So, consider this, if you will.
Us humans sometimes remind me of ants and bees, those most industrious of our lower ranking creature, but who, like us reputedly higher functioning creatures, are always very busy carrying out purposeful activities.
Like ants and bees, are we prone to beaver away at our jobs, with some of us doing 2 or more jobs, trying to earn enough money to pay our bill and, if we are lucky, to save to do the things we need to do to endeavour to realise our aspirations.
But, of course, some of us do not have to do 2 or 3 jobs to earn enough money to meet our essential bills, pay for the massive mortgage which we have yoked ourselves with, and the instalments for the car and the yacht which sets us apart from the rest, but also ensure that our jobs own us. No, one job is enough because it pays us a great deal of money and makes us feel as if we are, well, irreplaceable.
And so we must work, work, work nearly all the hours of the day, and, for some of us, much of the night. We must ensure that we become irreplaceable for our employers, because we are always working, and when we are not physically working at our jobs, we are probably thinking of our jobs and the work we must do to maintain our perceived indispensability.
Yes, you have heard of 'house-wife' or 'house-husband? Now we have 'work-wife' and 'work-husband.' Many of us have cross over from working to live a happy and balanced life to living to working to have a more stressful and unhappy living. It becomes all about the work, thinking about it, preparing to do it and doing it. Living, which is what it should mostly be about, has become subordinated to work.
And yet, there are more people looking for work who are not able to get any, and must therefore make it their priority to spend more of their time securing the essentials which they need to live.
Why, you might ask, do some people have to have so many jobs and work so many hours, when others do not have any work at all?
Is it because of how we humans have organised our economic system, where increased efficiency means less workers and increased capitalization and productivity, at the cost of greater dispensability of labour, or more utilisation of labour at much lower wages?
And so we have a situation whereby, as with a minority of people accumulating most of the world's wealth, resulting in their not being enough to distribute to the poor and poor sections of the population, so we have some people having too many jobs and some working too many hours at their single job.
In all of this mad and crazy rush to spend more time working and being preoccupied with working, than with living our lives and endeavouring to reduce our stress levels and increase our enjoyment of our living, we risk losing the purpose of living; which is to enjoy it. To take time to observe, to contemplate and extract pleasure from and promote the beauty of our environment, and our being an integral part of it. To endeavour to be more at one with it and flow with it.
And so it seems to me that we should all spend more time contemplating our own and our partner's and children's navels, and less running around living like industrious ants and bees. We are neither irreplaceable nor indispensable. What happens to the ant when is is crushed by some object, or the bee, when is is gobbled up by another creature?
Yes, the are both replaced by others. And so it is with humans; we are neither irreplaceable nor indispensable. So why do so many of us rush around as if we are? If we have to do many jobs to make a reasonable living, then probably it is because those jobs are uneconomical, and are only viable if the labour doing them can be cheaply exploited.
In living your life, try to remain conscious of what kind of living you aspire to live, and the purpose of your life; not necessarily as others perceive of it, but how you see it. Endeavour enjoy your living and be of greater ergo sumness than the ants and the bees.
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