Month: February 2025

🎹 Music for this post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jL4S4X97sQ.

I hope that you and I together can find some humor in the size of the list of things that many human beings consider necessary. After all, it’s not our fault; these many things were deemed necessities long before you or I were born. We even have a word that we use to describe this world of necessities, in contrast to the world of wild animals we’ve been reflecting on together:

Civilized.

How do you feel about being civilized?

From your very seat, it might seem that there are three answers to this question:

a) “What are you talking about? I do not live anywhere near your first world!”;

b) “I am glad to be!”; or

c) “I resent this complicated life and wish to live a simpler one.”

Many of you will fit into the latter two categories. If so, I think that there is another position you can consider:

d) “I understand that this crazy world I was born into was crafted without my input, and I can live within it while looking for opportunities to appreciate its follies with a sense of humor.”

You do believe life is filled with follies, don’t you?

Please take a leap with me: Let us consider our work — no matter how proud we are of our accomplishments, no matter how highly developed or professional we may be — to be one of those follies.

If you work, or have worked, you may tell me that thinking of work as folly is itself folly. But: I am not asking you to stop working. Your work is one of your predetermined necessities; a true folly would be to attempt to change this. But what I am asking you to do, at least for as long as you are with me on this written journey, is to think about it as something that is artificial.

Now may be a very good time for you to reflect on your previous musings as a wild animal.

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