is water on stone, the ever persistent artist in their art, their craft, their daily work. The street sweeper, the accountant, the plumber, the […]
A Word On Performance
Performance on stage, in sport, at work, in the home, in art and music, in our hobbies and pastimes. The nature and function of work as it relates to happiness has been a source of interest for some time now, especially so since I began studying psychology.
There Is No Point In Work, Unless…
I’ve got an office/workspace at the bottom of our small garden. It’s a converted shed. Last summer, twelve months, I cleared it out, and in a couple of weeks had my own private space for work. It’s a Godsend. Here I can work uninterrupted, blinkered for hours on end. The only sound is the hum […]
Move Closer To The Centre
On the edge, just inside the edge, there is the mainstream media–a glut of data–fabricated, manipulated, molded, spun. It’s where most people get their information. It’s the nature of surface level reality, but rather than thinking of this information distribution as a two-dimensional circle, consider it a sphere. Particles, waves, wavicles in constant motion, combining, separating, mutating. It’s not ours, we inherit it, then adopt and contribute to it.
Try Many Things
We can get into a rut when things don’t work out. You know, we try something we think we might do for a living and it turns out, for whatever reason, that people just aren’t biting. There’s no traction, you doubt yourself; you feel you’re wasting your time.
Is It Any of My Business?
Frederick Herzberg in his 1959 book The Motivation to Work, gave an account of an address made by management guru Peter Drucker to The American Psychological Association in the 1950s. Drucker apparently suggested that an investigation of workers’ job attitudes was immoral and unjustified. He believed that it was nobody’s business but the worker themselves, how they felt about their job.
A Return to Craft Based Work
We don’t know how to use our hands and our bodies any more. We can’t make things, practical things. We don’t know how to grow food, to fix a roof, or build a wall. Some of us do, but many of us don’t. A return to making things by hand could be a route to that change, greater meaning and purpose, and a happier life.