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270 sats \ 4 replies \ @freetx 2 Jan \ on: Do Routines Lead to the Quiet Desperation of Life? FiresidePhilosophy
I think its important to take a historical perspective. For 99.99% of history, life was mostly just the same things day in day out: Tend to crops, milk the cow, check on the chickens....
The idea that each day is a magical series of adventures - or moreso - that your life needs some grand overarching "plans for the future" is mostly an illusion that is thoroughly modern in origin.
I'm not denying the malaise of the modern world, but I think 90% of that is caused by the latent atheism prevalent in modern society. It makes sense that the 44-year old man feels its all meaningless if your underlying premise is that life is just a series of stochastic chemical reactions....or whatever Dawkins / Harris promulgates.
Farming is anything but routine, there's constant adjustment to conditions, the inherent connection to nature, risk mitigation from that entropy, and the ingenuity required to make it work. It's the total opposite of the lifeless drudgery OP describes.
latent atheism
That's true in many cases, but the OP reminds me of a friend that spends 4 hours a day with devotionals and church related stuff trying to overcome his depression, a depression created by a lack of accomplishment which has been a direct result of sticking to a routine for fear of change.
Routine is easy, routine is picking low-hanging fruit to avoid challenge. Routine is an exhausting battle against entropy that cannot be won, making the failure one sought to avoid guaranteed.
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true, I think it's also different that in the past, the farmer (as long as it wasn't on a Soviet collective farm etc), generally speaking, was his own boss, doing his own proof of work. And then the rest were so busy trying to survive, literally, that they wouldn't be sitting around dwelling on shit.
apart from religion, I also think the constant bombardment of people showing their highlight reels on the various socials also makes people think that they are missing out all the time
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And then the rest were so busy trying to survive, literally, that they wouldn't be sitting around dwelling on shit.
Yeap. I also think there is something about physical work that is more fulfilling in some way. I had a college summer job for 2 summers working as a car tech (simple stuff like oil changes, brake jobs, etc). In the years after college I was often very nostalgic about that job....
There is a surprising lack of mental stress that comes with such jobs (you're not 'taking work home with you'). You arrive and the car needs a brake job, you leave work and the brake job is done. There is a tangible feeling of accomplishment at the end of your shift....unlike modern office work where projects just seem to drag on and on and you only make incremental, somewhat ephemeral daily progress.
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this is true yeah, keeps life simpler, when I worked with my uncle doing construction it was something similar, physical work and switch off when home, a bit like the movie Office Space lol
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