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No Fun Like Work
May. 30th, 2020 10:34 am"How can it be work if you enjoy it?" asks Ailz.
I'd just come in from half an hour's fence-building and announced- with pardonable exaggeration- that I'd earned a cup of tea because I'd already done a day's work.
I should have added "in the broiling sun" because it is hot out there (the statisticians say this has been the sunniest Spring on record)
"Ah," I say, answering Ailz. "Now that's where we've gone so wrong in our society; we've allowed "work" to become synonymous with "chore"- whereas in a better system - as opposed to the capitalist one we seem to be stuck with- work would always be an expression of a person's true nature and be done with joy. The ploughman would plough because he liked getting up when the birds woke him, to tramp the fields while the dew was still on the ground, and the weaver would weave because she loved nothing better than making fabrics and decorating them in beautifully coloured patterns- and no-one would be a wage slave. It's what William Morris was always on about..."
(I didn't actually say all that- just a sentence or two- but the two sentences implied the rest.)
My father used to have a card taped up inside the cabinet that held his wood-working tools (which we gave to Bean because his need was greater than ours) on which was printed the motto "No fun like work". I used to think it was a daft motto because the best fun is- well, doing things I needn't go into here- but I now know I was wrong because I was parsing "work" in the late-capitalist sense whereas- but I've already said all that and I'm not writing an academic thesis or a political speech so there's no need for me to repeat myself...
I'd just come in from half an hour's fence-building and announced- with pardonable exaggeration- that I'd earned a cup of tea because I'd already done a day's work.
I should have added "in the broiling sun" because it is hot out there (the statisticians say this has been the sunniest Spring on record)
"Ah," I say, answering Ailz. "Now that's where we've gone so wrong in our society; we've allowed "work" to become synonymous with "chore"- whereas in a better system - as opposed to the capitalist one we seem to be stuck with- work would always be an expression of a person's true nature and be done with joy. The ploughman would plough because he liked getting up when the birds woke him, to tramp the fields while the dew was still on the ground, and the weaver would weave because she loved nothing better than making fabrics and decorating them in beautifully coloured patterns- and no-one would be a wage slave. It's what William Morris was always on about..."
(I didn't actually say all that- just a sentence or two- but the two sentences implied the rest.)
My father used to have a card taped up inside the cabinet that held his wood-working tools (which we gave to Bean because his need was greater than ours) on which was printed the motto "No fun like work". I used to think it was a daft motto because the best fun is- well, doing things I needn't go into here- but I now know I was wrong because I was parsing "work" in the late-capitalist sense whereas- but I've already said all that and I'm not writing an academic thesis or a political speech so there's no need for me to repeat myself...
