one of the topics that Marx grappled with was the
connection between people and their work…
that people are identified by and with their work…
In the ‘‘old’’ days of craftsmen who worked on
desks and cabinets and dressers… they could,
rightly so, take pride in their work… go into museums
and see the old school desks and dressers, they are a
work of ART… and they last forever… you could find meaning
and value within that type of craftsmanship and effort…
and in most jobs/careers today, where is the possibility
to take pride in one’s job/one’s effort? In my factory lite job,
I deal with hundreds of people a day… the best I can muster
from my job is by acting professional to my customers…
which is really the basic bare minimum of any job really…
but that is what I ‘‘create’’ for I create nothing… I simply
expedite a customer’s purchase… get them out of the store
quicker is about all I can say about my job… not much
to hang my hat on…
I can’t really find meaning or purpose in my factory lite job…
and I suspect most people can’t find meaning or purpose in
their jobs or career… most jobs in America, anyway, are service
jobs, a service is provided to someone… be it fixing a stove or
repairing a pipe or fixing a drain… it is needed but not necessarily
something that gives us meaning or purpose…
so, how do we return to having jobs or a career that has
meaning or purpose? which is to say, how do we return to
having lives with meaning and purpose?
the vast majority of today’s existence is about the mass
number of people and what they need… the bureaucracies
of today, deal with millions upon millions of people… the sheer
numbers prevent us from some sort of meaning and purpose…
the vast numbers of our day, that 81 million people voted for Biden
in the last election and quite bit more will vote for Harris in the upcoming
election, that roughly 70 million people receive benefits from
Social Security, about 1 in 5 American’s, that a TV show can have
20 million people watch it every week and that show could get cancel
from low ratings, where over 250 million people watch some or all
of American football games… Our modern-day existence is
dominated by vast numbers of people…and in that mass
number of people, where does one individual find meaning
and purpose?
what has been forgotten is that meaning and purpose, like
everything else has an individual aspect and a collective/group
aspect…that those psychological needs of human beings, of
safety/security, of self-esteem, of a sense of belonging, requires
a society, a group of people to fulfill it…
We cannot, as human beings find our meaning and purpose
outside of our collective, our group…all other psychological
needs are meet by the collective, including love, so, why
does meaning and purpose have a solely individual aspect?
or, or we could go about this a different way… in which we
no longer attempt to find meaning and purpose within a job
or a career… we find our sense of meaning and purpose
in other aspects of our live… personally, I find engaging in
philosophy gives me a sense of meaning and purpose…
for philosophy has a history, a collective in which I can
seek out the answers they found for their questions,
there is a group of philosophers, some famous, some not,
that help me work out my own answers…and
this has nothing to do with making money or finding fame or
getting a promotion… these things are temporary, at best,
I find my own meaning and purpose in seeking out answers
and knowledge… on the off chance, I might even become
‘‘wise’’… although I for one, am not holding my breath for
that achievment…
Marx was on the right path, but he was unable to work out
the vast numbers of people that exists today and those numbers
makes having meaning and purpose difficult to experience…
Kropotkin