On The Leisure Track Creating Radical Alternatives to Conventional Employmentby D. JoAnne Swanson

Chapter One

“Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs.” - Curtis WhiteI spent much of my young adulthood working at a fast-food job I hated. I would distract myself from the drudgery by mentally protesting the notion that people should wake up every morning to an alarm clock, then go to their jobs and spend the bulk of their days doing something they don’t like to earn money. Who came up with this crazy system, anyway? The idea that I, and everyone around me, would be expected to continue doing this until age 65 or higher filled me with utter despair. There had to be a way out of the work-consume-die treadmill. There just had to.Work, in and of itself, was never the problem for me. In fact, I observed that whenever I could freely choose an activity, work on my own time, and pace myself according to my own inclinations, I quite enjoyed it. But put me in an office or factory where I earn a paycheck for doing the very same activity at the behest of an employer, and inevitably I would learn to hate it.This situation baffled me at first. Love the work under certain conditions, hate it under others. What were the larger implications? I was particularly dismayed when I realized this applied even to creative writing, an activity I had loved with every fiber of my being since childhood. Love notwithstanding, the moment that the prospect of jobs and remuneration entered the picture, the vitality would drain out of my writing as if it had been sucked dry by a hungry vampire.Consistently I found that stubborn avoidance of paid jobs, especially writing jobs, was the only way I could preserve my ability to write effectively about the things that really mattered to me. Though I didn’t understand why doing it for money sucked the life out of my writing so reliably, I knew this much: writing was my Work with a capital ‘W’. I was often ridiculed for my utopianism, but I sensed deep in my bones that there was something sacred about it. I wasn’t about to make it my job.From my new-age upbringing, I had absorbed the idea that if I could just find a way to do what I loved, the money would surely follow. I wanted to believe it, but it never seemed to work for me the way I thought it would. What was in dispute was not the notion that people should do work they love – that seemed obvious enough – but the idea that they should try to make a living at it. But why was this a problem?Determined to get to the bottom of this, I put this theory to the test. I would find a way to do what I loved, and see if the money followed.In my mid-twenties, a couple of years after I finished my first baccalaureate degree, my fiance and I made arrangements such that I could quit my boring office job. His job as a software engineer would pay all of our bills for a year, and I could devote myself to writing. Lack of money to pay bills, I was sure, was the only thing standing between me and a finished book, so this would be just the ticket. Freed from the obligation to have a job for money, I could throw myself wholeheartedly into my work, and write to my heart’s content. For years I’d claimed that all I wanted was to write, and my partner’s financial support had finally offered me that chance. At long last, I had been graced with the opportunity to plunge right in and shape my days completely at will. I could do exactly as I pleased. No rude alarm clocks, no regimented job routine, no 2-hour bus commute, no expensive restaurant lunches, no pointy-haired boss breathing down my neck. Sweet freedom! Elation flooded over me. I showered my beloved with gratitude, and promised him I’d credit him prominently in my finished book. I didn’t want a sugar daddy; I just wanted a chance to concentrate all my attention on my writing until I could make a go of it.So I was hardly prepared for the next baffling predicament: I couldn’t write.Just as baffling, though, was the vigilance of the mental dictator – that critical voice that had stayed mostly in the background as long as I had a job, but immediately commandeered a good portion of my thoughts and emotions once I mustered up the audacity to actually quit my job. At first its exhortations were subtle, but as the allotted year for writing quickly elapsed with little sign of a finished manuscript on the horizon, the voice grew progressively harsher and more insistent. There were endless battles between the “good” (productive) me, and the “bad” (goofing off) me. Dealing with these battles thoroughly sapped any emotional energy I might have had for serious writing.The constant din inside my head sounded something like this:You didn’t do much writing today, the voice would point out oh-so-helpfully, as if I didn’t already know I’d been a bad girl. Nor yesterday, nor the day before that. Why not?Well, I was tired from running errands and cleaning house. Then I had to catch up on e-mail. Before I knew it, the day was gone.A flimsy excuse indeed, replied the guilt-tripping voice. You’re not making much of a financial contribution. You’re just being a freeloader and living off the earnings of others. You need to concentrate harder on making a paying career of this writing stuff, or you’ll eventually have to take a boring office job you don’t want so you can earn a paycheck again. Why aren’t you being productive, hmmm? Do you really want to write, or are you just using writing as your excuse for avoiding a real job?The implication being, of course, that real writers get paid for their work; the rest of us are just dilettantes.A week passed like this, then two, then three. Then a month. Then six months. The relentless mental dictator never let up. Guilt set in: Where had the time gone? I honestly didn’t know. Sure, I had taken over all the housework and cooking, which seemed fair enough since my partner had agreed to pay the bills…but we didn’t have kids or pets to care for, and it’s not as if I was swamped with chores. Yet there were still a million things that seemed to occupy my time. It wasn’t conscious avoidance. Though I couldn’t articulate it this way at the time, I felt as if my attention had been hijacked, minute-by-minute, by some unseen force. I had been corralled into fighting this battle, entirely without my consent. Why else wouldn’t I be writing, given this immensely luxurious opportunity? But there was laundry to do, errands to run, a dental appointment, phone calls, car repair, financial planning, a long phone call with my mother…the list was endless, and the days seemed to fly by. Once I finish this next project or errand, I would say to the guilt-tripping voice, then I’ll sit down and do the serious writing. But first, I need to look up some information on the web about publishers. I need to do more research to understand my topic better. I need to figure out how to deal with writers’ block. I need to find a writers’ group to help me get past this. I need to answer important e-mail. I need to straighten up the house.I frittered away astonishing amounts of time this way, doing just about anything. Anything but write, that is. Why wasn’t I doing what I loved? Many people would give their eye teeth to be in my privileged position, and yet here I was, passively resisting my own stated goals. It made no sense. How could I just shirk this golden opportunity? And how did I manage to get myself trapped in an ongoing adversarial inner debate in which I felt the need to justify my own inaction to myself, and then felt resentful about it? It’s not as if I had a boss who was tracking my every move.Much later I would come to realize that without the structure of a job with a built-in schedule, I had nothing concrete to rebel against. It seemed I had nothing and no one to blame for my dissatisfaction but myself. No convenient scapegoats. Nothing to allow me to maintain the strangely comforting illusion that only the lack of money stood between me and a finished book. I found this profoundly unsettling. I only had a year to get this writing thing all sorted out so that the money would follow, so the pressure was on. Had I been sold a bill of goods with the do-what-you-love line of thinking?Increasingly it became obvious that, despite any appearances to the contrary, I was not truly free to write. But was it the circumstances that held me back, or was it me? Could I handle real freedom? The truth wasn’t obvious.But what other options were there? The thought of forfeiting my artistic ambitions and going back to life as a corporate wage slave was abhorrent. Waking up to an alarm clock every day, dragging myself reluctantly to a job I hated, and coming home too exhausted to do anything but veg out in front of the idiot box – the thought terrified me, and all the more so for seeing those around me doing the very same thing for ten, twenty, even fifty years.So if I couldn’t write when I had a job, nor even when I had been temporarily freed of bill-paying responsibility, then just what, exactly, would it take for me to live in freedom such that I could do work I loved and not have to worry about money?According to the books I had read, having financial independence, lottery winnings, trust funds, or a wealthy spouse would be sufficient to free me up to do work I loved. But I was suspicious of this line of thought, as I had already been freed from the immediate need to earn money, and still I felt enslaved – not by a job, but certainly by the dictator in my mind. Where were the books dealing with that subject?Eventually it became clear: Like all wage slaves, I would have to learn how to be free. I would have to take on the mental dictator, and figure out how to win. And that’s just for starters.I doubt very much whether anything could have adequately prepared me for the shock of this realization. Like many folks from white middle-class backgrounds, I grew up believing I lived in a world of fundamental freedom – a world where I could use my gifts to make a difference. Failure to show sufficient gratitude for this freedom by using it to get a nice respectable well-paid job, in fact, was looked upon with thinly veiled disdain. Yet regardless of how free I might have appeared to an outsider who took note of my reliance on my partner’s financial support, I was still a wage slave on the inside. I didn’t want to get a job; I just wanted to write, and I wanted to control my own time. There was a pesky book manuscript sloshing around inside me that insistently prodded me to get off my duff and write the damned thing already. But there was a problem: I hadn’t developed a shred of the fortitude and responsibility I might need for the life of freedom-to-write that I lusted after. All I knew, in fact all I had ever been trained for, was a life of making money and getting a job. I had been conditioned to consider it normal that my time would never really be my own. My time would always be structured by external factors beyond my control, such as school and making a living. Here I stood, faced with a mule-headed sense of job resistance inside myself that refused to be ignored, yet unaware of any other suitable options. Gotta pay the rent!Finally face to face with myself and the burden of all my cultural conditioning, I cringed. Apparently I couldn’t write the book when I had a job, which was one thing; now it seemed that I couldn’t write the book even when I didn’t have one. But it didn’t matter anyway, because my year of freedom was up, and I would have to set aside my creative inclinations and earn a living just like everyone else. Disheartened and thoroughly disillusioned, I sank into a deep depression.It would be many long years and one devastating divorce before I emerged.*****Whatever else you can say about a shitty job that pays the bills, one thing’s for sure: as long as you have that job, or are busy looking for another one, you’ve got a built-in, airtight, socially acceptable excuse for any lack of progress toward your dreams in life. All but the most inquisitive and perceptive of your friends and acquaintances will probably believe you when you say you aren’t doing what you love because you have to make a living. You might even fully believe it yourself. I know I did. For some people, I’m sure it is true. But for someone in my fortunate circumstances, it was a convenient excuse that hid a deeper and more insidious problem.I didn’t know how to be free.Where, exactly, would I learn such a thing? No school or culture I’d ever heard of taught people how to be free in the sense I was contemplating, and even if one existed, I wouldn’t have been able to recognize it. I knew no one who seemed to even perceive the need for this kind of radical freedom, let alone anyone who could offer insight on how to achieve it. Experience had taught me that quitting my job and having access to money – at least in the sense of knowing my bills would be paid for the foreseeable future – was insufficient to free me from the grips of wage slavery. Underneath the surface lurked a deeper kind of slavery: slavery of the mind. Yet when I tried to explore the implications of this truth more deeply in conversations with others, most people were unsympathetic at best, and quite a few didn’t even take me seriously. I was dismissed as a lazy trust fund hippie or a chronic whiner. After all, it’s easy for someone with access to money to say “hey, money isn’t enough.”Discouraged, I stayed underground. I gave up on getting paid to do what I love, and decided to keep the two domains – work and money – entirely separate. At the end of my year of “freedom,” I began looking for a paying job that was low-stress, suitable for my introverted self and unrelated to writing, and would leave me time and energy to write just for the love of it. As it happens, I didn’t find a job like that. In fact, except for some brief temp assignments, I didn’t find a job at all, although not for lack of trying.Eventually, however, I found something better, or at least more amusing: an appreciation for the irony of it all. Here I was, devoting my time to figuring out what kind of paid job I could get that would pay the bills yet still leave me adequate time to carry out my calling: writing for love. Yet the paradoxical message seemed to be that my calling, and therefore the purpose of my writing, would be to help free people from the confines of jobs. Whose bright idea was this?The gods have a sense of humor, all right. It just took me awhile to get the joke.*******Okay. So I’d figured out that something was deeply wrong with the job culture as I knew it, in part because I had observed its tendency to turn any activity I enjoyed into drudgery when done at a full-time job for the sake of earning money. But could I still work for love within these limitations anyway? I had my doubts. Most folks I knew who took jobs with the best of intentions had found themselves slipping, caving in again and again to the immense pressure to uphold the status quo against their own best interests. If I took a job like that, I was sure I’d be no different. I recalled the days of my first marriage, which I had gone ahead with at the age of 20 in spite of my reservations. I had naïvely rationalized my marriage the same way: Our marriage will be different. Maybe I’m young, but I won’t cave in to the sexist wife stereotype. Our relationship will be successful and last a lifetime.Two years later and one divorce wiser, it became clear to me that the power of my individual intentions are no match for the entrenched systemic power of culture and institutions. I learned that regardless of how individually determined I might fancy myself, I am thoroughly shaped by my society and culture. I learned that my individual choices, and even my perception of which options are and are not open to me, are constrained in very real ways by my cultural milieu, educational background, and various other factors.I reasoned that if culture shapes me this profoundly and intimately, then if I took a normal 9-to-5 job in a culture that considers money-making a much higher priority than doing what I love, eventually I suspected I’d find myself doing, and then justifying, things that troubled my conscience and my ecological sensibilities. I’d find myself trapped in a system that rewarded people who cut corners in their work and were good schmoozers, but penalized people who were more introverted yet cared deeply about doing quality work. I’d rationalize away the questionable things I’d done on the job, and it would be easy enough to believe my own rationalizations, since I’d be working within a system that insulates workers from the larger consequences of their work. Surely, sooner or later, I’d find myself tempted to say I was just following official orders. Or perhaps I’d just plain find myself too tired to even think about the broader implications of my actions, let alone take the risk of voicing any ethical concerns. And surely, even if I got lucky enough to work for an ethical employer, the deck would still be stacked against me. Part-timers aren’t taken seriously, and they’re left to fend for themselves with no benefits. I’d be forced to give up 40+ hours a week of my time, and I’d end up spending far too much of my “free” time using cheap, mindless entertainment to distract myself from a creeping sense of malaise and despair, just like most of my friends.Over and over I asked myself the same question. Could I find a way to do work I loved anyway? How much freedom could I carve out from within an unfree context – a sick system?It wasn’t clear. But I knew I had to try to find out.To start along this path, I had to devote many years to re-thinking a good chunk of everything I thought I knew. I had to uncover and re-examine assumptions I had unwittingly picked up along the way that were causing me to conspire against my own best interests.Quite a tall order. However, if the alternative was resigning myself to a life of job drudgery until I reached retirement age, I knew I could find it within myself to figure something out.Never have I desired a career-oriented life of the sort for which I was groomed. What I wanted, and continue to want, is a life, lived to the fullest. Money is simply a means to an end. What I want is to control my own time, as much as possible. My best creative work takes place under conditions where I have large blocks of unstructured time available for introspection, self-driven research, and exploring ideas. The work of a creative writer doesn’t lend itself to steady, predictable, easily quantifiable output between 9 and 5; it’s more like digging deep inside, giving and giving until you empty yourself, and then patiently waiting to be filled up until you are overflowing with words again. Finding blocks of time to work like this on a regular basis is next to impossible in our culture, where we are supposed to devote our attention to making a living rather than allow ourselves to be distracted by frivolous notions like pursuing a calling or fully enjoying our leisure. Things we love to do are to be relegated to the realm of hobbies done in our “free” time (if there’s any of it left over after recuperating from our jobs, that is).Time and again I was told that I’d just have to suck it up and resign myself to getting a normal job like everyone else. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending upon your perspective), some mule-headed force within me refused to accept this. Instead, I kept asking questions:How did survival come to be equated with wage-earning capacity, and why do so few people question this state of affairs? Why do so many of our important life choices (like, say, moving, or whether to leave a bad relationship) revolve around jobs—what they pay, where they’re located, what kind of hours we work, and so on? Why do people hardly bat an eye these days when a friend or family member says they are too busy at work to spend quality time with loved ones? People conduct job searches all over the world, basing decisions about where to live on the job market, disconnected from any meaningful and lasting sense of place or community. There is something deeply wrong with this picture…but what is it?When I first began exploring these questions as a defiant adolescent, I didn’t even have a clear idea of how to frame them, let alone answer them. I groped about in the darkness for something without clear shape, color, or dimensions. Yet somehow I knew, without knowing how I knew, that it was there nonetheless. I knew intuitively that there was something destructive woven into the character of daily life, and I knew I must keep trying to understand what it was. Somehow, I hoped, the very process of learning how to properly articulate the questions I had would open up new vistas of inquiry, allowing me to continue until I eventually hit upon something solid.I still didn’t know if I could find a way to do the work I wanted to do within the confines of the job culture, but I knew this much: I was highly motivated to seek out information on ways I might move toward having a job-free life. One way to reduce my need for job income would be to cut down my expenses. So I began to read books on frugal and simple living. One day I stumbled upon this gem from Amy Dacyczyn in The Tightwad Gazette:“I prefer the luxury of freedom from a job to the luxury of material goods.”Even as a lifelong voracious reader, I had never before encountered any book that put forth the idea that freedom from jobs was possible or even desirable (except in jest), so such candor was refreshing and encouraging. But were material goods strictly a luxury? Past a certain point of basics, I found them a burden. The things I owned eventually ended up owning me. They consumed time, storage space, money, and attention, and thus lent themselves to a vicious circle that resulted in the need for more money and more time on the job. More and more I found myself wanting to rid myself of the burden of too much stuff, to help further my long-term goal of a job-free life.And what about the burden of having a job? Should freedom from having a job rightly be considered a luxury? In a system where money rules, it seems that only those who have accumulated some money can buy their freedom from jobs, so it made sense that under those conditions, freedom from a job should be considered a privilege.But there were deeper questions. Questions like: Why couldn’t freedom from jobs (not from work, just from jobs) be the natural state of all beings, rather than just a privilege available to the rich? Why was everyone expected to earn money at a job by working 40+ hours a week just so they could have a roof over their head, food to eat, and clothing to wear, no matter what the cost to their emotional, spiritual and relational lives, and to the environment? Why did it seem like everyone I knew accepted the work-consume-die treadmill so uncritically? And why was it that even those who did live simply and criticize the rat race couldn’t seem to find a permanent way to live without a regular income? These were questions I had learned not to ask, lest I hear the same kinds of non-answers every time: “Well, because that’s just the way the world is,” or “Everyone has to work.”Asking questions like this quickly got me branded as ungrateful or hopelessly utopian. The knee-jerk assumption – usually trotted out before I even finished my last sentence – was that I must want others to carry the burden that should rightly be mine and mine alone. After all, only a lazy freeloader who felt smugly entitled to handouts from all the other disgruntled workers would seriously entertain questions like these. Therefore, of course, I must be out to take advantage of others who’d paid into the system without pulling my own weight. How dare I depend on others! Me, an intelligent, able-bodied adult! The nerve! What a bum. What a gold-digger. Get a job!I knew there was a major error in thinking here, but I could not articulate it effectively. I would protest again and again: “No, no, you misunderstand…it isn’t that I want some folks to suffer in jobs for the sake of others! In fact, ultimately, I want to be able to opt out of jobs altogether, so I can do the work I love, and I want everyone else to have that option too! We should all be able to do work that uses our gifts.” But these protests fell on deaf ears – that is, whenever they weren’t drowned out entirely by the usual glib dismissals.After countless fruitless attempts, I gave up on discussing the idea of job-free life with others at the level I wanted, and once again took stock of my situation. I wanted to write in a self-directed manner. And I needed enough money to pay for my basic needs. But I resisted the idea of getting a job working for someone else, doing something I didn’t care about. It was difficult to avoid the conclusion that having a paid job, no matter how cushy, would never be able to provide the proper outlet for the kind of creative writing I most wanted to do, under the conditions I needed to do my best work. And I had high standards; I cared deeply about doing my best work.I also knew it would not be sufficient just to get myself free. I wanted the job-free option to be available to all those who wanted it. Would that ever be possible in our culture? Maybe the goal would prove to be hopelessly utopian and entirely out of reach, but wouldn’t it still be useful to imagine and take steps in that general direction?In search of deeper and more comprehensive answers, I decided to go back to school. I undertook interdisciplinary studies, both inside academic institutions and outside of them. I read books in history, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, sociology, systems theory, and psychology, driven all the while by a relentless desire to explore the systemic functions of jobs and work in our culture. Among many other things, I learned that the job culture, as I came to call it, exercises enormous ideological power. Its underlying assumptions make it clear who should be considered to be “working” (those who have jobs for which they receive paychecks) and who is “not working” (stay at home parents or retirees). It separates what is seen as valuable (e.g., whatever increases growth and consumer spending or creates more jobs) from what is not seen as valuable (e.g., lying in a hammock for hours.) And on and on.The more I learned, the more convinced I became that there was something seriously wrong with this entire picture, that the problem was deep and systemic, that all of us were somehow implicated in it, and that I had somehow been given the daunting task of carefully and precisely analyzing and explicating what was wrong with it, through the lens of my own psyche and life experience.*****A distinction needs to be made here, for the sake of preventing common misunderstandings. What I advocate is a systemic critique of the entirety of the job culture, as it manifests itself at all levels: psychological, social, cultural, economic, ecological, institutional, spiritual. Though I don’t want a job, I am not anti-work. I’m not anti-money, either, although I do believe that sustained, systemic critiques of the money system go hand in hand with rethinking the job culture. When I say I don’t want a job, I definitely don’t mean that I refuse to do anything that involves effort, or that I want to do nothing but watch TV and sleep. What I mean is that to the extent that it is possible, I want to find a way to use my gifts effectively without worrying about where my support will come from, and I want to help make it possible for others to use their own gifts in the same manner. The job culture is not designed to reward people for developing their gifts and working with love and joy; it’s designed, primarily, to concentrate wealth at the top.I want to devote the bulk of my time to working – and playing, to the extent there is a difference – for my community, for the gods and spirits, and for the land that provides our sustenance. This is what I call Work-with-a-capital-W, and such work can hardly be contained within the framework of a job. In order to do this to the fullest, I must trust that my support in life, monetary and otherwise, will come when I follow my calling. There is a grain of truth in the “do what you love, the money will follow,” school of thought, but it’s more like “do what you love under the appropriate circumstances and after differentiating it from fleeting whims, addictive urges, and passing wants; then, and only then, the support will follow, although not necessarily in the form of money.” Not as catchy that way, is it?Eking out a way to truly use one’s gifts and do meaningful work – while staring out into the gaping maw of a toxic job culture that would readily swallow us alive without even batting an eye – is not a path for the faint of heart. I have learned that if I really want to do this kind of work, I will be asked to rethink most of what I thought I knew, confront various inner demons, and accept radical changes in my lifestyle. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I will also need to find ways to navigate through – or around – a densely tangled and intimidating thicket of cultural, social and systemic obstacles. Frankly, I am not sure I am prepared to do this. Perhaps that’s another reason why “do what you love, the money will follow” hasn’t worked as well for me as I once thought it might. Psychological obstacles are one thing; social, cultural and institutional ones are quite another.How to discern the difference between an activity that is related to my Work and an activity that is more like an addictive urge or passing whim? It can be challenging to get clear on this, but it’s possible to develop a kind of internal compass that will guide you in the right direction. I know I’m on the right track when something I’m doing produces a deep sense of joyful fulfillment and spiritual rightness, and it does so even in cases where what I’m doing is difficult or tedious. I definitely feel this way about writing. A quip I often use will illustrate. “Writing: I love it even when I hate it.” By contrast, activities that stem from addictive impulses leave me with a haunting feeling of aimlessness, shallowness or emptiness, even in cases where the activity provides instant gratification and is extremely pleasurable.Working in the lap of the joy culture, as opposed to slaving away in the rat race of the job culture, calls for a leap of faith. It asks me to face a deeper truth: security cannot be had through money or jobs. These things are always vulnerable to market instability. When I work at a job I hate strictly for the money, I am cut off from so much of the magic in the world. The tragedy of modern existence is that this predicament is so common, and so widely and uncritically accepted. Great masses of people are so driven by fear, insecurity, and the threat of violence, dispossession, or financial ruin that they continue to hold down jobs they hate, sometimes for decades and lifetimes, just to earn a living.Imagine the possibilities if huge numbers of us could find ways to abandon the job culture and focus on using our gifts to support one another instead. Imagine what it would be like if we were to recognize and properly value useful unemployment – in other words, people bypassing the formal wage economy altogether and working directly with one another to meet their needs for food and shelter. Imagine what it would be like to live in simple-living communities where no one was desperately hunting for a job because everyone’s basic needs could be adequately met through interdependent, local efforts: things like small-scale organic farming, backyard gardens, barn-raisings, gift circles, community currencies, and much more. There are many people who are doing this kind of work; they are unsung heroes and deserve our appreciation, as they are building the cultures of tomorrow.*****I write for my fellow wage slaves who want to learn how to be truly free, whatever their socioeconomic class or financial status. I write for the disenfranchised, the marginalized, the welfare bums, the downwardly mobile, those who feel stuck in jobs they hate, and all others who just don’t fit in to the job culture. I write especially for those who, though they may be poor by economic standards, nonetheless have boundless wealth of spirit. I write to help lay bare the forces that keep us trapped in the rat race, and to help us recognize our mental dictators and grapple with the ways these forces operate in our ailing culture. My message is rather simple to comprehend, though vastly more complicated to carry out. My message is this:This is an inside job, and it can’t be done alone. To get out of wage slavery, we will have to work together to get wage slavery out of us.*****When I sit down to write, I am driven by a vision I cherish: a diverse, ecologically responsible culture in which people are free enough to use their gifts to do work of the heart and spirit, instead of toiling away in jobs they hate for the sake of making money to meet their basic life needs. (And I believe that we all have gifts, even if we don’t know what they are because we’ve been taught to suppress them in favor of making money.)I write for those who listen to that small voice inside them that resists taking jobs for money under any circumstances where doing so would interfere with using their gifts appropriately and effectively.I write for those who, given their druthers, would help create cultures in which all who want it could have this same freedom.Let’s get out of our jobs and get to work, shall we?

http://radicalunjobbing.wordpress.com

By Charles Eisenstein

I had a conversation today about the beautiful world that I believe will be born out of the converging crises of our age. One characteristic of this world will be that each person will have recovered a very basic, simple birthright: to wake up in the morning excited and happy about your work for the day. We will be in love with what we do; in other words, we will all be artists. Everybody has probably experienced this feeling at one time or another, the feeling of being passionately involved in a creative project. That passion is the sign of what might be called authentic work, true work, or soul work. The human spirit rebels at doing anything we don’t truly care about. The rebellion is closest to the surface in the young: hence, the sullen, resentful, rebellious, angry teenager. As we get older and the spirit crumbles, we come to accept that life is “just like that.” Working in drudgery for external rewards so that you can live your real life during your “time off”.
Think of the assumptions built into that phrase, “time off”. Time off from what? If we enjoy freedom only on the weekends, vacations, and evenings of our lives, then what does that say about the rest of life? It is slavery. What about being free all the time? That is what you are, when you do something you love. You are free.
I am not just speaking of the obvious drudgery of the working class here. Even among the elite, many occupations are not rewarding on their own merits. One corporate executive told me that his job consisted of “lying to the customer.” Another told me that his job was to scare customers into buying computer security systems that they didn’t actually need. And imagine if your job were to promote Colgate over Crest, or Pepsi over Coke, or any brand over any other, essentially identical, brand. Or if your job were to write software to help someone else do that. Or to provide the financing or insurance for someone to do that. Something in you would say, “I was not put here on earth to sell soda. I was not put here on earth to lie to the customer. I was not put here on earth to make children learn standardized testing curricula. I was not put here on earth to push a broom. I was not put here on earth to fill out medical billing statements. I was not put here on earth to collect garbage.”
The nature of work-as-we-know-it—tedious, routine, degrading to self or others, unfulfilling to the spirit—has very deep roots. One root grows from the Machine, with its requirement for standardized, replaceable parts and processes. Another grows from the mentality of domestication, laboring today for the sake of a future harvest. Ultimately, all originate in our sense of self as discrete and separate. More for me is less for you. The true artist never does anything merely “good enough”—good enough for the grade, for the customer, for the boss. The true artist keeps working and working on a project until he or she can look upon it with satisfaction. Then, and only then, is it ready to give to the universe. The true artist might receive money for her work, but the work is not done for the money because no amount of money is sufficient. The real motivation is elsewhere. True art is beyond price.
My conversation partner asked, “But in such a world, who will collect the garbage?” My short answer was, “In a more beautiful world, we are not going to produce very much garbage!” Now I would like to give a longer answer.
Both the question and the answer were spoken on two levels, the first literal, the second metaphoric. On the literal level, we can envision an economic and monetary system that structurally discourages waste. When all costs are internalized, a huge incentive is created to produce goods that are fully reusable or recyclable. This is a return to the very recent past. My ex-wife recalls that in her childhood in rural Taiwan, there was no such thing as a garbage truck. Food scraps were composted or fed to the pigs. Newspaper, metal, and glass were all recycled. Food bought at the market was taken home wrapped in bamboo leaves. Containers were refilled by local distributors or producers. Another friend of mine recently returned from a visit to Cuba, where she was amazed to find that an entire village of several hundred people only filled one garbage can a week.
Ultimately, to make an object beautifully requires that we consider its entire history and future. The artist-engineers of a more beautiful world will incorporate reusability and sustainability into their design specs. They will do so for beauty’s sake, for their own joy and satisfaction, and they will have an economic incentive to do so as well. Products that generate waste will be more expensive. Beauty and money will no longer be at odds. If you are curious to know more, read the economics of Paul Hawken and Amory Lovins, as well as Chapter 7 of The Ascent of Humanity.
But really, the question was about more than just garbage. Generalized, it might go something like this: “There are a certain number of unpleasant, tedious, degrading tasks that have to get done in order to have a modern society. Who will do these tasks in a world where everyone insists on work that is rewarding?”
My answer generalizes too. Tasks like that will become much less necessary when industrial design consciously seeks, not to minimize costs, but to minimize drudgery, tedium, and waste. Secondly, our demand for endless piles of cheap, generic consumer items will diminish as we transition into a new conception of wealth and surround ourselves with durable, elegant material objects made with love. I believe that many consumer goods that are mass-produced today will revert back to local, more labor-intensive production. This is especially true of food, and also to some extent clothing, medicine, shelter, and entertainment. Thirdly, as new currency systems render money into no longer a scarce commodity, we will no longer support enterprises whose dominant motivation is to reduce costs and maximize dollar efficiency. We will desire goods and services produced by artists, not slaves. Such a thing as a garment made in a sweatshop will seem ugly and repugnant to us. To have a surfeit of such things is a strange concept of wealth indeed. To me, true wealth would be to live among unique treasures, not mass-produced uniform objects made with the crass motive of profit above all.
In a more beautiful world, we will not be comfortable eating at restaurants or staying at hotels or working in office buildings that depend logistically on masses of broken souls pushing mops, washing dishes, flipping burgers, and entering data. Nor will there be many people sufficiently broken, by training or poverty, to do such work. Any enterprise will have to make consideration for human dignity.
I believe there will still be such things as hotels and restaurants in a more beautiful world, and there will still be a limited amount of work washing dishes and chopping vegetables and pushing mops. These jobs are really only degrading and soul-destroying when you feel compelled to do them day in and day out, with no hope of anything better. For a teenager to do something like this a few hours a week for a year or two is a different matter entirely. One of the best jobs I ever had was in a cafeteria dish room in college. There are times in life as well, personal transitions for instance, where a period of mindless labor can be comforting. So there may always be a limited place for such jobs in even the most beautiful society. No one will feel that he is stuck there, though.
People will do many more things for themselves. It is degrading to clean other people’s toilets all day; it is not degrading to clean your own toilet, or even another person’s toilet out of love. I do not find it degrading to change my son’s diapers, or to physically care for an ill loved one. Such tasks are part of the richness of life, yet ironically, in this, supposedly richest society on earth, we pay other people to perform the tasks of daily living, converting them from richness to degradation. I think that the toilets in tomorrow’s office buildings will be cleaned by the people who work there.
All the same, it is nice to be pampered sometimes, and there are people who love to do that for others. A more beautiful world will abound in inns, restaurants, spas, massage clinics, and other places devoted to making people feel great. Inns and restaurants will operate on a smaller scale than today’s mega-hotels, and all the slogans about personalized hospitality will come true.
There are some who say that if everyone suddenly insisted only on rewarding work, and refused to compromise their dignity, then society as we know it would fall apart. From this assumption follows the whole regime of oppression and control, with the associated guilt of knowing that your freedom and fulfillment is based on another’s slavery and misery. Well, this way of thinking is correct about one thing: society as we know it would indeed fall apart. But that doesn’t mean a descent to barbarism. In fact, I doubt the transition would be nearly as difficult as you might imagine if, say, all the garbage collectors of the world went on permanent holiday. Your purchasing habits, your composting habits, and so on would change very quickly I am sure, soon to be followed by our production systems.
If all the mop-pushers quit, saying, “I’m too good for this”; if all the burger-flippers quit, saying, “I am too good for this”; if all the marketers decided that lying were beneath their dignity, if all the soldiers said, “I will no longer kill”; if all the manufacturers said, “I will no longer produce in a way that pollutes the air”; if everyone just refused to go along with anything that felt wrong, can you imagine the world we could create? Let us not be afraid to create a world in which no one is broken to be anything less than an artist.
I think we can all begin creating a world like that right now. We can become refusers ourselves, as much as courage allows, and we can encourage each other with the knowledge, “You are meant to do something beautiful here.” Most of all, we can see in every maid, every check-out cashier, every janitor, ever data drone, a divinely creative spirit that is much bigger than that role. See everyone as big. Never through word or deed imply that they are small. Every time you treat one of the lowest functionaries of our society with humanity and respect, you are committing a small, revolutionary act, because your respect contradicts what the system has made them. Even if they are 99 percent broken to their role, even if they accept with 99 percent of their being that life is just like this, even if they willingly comply with their own degradation, there is something deep down that refuses ever to accept it. No human spirit can ever truly be broken. Your humanity and respect will speak to that tiny, buried, and indominable spark of dignity and rebellion in every human soul.

//www.raiazome.com

 I have read a book that has apparently changed thousands of lives for the better...it talks about a self-healing technology that has the potential to cure humanity of all its maladies. It seems so incredible that I thought I'd share if you haven't heard of it or you can let others know who you think may use it. I think this year 2011 we could all practice resolving our issues that have held us back from our highest potential. ;-)

Basic principles outlined below are included



The Seven Master Keys are…


1. Take Back Your Power
2. You Are Not Your Patterns
3. Eliminate the Virus In Your Human Computer
4. Walk Your Highest Destiny Path
5. There is No True Victim hood
6. Challenging People Serve You
7. Suffering is Not the Will of God

These steps Actualize your Full Potential and attain Inner
Peace. When applied, you are no longer a victim to your fate,
nor are you susceptible to the victim consciousness so prevalent in
humanity today. You take responsibility for your life and you take
command of every situation in a masterful way.

To get your free e-book go to http://aurorajulianaariel.com/ & click on the tab TheQuest--then you can download the book.

Enjoy healing yourself once and for all!

Lack of Peace, Reaching Critical Mass

You have in front of you two buttons, one is green the other isblack. The green button represents peace and love, the black button
represents war and hate and you were put in charge of choosing what the
rest of humanity will experience on earth. Which one will you choose and
why?

New Age authors write that the thoughts of only a few can change the circumstances of the world.

Over twenty five years ago I was taught Transcendental Meditation and during that course we learned
that critical mass (the minimum number of people that can sustain a
major change) would come when only one percent of the world's population
learned to meditate. We understood that this small group of individuals
had the power to change the outcome of the world's circumstances.

In the book Edgar Cayce's Millennium Prophecies by Mark Thurston, PhD.,
Mark suggests that only a few hundred people could achieve critical mass
and this would cause the world to experience a quantum change, in other
words the thoughts of only a few souls being in tune or harmony with
God can bring peace and love to the world. As these souls raise their
vibrational levels, others will automatically raise theirs by proximity
as a single virus introduced into a cell can affect the whole body.

I would like to go all the way and say that I believe (know) that it
would take only one soul in harmony with God (creator) to change the
world.

For as many souls that we now have on this planet approximately 6 billion, there are also 6 billion different worlds
existing in the same time and space. Each of us is experiencing and
creating the circumstances of our existence in these physical worlds. To
say less of us is to say less of the creator and it would suggest that
we do not have unconditional love to experience unconditional freedom.
The world exists only in our minds and we each choose individually how
we are going to experience it. Thought, word and deed brings into
physical manifestation which we want to experience.

We are all connected to the power that creates the world we wish to experience.
Everything that is physical is drawn to us so that we can create our own
world. It is not so for fetched if we consider that we live in an
illusion, physical material is the densest form of light and is a
projection of our own thoughts. We agree on certain things at a
subconscious level of thought because the illusion is shared between
souls, we assume consciously that we are experiencing the same world as
one.

Peace cannot be experienced by trying to bring peace to the world. It can only be experienced by knowing that there is already
peace. The road to peace starts in your own world, the one that you are
creating. In all that you know, you must know peace first in order to
experience it. Peace must be your experience; you cannot know peace
while you are experiencing war or while you are fighting for peace. You
cannot love while you hate and you cannot be for peace while you are
against war. No war can be about peace. War is at the opposite end of
the two ended stick; to know love you must move towards love and away
from war. War simply means that there is less peace, in truth love is
all there is.

In all that you do, you must do it peacefully. Create peace in your mind and you shall experience it in physical life.
What you give away comes back to you, and what you hold onto you lose.
Give away peace and you will always experience peace.

Do not try to change the worlds of others, but strive to experience what it is you
desire for your world simply by thinking about it, speaking it and
experiencing it. Give power to that which you are creating, not that
which you do not want to create and the fastest way to experience peace
is to know that you already have it. Faith, hope, trust and wishful
thinking are steps to knowing that you are moving towards peace and that
you do not have it yet. It also removes the responsibility from you for
creating it.

You must always know that you have the power within self to create what you desire. You must know that it is you that is
creating peace because you have the connection to the universal power
and the creator responds to your demands, and finally you must know that
you are the creator in individualized physical form. You are reacting
to your own thoughts about what it is that you want to experience. You
have both the thought and the power to experience peace. You are the
"this and that," the "ying and the yang," "the giver and the taker,"
"the peace lover and the war monger." Choose what it is that you want to
experience in this wonderful playground that you are creating.

You are the Captain this is your ship, you are the creator and the created.
If it is peace that you want to experience, create peace in your life.
If it is trying to move a warring world towards peace that you are
experiencing, then that is what you have created, and you will never
experience peace. Know that it is absolutely appropriate for other
worlds to be at war given that we have absolute unconditional love to
create our worlds as we see fit. To the level of awareness that we have
that war does not work for us, will be the level of peace that we
experience. As long as we believe that war works for us, we shall
experience it.

If you are wishing for a peaceful world, then that is what you will experience. If you have hope for a peaceful world, that
is all you will experience. If you trust that man or God will bring
peace to the world eventually, that is what you will experience and that
will always happen in the future, you will never experience peace now.

Peace comes now, to those that know they have it. Forget about the rest of
the world, it's not going to happen. Experience peace in your mind and
your world will reflect that thought. Experience is a thought
manifested, you are never a victim of circumstance you are creating it.

To the degree that you know that you have the power to change will be the
degree that you will experience change. If you limit your power, you
will limit your experience. If you are waiting for change you will
always experience waiting for change.

If what I have written is not part of your philosophy you will probably already have a very good
understanding of way you feel powerless to change your world. You have
no power if you do not claim it. It is you the reader that does not
experience peace because you do not know it and you are still searching
for peace that is why you are reading this.

Peace is always an individual choice, simply choose to experience it and know that peace is
what you represent.

If peace is simply a matter of pushing the correct button, what thoughts are holding you back? There-in is the
truth that you seek, the answer to peace.

Roy E. Klienwachter is a resident of British Columbia, Canada. A student of NLP, ordained
minister, New Age Light Worker and Teacher. Roy has written and
published five books on New Age wisdom. Roy's books are thought
provoking and designed to empower you to take responsibility for your
life and what you create. His books and articles are written in the
simplicity and eloquence of Zen wisdom.

You may not always agree with what he has to say. You will always come away with a new
perspective and your thinking will never be the same.

Roy's style is honest and comes straight from the heart without all the metaphorical
mumble jumble and BS.

Visit Roy at: http://www.klienwachter.com