A World Bereft of Substitute Gratifications

It is hard to say what the exact numbers are, but suffice it to say that the greater majourity of human-beings are unhappy with work. Few are those able to do what they love. Few, in other words, are those who have found an exquisite balance between being and doing.

For the majourity of us, then, life is a constant, pervasive, often unending conflict between who and what we feel we are (being) and who and what we are asked to do the majourity of our waking hours (doing). The general result of this situation is that we are compelled to seek forms of gratification intended to act as substitutes for the huge deficit we experience in our working life. We are, in other words, forced to try and find immediate forms of substitue gratification in order to compensate for what is severely lacking in our work--which is that our being and doing are not in harmony, acting in concert with one another.

For example, many experience a near total absence of psychological presence while at work. The body is present and accounted for in form only, but not in spirit. Because we don't love what we are doing we cannot invest, immerse all of our being into that doing.

Ideally, in some sense, our work and our play ought to be joined. This notion--outdated, archaic, and deadly as it is!--that we ought to know a sharp division between work and play is about extreme a fallacy as one can arrive at. The best workers are those who are able to experience and express an element of play in their working. It is the same with lovers and loving. The more playful the lover and the loving then the more genuine does tend to be the experience of the lover and the loving on behalf of the beloved.

Overly serious work, like overly serious play, is psychologically exhausting. It will drain you like nothing else. Much of that attitude derives from a sense of work as this arena of conquest where we are always and forevermore locked in mortal combat with some competitive element that is going to squash us if we don't get serious and get serious now! Yet, no one can long survive in an atmosphere totally devoid of play, let alone thrive in that atmosphere. And mounting visits to the Dr.'s office to be prescribed drugs to 'get you up' (SRI'S) and drugs to 'get you down' (barbituates) is some of the clearest evidence we have for the fact that human-beings must be able to bring their whole being into their work-doing or there will be severe psychological, physical, and relational (not to mention financial) consequences.

Some of those consequences are in the form of attempting to 'consume our way to happiness and well-being' because we are not fulfilled in our doing. Others are addictions to alcohol and drugs, sex and domination. The ways that we seek to compensate for failures in our working-environment is probably one of the more little understood facts of (post)modern existence. And it is also something that Marx was driving at in his analysis of Kapital: that work must nourish us directly, not indirectly; that our labours must feed us first, in every sense of that word, for then can we feed others.

But that is not how Kapital tends to work. It does in some cases... but not in the majourity. The way current tendencies are is that work leaves us exhausted and deprived; then we go in search of gratification and fulfillment 'outside of work.' And that is, according to all signs and indications, a un-winnable proposition for each of us. It is but a brutal cycle upon which the breaking of depends much of humanity's happiness--yours and mine, ours, our childrens, and their children as well.