Hard Work?

Buying an apple yesterday the shop keeper was remarking on how short lived the get-rich-quick schemes of his mates are. What you need he says is just plain honest hard work - that is where the money comes from.

Good advice - yet the apple cost me 30p. It was a very very nice apple no doubt but as I ate it I wondered what "hard work" the shop keeper had done. He had barely touched the apple, yet he was charging 30p for it. Maybe I thought most of the money does to the distributers. But they touch it even less. Maybe to the picker. It is probably a machine. Ok maybe the farmer. He has done the actual work to make the apple. Yet did he do anything to make the sun? the water? the CO2? the seed? All he did was fertilise the soil and plant some apple seeds. Then may be spray with some pesticide and maybe if its a greenhouse monitor the temperature and water supply. The actual hard work hosever was done by the sun pumping out its light eneregy for the plant photosythesis. And, we can't forget the DNA and the seeds cells who did all the replication and chemistry which converted the inedible environment into the delicious apple.

All that these men did it seems was attend to a process that would have happened all by itself anyway. I accept that wild apples are very hard to eat because of the tannins - but natural selection would have led to better varieties all by itself as humans took the sweeter varieties. Create of managed orchards to select against weeds and unwanted competitors would be a simple step to the tasty juicy varieties we enjoy today.

"Hard work" I thought - this man doesn't know the meaning of the word! We rely upon the infinite histories that create today to enable us to live at all - where does the idea of "work" come into it at all?

30p does not repay hard work - the sun gets nothing. 30p is simply the exchange mechanism that measures the supply and demand of commodities. Whether apples grow on trees or are manufactured at great personal expense - the 30p is still supply and demand. If no-one wants your lifes work then it costs nothing even after all the hard work.

"Work" like so many things I'm seeing more clearly these days is a fake. It is peculiar to the Abrahamic religions I suggest - where even God is said to have worked upon the world.

In those same relgions and in common with other parts of the world Jesus says that we do not own the fruits of our labours for everything belongs to God. This is not fake. How can we own anything when we don't even own our own bodies!

To "own" something is to say that once we did not own it and also that maybe in the future we will not own it. It entails the idea of losing it, and having it stolen. When we own something we say - this is obviously not "me", yet I am going to enforce a notion of "me" on it. Alva's pen, Alva's blog. When I die these things will remain yet I will not. Clearly they are not me. But I enforce against the evidence that they are part of "me". I feel personally affected when anything happens to them. Yet they are not me.

There is a dialectic between me and not-me present in the notion of ownership. That which is truly "me" we don't even notice because we can't ever be parted from it so we can't even be with it - it is empty. That which we call "mine" is already dialectically lost. In Bono's cannibalised (The Fly) words (???) "If you hold on to something so tight you've already lost it".

We acknowledge in ownership that all these things are not really ours - that is why we have to make such a big deal of them. Like with "happiness" to seek property is to become inauthentic immediately, to become not oneself.

So if we can't truly own then what is "work"? It is just something that happens.

While sitting doing nothing
The Spring comes
And the grass grows all by itself.