Righteous Prosperity

What role do we owe society in terms of economic growth? Ideas on work, priorities and rejecting the machine-like model of human production

A few weekends ago I almost got hit by a semi on the highway in an ice storm. I had a hard time getting out of their way due to the banked snow on the road. I was attempting to make my way home after work. I had slept at my job the night before in order to make it to my shift. I could have stayed again that night and worked the next day (on my off day) but chose not to in order to try to get home to my children. I tried, I failed.

I drove for an hour in ice and snow, through an area with no cell service, with my emergency lights flashing due to low visibility, and watched several cars around me spin out and crash.

I called it a day and stopped at a hotel. I called before I went in and the woman said the system told her they were full and I cried, not knowing I if would be able to get out of the hilly parking lot if there wasn’t a room for me. I thought about sleeping in my car in 20 degree weather. I walked in to see if the woman in the lobby would have a different answer than the woman on the phone. She did. I got to my room and began pacing, nauseated and shaking and feeling a little out of my head.

I realized the last time I had felt this way was after a man attempted to break into my home when I was alone at night with my children (I wrote about it, you can read more at the linked essay below). After he was arrested, I stood there shaking and shivering and pacing, almost vomiting. I felt like this again after driving in that weather and avoiding that truck. An adrenaline come-down I suppose. I never did like uppers.

This experience has me thinking about work, the place it holds in my own life, and exactly how I (many of us) arrived at this place. What should work actually be? What sort of place should it hold in the hierarchy of how and why we physically, emotionally and intellectually exert ourselves?

This leads to thoughts on work versus employment, which are decidedly not the same thing. The issue is that most people do consider them to be one and the same. Employment, even in the context of self-employment, implies there is a boss. It implies there is some sort of contractual-like obligation, there are times to show up, time clocks to punch, taxes to be filed, policies to follow. Employment is a trade of time, effort and thinking for money and insurance and a 401k, and those rewards are only doled out when the work involved is up to snuff. There is an element of surveillance in employment, even when it is of oneself.

Shepherds in the Field with a Rainbow, 1885, Camille Pissarro

Work implies task, whether of the physical or mental sort. One doesn’t need to be employed in order to achieve these tasks, because work is inherent to the human condition. Really, work is inherent to the condition of living, for the bear and the spider work just as the man and the woman, even the child, does. Work is the task of she or he who survives. How we complete the work also matters.

It isn’t enough to just survive, and perhaps that is one of the relevant differences between man and bear or spider. Our tasks, the ones that require work of us, are not without consequence. These tasks vary person to person, of course, and my primary ones are food acquiring and preparation, keeping my home clean and reasonably tidy, keeping my family healthy and remedying any illness or injury that comes up to the best of my ability, educating and guiding my children (which includes teaching them about work via chores), caring for our garden and animals, and maintaining my relationship with my husband and family and friends. All of these things directly impact both my own and my family’s survival and ability to prosper. Doing these things gracefully and with focus and skill also matters.

I am learning that completing my own work in the home is being sabotaged by the conditions of the work I do via my employment. Money is of course relevant to survival in this time, and so I can recognize the place my employment holds in terms of relevancy to my own interests, yet I cannot help but notice that not only for myself but for most people, the way in which we conceive of employment and the way we interact with this concept are very machine-like. When half of my life is embroiled in the machine, with my own mind and body being a function of the machine, there is a fracturing of what my own purpose means to me. Employment is to the machine what work is to the people.

If a machine is a contrived artifice, an organized mechanism specializing in efficiency, what is the opposite of that?

The very people they are made to replace, correct? The authentic, corporeal, ensouled organic bodies which specialize in a great many things, not the least of which is the relational realm. Machines know nothing of relationships, we invented them in order to save ourselves time in favor of more time for relationships and leisure. Yet here we are, modeling ourselves after the very thing we created with our unique human intelligence. What a subversion of human creation and will! To mimic that which we created in order to outsource to, on such a vast scale, is some sort of twisted lesson in “be careful what you wish for”.

The lesson being that in replacing our hands and the care they take in their basic tasks with machines, we made ourselves more space and time to be directed and manipulated toward the project of an impersonal and hyper-corporatized mass economic system which views each and every person as a unit of production and service.

Rather than existing within a reality where personal survival, community connection and spiritual clarity are the priority as we are naturally meant to do, we are existing in a reality where our own personal survival is often dependent on giant companies whose leaders do not know our faces or our names, where we spend so much time completing duties for these companies that we have little to no time to tend to the tasks that make communities actually communal, and where the spiritual is replaced by the commercial.

And what of vocation? This is maybe somewhere in between work and employment, a word meant to signify what occupies our time, which comes from the Latin vocare, “to call”. We can be called to a great many things, and what if the call is coming not from formal employment but from the inner realm of home life? What if the call is from a set of tasks which together can be powerful in the value they bring to the doer, her children, her husband, her neighbors and friends—but which brings in little to no financial value? What if the call is to creation, not production? These are not the same thing just as work and employment are not the same thing. This thought brings up the work of Ivan Illich on the topic of work and employment/unemployment:

“Work done off the paid job is looked down upon if not ignored. Autonomous activity threatens the employment level, generates deviance, and detracts​ from the GNP...Work no longer means the creation of a value perceived by the worker but mainly a job, which is a social relationship. Unemployment means sad idleness, rather than the freedom to do things that are useful for oneself or for one's neighbour. An active woman who runs a house and brings up children and takes in those of others is distinguished from a woman who 'works,' no matter how useless or damaging the product of this work might be.”

Perhaps some of my personal vocation is undermining the spell we are all under, the one that has enchanted the workplace and elevated it to the primary focus of living, even if some of us may resent it. The spell seems to be gaining momentum as time marches forth, with each generation more and more removed from the time when formal employment was not the primary lens through which we perceived life. Perhaps part of my project of undermining demands I ask the question of what should be the primary lens through which we perceive life?

This makes me think of a post referencing a study I saw this past week, shown below:

nicolemjardim

A post shared by @nicolemjardim

The rest of the post…

My issue with this post is the wording used in the study related to economics. “The first economic evidence for the existence and importance of estrus in contemporary human females”. This wording is indicative of a certain attitude towards human existence, one which seeks to monetize every single aspect of it, right down to normal physiological processes.

We do not need “economic evidence” for the reason of the phenomenon of ovulation in women. Women do not ovulate in order to make more money at the strip club. Women ovulate in order to create life. Any physiological and emotional changes that happen in tandem with this stage of the menstrual cycle which make women more appealing to men is in service of life making, not money making. This is quite obvious to anyone who has observed or taken part in this experience as well, and why this needed to be studied to conclude as such is beyond me.

This is, of course, a hyper specific example, but one which does illustrate the fact that there is a tendency for some (I think many, if not most) people to perceive life through the lens of economy, a lens of monetary valuation of the worth of any particular human’s life. It’s the whole “what does she bring to the table?” question we keep seeing on social media being posed to young men, their answers often betraying expectations where young women are expected to not only be the makers and keepers of life and home while being eternally beautiful but also to pay for his dinner and have an impressive stock portfolio. In this lens, a woman isn’t valuable unless she is profitable and brings financial gain. This question, of course, gets even more complicated when it comes to men.

The lens of any perspective does what exactly? Bring into focus. In bringing into focus the monetary value of people, both as individuals and as entire regions, the other more uniquely human qualities we embody are effectively being blurred. It’s a very extractive perspective. If the lens were to be re-focused to include the wider span of human value and thereby give the qualities within us which impart that value more meaningful reign, the qualities which make us unique from our other mammalian counterparts, I do think we all would be better for it. Market value of humanity should be in the blurred background, intrinsic worth in the fore.

Ruth Gaskovski

recently shared a quote in notes from a piece shared over at

The Savage Collective

entitled “The Home is Not a Hotel”, linked below. In her note Ruth stated that Joshua Pauling, the author of the piece, “makes a clear case that, without mentally and physically participating in building a home life, a person turns into ‘an isolated productivity unit of economic worth’.”

The Home is Not a Hotel

This got me thinking and mentally expanding on this concept. In addition to the home not being a hotel, your family are also not your roommates. For those of us blessed to have them, the garden is not the grocery store. The analogy could go on and on….the point is, these things we are keepers and curators and makers of require intimate maintenance. They require our personalities to be ensouled into them. They demand our utmost care and a sense of sincerity and authenticity. In order for this tending to be proper, we have to actually be present—mentally and physically.

This leads to another analogy—for many people, jobs and their confines should not be the primary community. The trick of job culture—which encompasses place, people, and task—is that it precedes what was described above. If our jobs replace our homes as the places where we spend the most active time, and our co-workers replace our families as the people we interact with the most and are most present with, and our job-tasks replace our vocation-tasks, what are we left with exactly? And what does this do to our collective identity? It robs us of the ability to tend to true purpose and enjoy the fruits of our labor. It renders us into both human and machine, each part at war with the other. There can be no true happiness here.

The happiness sought inherently by the human soul is the fulfillment of the right to prosper. Prosper, of course, is in reference to both wellness in material and physical life, as well as spiritual. The grounds happiness swells from. I enjoy the following etymological explanation from Etymonline:

“This is perhaps etymologically ‘agreeable to one's wishes,’ traditionally regarded as from Old Latin pro spere ‘according to expectation, according to one's hope,’ from pro ‘for’+ ablative of spes ‘hope’”.

For hope! The fulfillment of one’s hope is where happiness lies, and the right to pursue the tasks needing completion in service of these hopes, alongside the families we hold these hopes for is the imperative of the human spirit. Jobs are a mere tool to add to this mission, they are not the primary means of how we may fulfill our hopes and find prosperity. The current human-as-machine imperative tells us that they are this very thing, however.

I propose a generative unemployment, combined with turning back to vocation and bringing that vocation into the home in every way it is possible. We cannot do away completely with jobs, but I think it is worthwhile to pursue with vigor and a sense of unforgiving righteousness our purposeful, aligned, real work in a way that eclipses our jobs and hopefully eventually replaces them. We do not owe society our labor at the expense of our happiness. We owe society our happiness so that future generations of people may be useful, well-adjusted, devoted members of the communities in which they dwell and exemplary mothers and fathers to their children—not just job-completing shells of unfulfilled human potential.

Our happiness is the imperative, our prospering is a matter of righteousness, and our respective calls to our individual vocations are the vehicles to both our happiness and our prosperity.