What should one do in this life? I think this is a question that most young people are facing. It is a tremendous question and one’s response to it determines one’s future to a large extent. For this reason, it is a question worthy of our time.
The older I get, the more I consider that the two most important things in life are earning a living and caring for each other. I feel that both must exist in one’s life, in a state of balance, in order for either to be done adequately. Without a sense of care for yourself and the world around you, money personifies and loses almost all its meaning, and without the capacity to earn money, your ability to care is severely inhibited.
A desire to care without the ability to earn money is a state represented by today’s charities, in that they are entities that become dependent upon donations for their maintenance and progression and I feel that this is a very fragile structure.
The fragility of this structure allows for the easy cultivation of corruption that is expressed through marketing as a willingness to extort money by means of inciting pity. This seems to me to be an exploitative action devoid of care for those from whom they are acquiring money: they are like corporate Robin Hoods, stealing from the rich to give to the poor. This is the mirror image of how a normal company operates. Usually an organisation cares most about the people they are getting money from, and less about the people they are giving it to.
Please don’t harbour resentment towards my observations: I do not intend to condemn the work of charities or denigrate what they have accomplished, I merely intend to bring to light a moral imbalance between the common act of fundraising and the spending of those funds.
To care and to earn a living are two very important and essential factors of living. Money determines your physical freedom to a large extent, and one’s capacity to care is a quality intimately entwined with the health of one’s psychological state. So, let’s elaborate on these two.
How do you earn a living?
Schools take up this question and their response to it is to get you to think of a career you may like and then pursue it. I personally undertook this journey and I remember my thinking process at the time.
In my school, each student had an allotted time slot with a careers adviser. I went to my appointment and they asked me, at the age of twelve, to choose a career, something I now think of as quite funny. I remember thinking to myself, not even comprehending really what a career was at the time, that I simply didn’t know.
My first thought was, ‘what am I good at?’, so I looked at my report card and saw that I regularly received high grades in maths. This then prompted the careers adviser to turn to the section of her book that contained maths-related jobs. She asked me, ‘How much would you like to earn?’ to which I replied, ‘As much as possible please.’
Five minutes later, we had decided that I was going to be either an accountant or an actuary, and I left. I hadn’t a clue what either was, I just knew I was going to become one of them. I went home, took a serious look into what I was going to become, got excited about the money, and then began to develop an immense disgust towards my future and, comically, developed a strong dislike for maths. I haven’t sought careers advice since.
As a result of my experience, I question, very seriously, whether the approach referred to above is the correct one. So, what is another way to meet this question of earning a living?
How to earn a living?
To answer this you must first understand what each person is doing in order to earn a living.
What do people do to make money?
You can split what people do in to many categories – entertainer, wedding planner, mechanic, computer programmer, but what essentially are they all doing? They are solving problems. People make money by solving problems. Problems are solved in exchange for money. So, we come back to the question:
How to earn a living?
You must learn how to solve a particular problem.
Now, the key to this is to find a problem that you enjoy solving. Or, more generally, find something that you enjoy doing and then find a way to sell that activity/solution as a product (either goods or service). I feel that this is the key to earning a living.
Suppose also that you don’t know what you enjoy, or you don’t have a problem that you enjoy solving, what do you do then?
Simply, you seek out something that you enjoy.
The benefit here is that now you at least have the right question ‘what do I enjoy?’ instead of the wrong question ‘what career should I follow?’, which has no clear solution. I feel that the question ‘what career should I follow’ is only ever a question asked as a result of one’s present dissatisfaction, pressure, or confusion. If you don’t know what you enjoy doing, then the question of finding what you enjoy is much more important than how to earn money. Money allows you to progress through life, but what is progress without joy? It is surely just waiting for death.
The last thing to add about earning a living is the quality of your occupation and how you consider yourself in it.
One trick adopted by many companies, especially those who employ predominantly male staff, is to give each employee the illusion that he or she is important. It is this sense of importance, a quality strongly linked to a sense of superiority, that makes the employee easily manageable and . . . the bottom line . . . cheap. An employee who has the illusion of superiority will be willing to accept less than what he is worth to maintain that state of superiority. Never take part in this charade.
In the office, the only reality of your occupation is your wage: everything else is an illusion.
So, on to the next factor. Care.
How to care?
We all have this sense of care in us and it is out of this sense that we tailor our behaviour in order to maintain the wellbeing of ourselves and others. It is also possible for this sense of care to dissipate and for us to behave in a way that demonstrates a lack of concern for our own wellbeing and others.
Through living, we see the harmonious consequences of care and the inharmonious consequences of a lack of care. Thus, it becomes of paramount importance to understand what action maintains this sense of care and what action causes this sense of care to dissipate and bring about uncaring behaviour.
What action determines the existence of care?
Care is intrinsic to awareness. It is possible for one to be very aware (alert) or to enter a state of stupor.
Stupor – 1. A state of reduced sensibility or consciousness.
When one is aware of something, care is allowed to embrace that something, whether it is an object, person, or group. Awareness implies a quality of attention.
Attention – 1. The act of close or careful observing or listening.
There is a boundary to this attention, and it is inattention.
Inattention – 1. Lack of attention, notice, or regard.
Inattention means to neglect. Neglect is the act of being inhibited from having direct contact with something, whether it is an object, a person, or group. Distraction is a major cause of neglect and it is an action by which one’s interest is redirected.
Distraction takes many forms: for example, one may be asked to look after a child. At some point during that service of care one can become distracted (by something happening on television or by a knock at the door, for instance) and lose direct contact with the child and, even if only temporarily, enter a state of neglect towards it.
There is also mental distraction, which is where your thoughts distract you from an awareness of the true course of events. Examples of this include:
- Hurt as a result of insult.
In this instance, an insult that may have lasted only a couple of seconds is played back, through thought, many times over, thus giving the insult a lifespan and degree of importance greater than the reality of its occurrence.
- Frustration as a result of stress.
In this instance, one may have been handed responsibility for completing a minor task. This then causes one’s to imagine the demands of this task and simultaneously inspires the recollection of the demands of all the other tasks that one has to do. This imagination is often accompanied by a sense of time constraint, a deadline, and causes one to feel a great sense of pressure. We commonly refer to this sense of pressure as stress, and it is out of this stress that frustration arises.
It is this latter form of inattention that is responsible for neurosis.
Neurosis – 1. A relatively mild psychological disorder.
The question of care comes down to the question of health. A lack of care for oneself results in an unhealthy body and an unhealthy brain, and a lack of care for others can result in the same for them. A healthy brain is necessary because it determines how you think, and that, in turn, affects how you respond to situations and behave.
In order to explore this question of care, you must observe and understand the instances that cause you to become inattentive, and perhaps in a lot of cases it is the abstraction inherent in your own thinking that causes this. It will be your ability to observe your thoughts and feelings that will allow you to see clearly the onset of inattention, the consequences of losing a sense of care, and the significance and structure of careless thinking.
To be aware of the moments that you are inattentive is a state of attention.
Earning a living and maintaining a healthy brain that has the capacity to care are two of the most important things in life. The reason for their importance is that they are the fundamental building blocks that give one the ability to be independent.
Independence, both financial and psychological, allows us to maintain our integrity and remain caring.