FOLLOW YOUR BLISS - the idea of devoting your life to doing the thing that you most love, even if that means ___________________________________________________________________________________________

since this struck a chord with so many people

http://www.theonion.com/articles/find-the-thing-youre-most-passionate-about-then-do,31742/

what position does this idea have in 2013. is it still something we should be unreservedly, unqualifiedly telling kids in high school. where is the safety net.

we should be teaching the idea of karma - what you give to others, you give to yourself. the rest is subjective.

Etsy makes this a viable notion.

i vote that we change this saying to FOLLOW YOUR BLOGS

i was thinking about spinning off from the Onion thread.

so many difficult issues here. the needs of the many vs the needs of the few. what constitutes a good or happy life. what Philip Larkin said about what you want vs what you get. entitlement, privilege, all those good old ILX footballs. i think these are the biggest questions we shd ask ourselves, really.

and cos it's knots on knots on knots i don't have a total grasp on the answers. what i feel, what i talk to my children or other young people about, is the importance of finding a way of living that fulfils them. the extreme end of that drive might be solipsism or narcissism, but i believe in some way that your first obligation in life is to yourself, or rather that it's not possible to live sanely for a long time without following that obligation.

too much too disjointed to write all at once, feel more comfortable with conversation than an essay. does the world owe us a living? about as much as we owe the world our cooperation, i reckon.

http://kfan.tumblr.com/post/45910246222/ok-by-now-youve-seen-this-article-in-the-onion

your dreams and ambitions are in flux and it might be impossible to determine where those things belong wholly to you and where they're produced by the people around you, both loved ones and society as a wider network.

that Kevin Fanning post says "we have our values wrong" and then says our values are right but we need to schedule them better. i think the first sentence was broadly true.

in a lot of ways me even telling you what your values should be isn't so much wrong on a moral or political level as just plain Quixotic.

what i feel, what i talk to my children or other young people about, is the importance of finding a way of living that fulfils them

yeah I mean, I think this is the first mover in this philosophy. you ask anybody in the_west, what is the goal of life? the goal of life is to be happy.

okay, if the goal of life is to be happy, then how do people achieve that?

by doing what they love.

out of all the things that people love, which of those things should they do?

the one that allows them to earn a living.

but nothing demands that analytical leap be made! nothing demands it. such a seductive conclusion, though. but so many gaps, pitfalls, perilous crevasses in between.

following your bliss seems in part like a response to the ye ole existential crisis that we have to spend most of our waking lives working. so a way of getting control of that terrible thought the answer is: follow your TRUE PASSION™ in life, even if it has utterly no value to the world and you're terrible at it.

http://i.imgur.com/7miqE39.jpg

there's a definite problem around the idea of a happy life that's unique to secular thought i think, maybe "western" secular thought in particular. a lot of 20th century literature deals with the idea that the pursuit of happiness leads to lack of fulfilment. a bog standard "life is hard, deal with it" is no response at all tho.

yeah I had a post typed out about the idea of a happy life being so the_west-flecked.

seems to me like, you could define a good life as a life where you were able to be relatively free from, uh, slings and arrows - where your bills were usually paid on time, where you had enough resources to deal with tragedies / medical problems / etc. and to the extent that money is involved with the conception of a good life, that's about as much usefulness as i'm willing to give it

I'll summarise what I said before:

If I can't do it 'properly', I'm not doing it.

i re-read some of Kevin Fanning's blogpost and it was better than i thought. "Maybe it’s not useful to define one person as the garbage collector and one person as the singer. Maybe everyone is a lot of things." That's good.

a lot of my thinking about stuff like this is prompted by working and socialising with disabled people, many of whom are locked out of a common conception of "living your dreams" but who seem to me to have as varied an experience of life and what it can be as anybody else does.

yeah there's def a whiff of 'if you're not doing it big you're not doing it right' in the air

the last thing to make me have ~thoughts~ about this was when i watched whateverest http://vimeo.com/58444378

Not even 'big', just 'properly'..

i reckon the source of the problem is people reaching 30 and realising they didn't bother to do what they want or point themselves towards it early enough.

it's never too late but like, it's also far easier the younger you are to follow dreams, because you have nothing to lose. like i am studying drama (a diploma) at night at the moment, and it's going great, really reinvigorated me, but i do envy the kids of 18 doing it who are just like "yeah of course i'm going to university to study drama" - and why wouldn't they, they have no job, no nothing, no commitments.

my job is my only commitment but it def is harder to walk away from whatever k a year to way less, or nothing - comfort erodes passion etc.

I'm not sure there's any reason why most work needs to be as unpleasant as it is. It's unrealistic to expect that every moment of the day is going to be fascinating, although that's probably as true for 'bliss' careers as it is for being an office monkey but it should be possible to combine most jobs with a decent standard of living. The challenge is to address things like work / life balance, employment rights, affordable family accommodation, easy commuting, home-based-working, and so on, so the bits of our day that aren't taken up with fun things aren't making us so justifiably angry and we have more time away from work to focus on the things that matter most to us.

I'm not sure there's any reason why most work needs to be as unpleasant as it is.

amassing capital is unpleasant :)))))

following your bliss is a way to shift responsibility to the individuals and away from society in providing a higher quality of life. miserable working 50 hours a week, never get to see your family, unfulfilled in the consumerist hellscape we call America 2.0? it's your fault cuz you ain't LIVIN THE DREAM like me, baby.

and so comes forth properity gurus, gettin' it done books, and lifehacker

i'd argue that the unpleasantness of work is directly related to the way we organise it and the way we organise our economies, but that leads to more questions - whether it's possible or desirable to change those things, how much of yourself you can sacrifice on that altar, whether you have an ethical duty to try to make things better for other people, including those not yet born, who mightn't feel the same way (or might have more tolerance for situations they don't like).

if a society that revolves around amassing commodities is causing you unhappiness, how do you persuade the people who think it's the only game in town - for whatever reason - to change it?

this thread = first world problems

I'm not sure there's any reason why most work needs to be as unpleasant as it is.

about half the time i just think "wtf is this stupid meaningless shit" - when i'm doing stuff i like that also requires "work", like a play, i can get frustrated but my mind is expanding or i'm being challenged and i feel this so it's worth it.

the vast majority of people have fairly uninspiring jobs, from what i can tell.

xpost that's what she said

Etsy makes this a viable notion.

― your fretless ways (Eazy), Thursday, March 21, 2013 8:41 AM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sure, if you make physical things and somehow can make/sell a bunch per month at a premium price, at which point you could probably have your own business, anyway.

what if my bliss is sitting outdoors or looking at art or arguing on ilx?

this thread = first world problems

― Mordy, Thursday, March 21, 2013 10:18 AM (37 seconds ago) Bookmark

wasn't gonna be the one who said it

what if my bliss is smoking weed, watching tv, listening to music and eating ice cream? life is so unfair.

Mordy, on one level that's not wrong, on a lot of levels it's dismissive bullshit that almost looks like you haven't read anything anybody's written.

some ppl have the luxury of being artists, musicians, poets, etc. that's like .01% of our population. the rest of us have the luxury of working at jobs that don't inspire us to feed ourselves and our families and to live.

i mean yeah lol life isn't going to come as pre-packaged satisfaction but "only first worlders think about quality of life or the purpose of life or how to live well"?

^

sorry i maybe should've included etsy kitsch designer in that first list so as to indicate that i am taking the posts before mine v seriously

how to live well in sierra leone means something very different than how to live well written on your laptop on ilx

some ppl have the luxury of being artists, musicians, poets, etc. that's like .01% of our population. the rest of us have the luxury of working at jobs that don't inspire us to feed ourselves and our families and to live.

true, but the path from one to the other is not some impossible bridge or something. lots of people cross it.

plus you can also make sacrifices to go some way towards more satisfaction with job. if you want to earn less, probably.

this guy has a family he supports and he claims we're the privileged ones

how to live well in sierra leone means something very different than how to live well written on your laptop on ilx

would you say it was more noble?

this is a lot bigger question than "why can't i be a rock star?" imo, even tho for some people it might be reducible to that.

even then, it isn't necessarily wholly selfish or wholly pointless to think "why can i not live differently and why is the life i live making me feel empty?" you could argue that those questions are entirely the problem of the person asking them but that certainly isn't the only way of approaching them.

props to anyone spending a lot of time and energy on the things they love most without caring if it actually elevates them at all (social adulation, financially etc.)...if they actually exist. i do wonder what that is like.

who's value is it, anyway, to "follow your bliss"? it's from people who it's either worked out for, or have some stake in this value (life gurus, people who want to maintain the status quo, etc.). this whole idea may not even have any actual value for 99.9% of people considering its sources, it's like we only place value on it for ourselves because it comes from authority, fits into our cultural narrative, etc.

if we weren't aware of this idea, would we even be worrying about it? wtf is "bliss" anyway.

props to anyone spending a lot of time and energy on the things they love most without caring if it actually elevates them at all (social adulation, financially etc.)...if they actually exist. i do wonder what that is like.

totally.

tbh, going back to the onion article, you can actually do a hobby pretty seriously in evenings and at weekends.

when Socrates said that the unexamined life isn't worth living he may have been hyping his latest book i guess

NV sharivari local garda and mordy all otm

The unexamined life is totalky worth living if examination of life isnt your bag, mileage varies

i think that's right, i wasn't so much agreeing with Socrates' line as pointing out that being dissatisfied with yr lot is hardly a recent phenomenon. at the same time the guy was the product of an aristocratic slave-owning society so idk

i think your conception of any possible afterlife must impact on your valuation of life in some ways too, allowing for the fact that most of us probably have indistinct or fuzzy notions of death and beyond.

I think there's something to be said about balance or fulfillment rather than bliss alone. I think I'd feel completely miserable if I did some of my free-time activities all the time.

Belief in working towards long term goals feeds into this p snugly imo, something ive not rly ever gone for myself but which works out for a lot of ppl who were probly raised right or w/e

itt i learned that developing nations don't produce artists, thx mordy

Reads like bad Tom Peters to me (you mean there's "good" Tom Peters?). The idea that everybody has unlimited amounts of time and money to do what they enjoy doing and doesn't have to do a day job to ensure that there's a roof over their head and food on the table, nor do they have families and especially children to look after, and yes I know he talks about day jobs, but he's living in a Raef Out Of The Apprentice world.

I would like nothing better than to spend each "working" day writing about music. Unfortunately no one wants to pay me to do so, nor would anyone be willing to pay me to write the way I write, especially not in the current climate. Since I have to eat, I have to do a day job which takes up time and energy and unless I win EuroMillions or something similar it's likely to stay that way. It's like some hideous eighties Thatcherite motivation speaker saying that sleeping is lazy, time-wasting and profit-missing. For whom? So I could "follow my bliss" but I'd starve to death doing so. Is that what he's suggesting?

I think that's one reason why raising children is so fulfilling for people, it's a long-term goal that is hard to give up on because the kid doesn't go away. xp

I think there's something to be said about balance or fulfillment rather than bliss alone. I think I'd feel completely miserable if I did some of my free-time activities all the time.

yeah i avoid talking about happiness, fulfilment seems more important to me and it's different in my head.

and tbh i think if your thoughts or values don't extend beyond survival and distraction from boredom then that is kind of sad and wasteful. i wdn't force the issue but it's what i feel.

Xxp or idk abnegation of all responsibility for the regulation of one's utility to the rules of a major religion or political doctrine that works out for plenty too ime

i've been trying to figure out what is says about me that i reacted to that onion article with more of a solemn nod of agreement than any kind of cringy self-recognition.

elmo gfy :)

i lolled at it and related a bit, but i think it's over-egged for humour obviously.

xpost

the question isn't so much "how do people live with themselves?" because self-evidently most of them do. at bottom it's a personal question, "how do i live with myself?" but the answer to that question has to entail a view on your society and the people who make up your society because you don't survive in isolation.

i think the real crux of the issue here is about fulfillment. There's a lot of things we can do that we "weren't meant to do" professionally that nevertheless we can feel fulfillment and pride about. Ultimately, I think the source of much of our collective unhappiness is that many of us feel that we don't have important roles within our society, and the roles we do have are neither crucial nor appreciated nor anything but a paycheck.

obv i am pretty sympathetic to e.g. Situationist critiques of society but it's notable that they didn't write so much about what "authentic" living wd look like.

capitalism blows

imo yeah. so how can we change it and what to?

capitalism blows but so has pretty much every other mode of organizing society and its impact on life. the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

we cannot. but maybe there's a historical process by which is slowly dissolves in the face of technological advances that ultimately experiences peak crisis and then posthistorical communism. that's my hope anyway xp

what you both say is fair enough, and perhaps in the interval a Stoic patience is the best mind-set to adopt. but again on a personal level mere Stoicism feels immoral, somehow.

No inheritance obv, all children furthermore to be redistributed annually

i think prohibiting inheritance beyond sentimental objects wd be a good idea tbh.

vast tracts of land and huge stocks of cash wd be disallowed from counting as "sentimental", obv.

"pater loved that valley so"

it's sweet that you think i'm joking btw

i didn't, i think forbidding inheritance of capital is perfectly reasonable. and you never see the kids of self-made millionaires blaze their own trails of innovation and glory.

plenty to be said for communal child-rearing too

except for veering into THIS IS SPARTA territory

what if you follow your bliss and what was enjoyable and fulfilling as a hobby on the side now stresses you out when you do it full time

the 'chefs don't cook at home' thing

^^

I'd settle for communal, but tbh my manifesto said rotation and that's our focus going into the talks

that's my other problem with this formulation - that as soon as you allow your primary love to also become your primary source of income, well it's pretty easy to see the balustrades start to crumble

here's an interesting article about a lab-run "mouse utopia" and what happened when they made the conditions start to resemble the conditions of human society. I'm still unsure what to make of this article, but if what it says about mouse society translates to human civilization, then it is fairly alarming.

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/42/wiles.php

excerpt:

...More than six hundred mice now lived in Universe 25, constantly rubbing shoulders on their way up and down the stairwells to eat, drink, and sleep. Mice found themselves born into a world that was more crowded every day, and there were far more mice than meaningful social roles. With more and more peers to defend against, males found it difficult and stressful to defend their territory, so they abandoned the activity.

Normal social discourse within the mouse community broke down, and with it the ability of mice to form social bonds. The failures and dropouts congregated in large groups in the middle of the enclosure, their listless withdrawal occasionally interrupted by spasms and waves of pointless violence. The victims of these random attacks became attackers. Left on their own in nests subject to invasion, nursing females attacked their own young.

Procreation slumped, infant abandonment and mortality soared. Lone females retreated to isolated nesting boxes on penthouse levels. Other males, a group Calhoun termed “the beautiful ones,” never sought sex and never fought—they just ate, slept, and groomed, wrapped in narcissistic introspection. Elsewhere, cannibalism, pansexualism, and violence became endemic. Mouse society had collapsed.

or even assuming adequate income, something you liked to do for 2 hours a day every day becomes nightmarish when you have to do it 8 hours a day every day

Tbh i found bliss with 50mb broadband and bittorrent fuck all y'all

Pololololiopolololice

xp

group socialization theory posits that most kids cd swap parents on the reg without it making any difference to their social development

that mouse thing is kind of cool in its decadent hellishness

wish i was a mouse tbh

xps did the mice stop buying physical music too?

lol

or even assuming adequate income, something you liked to do for 2 hours a day every day becomes nightmarish when you have to do it 8 hours a day every day

yeah maybe the problem raised by the question isn't so much "why can't paid work be my fulfilment?" as "paid work is too big a slice of my never-to-be-relived" time. in affluent societies the number of hours you have to work to get paid enough to survive is arbitrary in terms of value created.

Tbrr when my pay got cut i grew a big fucking furry nose and et nothing but cheese wheres my fuckin experiment

or even assuming adequate income, something you liked to do for 2 hours a day every day becomes nightmarish when you have to do it 8 hours a day every day

the problem, in my opinion, is not actually doing it for 8 hours a day every day, but the fact that you rarely-- if ever-- have complete autonomy over how you do it. There's always other people you have to please, which makes it a lot less fulfilling.

xps did the mice stop buying physical music too?

― dat neggy nilmar (wins), Thursday, March 21, 2013 11:03 AM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

actual lol

Is this from pov of man or mouse xp

i think if your thoughts or values don't extend beyond survival and distraction from boredom then that is kind of sad and wasteful.

idk - if I'm not (or don't feel) creatively-minded or talented enough to create anything me or others would find worth the effort is it sad and wasteful that I spend much of my spare time consuming that (music, fiction, video games, sublime through-balls, films, blogs, w/e) which others have made?

Avoidance of boredom is a necessary part of maintaining mental health or at least managing stress.

Distraction is a welcome relief

bandit ‏@UtilityLimb 23 Apr
pursue creativity until you're too jaded to enjoy what you loved about it to begin with. keep believing there's some answer to life in art.

that's my other problem with this formulation - that as soon as you allow your primary love to also become your primary source of income, well it's pretty easy to see the balustrades start to crumble

i guess this is not necessarily true, but i think pulling it off requires a level of self-awareness. i think it's dangerous is to assume that your leisure activity -- let's say, making fudge -- is going to translate into satisfying work. Yeah, you make great fudge and you can probably sell it, but when it comes down to finding and renting a health-code certified commercial kitchen where you can legally manufacture your fudge, or when it comes to how to scale your production and how get distribution through specialty retailers and how to calculate the cost of your recipes in bulk? i think you have to acknowledge that there is still going to be hard work, struggle, disappointment, and frustration, there's always going to be stuff you'd rather not deal with no matter what. and in the end, you may only be able to enjoy the act of cooking only slightly more than you did before.

maybe it just matters that you have some say, however conditional and slight, in what those challenges are. maybe being open and willing to make that sort of conscious choice is what makes the difference.

plenty to be said for communal child-rearing too

― Easter Humphreys (Noodle Vague), Thursday, March 21, 2013 10:55 AM (25 minutes ago) Bookmark

nothing good tho, assuming u mean this

seems a overly tidy little coda to that post, but you know, maybe? xps to myself

I can only speak to this as a former full-time poker player but let me say that poker + job is way more satisfying than poker + no job

elmo following his bliss of being boring

haha mordy dude if you have an issue with me just out with it, jesus christ

haha dude you're just annoying and dull

(annoying= secret WS???)

like i know it's been tense between us occasionally on here but you seem to be holding some protracted grudge against me and i have no idea how it started. so if we could clear the air about that, that would really help me find my bliss thx

can't we treat art more like sports? i feel like i know dozens of people who are really into running, get up early to do it, run 10Ks or even marathons a few times a year, and my sense is they find this really valuable and fulfilling and great, even though they are in no sense "going big" -- thousands of people finish ahead of them, they are not competitive with full-time athletes, etc. we don't look down on those people for being mediocre weekend runners so why not give as much respect to the mediocre weekend artists?

Tough luck elmo, mordys bliss is fighting on the inyernet

follow your beef

couch to half arsed still life in 13 weeks

xxp

so why not give as much respect to the mediocre weekend artists?

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Thursday, March 21, 2013 11:32 AM (53 seconds ago) Bookmark

because art literally only exists for other people to judge :))

never heard of that Bettelheim book mordy so no i wasn't refering to that. horrible instances of failure aren't peculiar to any form of raising children tho eh?

lol elmo if u don't want hostilities stop writing passive aggressive stupid strawman nonsense shit like "itt i learned that developing nations don't produce artists, thx mordy"

There have been numerous studies that demonstrated that kibbutz model was psychologically traumatic to children raised in communal style xp

The world is full of mediocre weekend artists that dont draw any hate eephus?

There's this phenomenon that I think of as an American thing but may not be exclusively American where people have trouble actually comprehending what the word "risk" really means. So when people hear "do what you love, even if it means being poor" they don't really hear the "even if" part - or at best, they tack on an "...until you get rich." We call successful people "risk takers" and failures "losers." No one ever lauds the losers for taking risks, so "risk" becomes conflated with success, or at best, persistence (i.e. if you just do the thing for long enough, you WILL eventually succeed because that's the plan of God and the hollywood screenwriters scripting your biopic).

And of course, that leads to a lot of frustration on the part of people for whom it just wasn't in the cards, or who couldn't stomach the realities of being poor.

if I'm not (or don't feel) creatively-minded or talented enough to create anything me or others would find worth the effort is it sad and wasteful that I spend much of my spare time consuming that (music, fiction, video games, sublime through-balls, films, blogs, w/e) which others have made?

partly i'd argue that engaging with art is a creative activity. partly i'd argue that if avoiding boredom is dependent on consuming entertainment as a commodity then i believe that something inside isn't being fulfilled - but i recognise that's a personal belief that might say more about me than about you. none of us is qualified to diagnose each other's existential ills but it's okay to have thoughts and feelings about them.

partly i think boredom might be a sickness of thinking possibly brought on by consumer capitalism.

I remember reading a particularly dramatic study about kibbutz children psychology which basically said that they developed a kind of empathetic psychopathy from the experience. I can't remember where I read that, but there are tons of studies on the issue. I know I'm getting afield from the thread topic but communal raising is something I'm really interested in.

"consuming entertainment as a commodity" pls explain

can we also add that 99% of art created (professional + amateur) are pretty much of no lasting value to anyone except maybe the artist hirself therapeutically?

"lasting value" is far from the only metric though.

lack of immediate value too

whole framing of this thread that having meaningful work in accordance with your values = "art" is p much bullshit

i followed my bliss last week by turning down an opportunity to invest in a payday loan company. it didn't fit my values of not screwing poor ppl over.

xp well it is what the original onion post was about tbf

"consuming entertainment as a commodity" pls explain

that feeling that you can only be entertained by plugging into a pre-packaged form - CD or DVD or TV show or gig - like your whole experience of entertainment or being taken out of yourself is dependent on "make me something - entertain me"

I don't get what you're on about in this thread Mordy

mordy, blaming me for your hostility is a little passive aggressive itself, don't you think? anyway. i appreciate that you feel the need to lash out ad hominem but it'd be nice if you worked that shit out on your own.

god yr such a little shit

see? what's that about?

You sound a little miserable about something, honestly. Maybe you would feel better if you didn't dismiss your own problems as "first world problems" or whatever.

whole framing of this thread that having meaningful work in accordance with your values = "art" is p much bullshit

― goole, Thursday, March 21, 2013 11:46 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

sure but is it surprising that this would be the most common frame on a place like ILX

oh fuck you eephus

sorry, got carried away there with thread

"i appreciate that you feel the need to lash out ad hominem but it'd be nice if you worked that shit out on your own"

i'm glad u appreciate me elmo

xp well it is what the original onion post was about tbf

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Thursday, March 21, 2013 10:48 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah true, but i have a problem with that too!

mordy's whole trip that the q "what do i want to do with myself?" is a "first world problem" is garbage -- even if it was, so what? i didn't make the world, i just have to figure out what to do in it, you know?

from bliss to fuck you in an hour and a half

new board description

http://youcouldfeelthesky.files.wordpress.com/2007/08/farside-wendell-im-not-content.jpg

it's all my fault for being an annoying little shit who is also passive aggressive and boring, i'm sorry you guys

nah idg what mordy is on about either.

mordy's whole trip that the q "what do i want to do with myself?" is a "first world problem" is garbage -- even if it was, so what? i didn't make the world, i just have to figure out what to do in it, you know?

it's good when people in the first world have first world problems

it would be nice if more of our problems were first world problems

isn't that the whole point of building a first world in the first place? i mean, what the fuck are we even free FOR

lack of immediate value too

so if i can't change the world i should just give up?

yes, most ppl should not be artists

no, they shouldn't. i'm not talking about art.

maybe we can culturally engrain some values beyond being recognized as the voice of your given generation.

I guess once we surpass third world living conditions we should just pat each other on the back and call it a day. "Good job Ralph. Now let's go eat our abundant pizzas in front of Seinfeld reruns until we die."

well, the onion piece is about art

i know it is

there are values beyond artistic ambitions is my point i think. like being a good person, doing good works, etc.

50-odd years ago Galbraith was writing about the evil of economic planning based on survival in a society where survival had ceased to be a serious issue but obv it's important to somebody that we live in crisis mode at all times

i'm not trying to be recognized as the voice of my given generation! maybe you are working with a v narrow definition of artist but wtf is wrong with doing something i enjoy?

in an economy where most peoples basic needs can be taken care of w/ a very small workforce, most people should be shitty artists or w/e the fuck they want really

professional msg board posters

what ppl want is culturally determined too tho. it's not like you want to be a shitty artist bc your soul is crying out for it. u want it bc that nonsense is built into the american dream. it's the capitalist approved way of resisting capitalism or whatever.

The problem is that instead of working 30 hours a week and all being shitty artists, we work 60 hours a week so the children of the rich can be shitty artists with very expensive educations and materials.

agree with Mordy that there are v. important values beyond artistic ambitions, but part of the issue is probably the position of art in post-religious thinking and part of the issue is art in a commodity economy. if you think about art in terms of process rather than value this stuff goes away.

iatee is right tho that we don't really have enough jobs to give ppl. that's why there are so many business consultants.

the onion article is kind of perfect in that i think most ppl's conception of "things" to be "passionate" about is an incredibly small and restrictive list that regrettably includes a lot of creative pursuits that everyone is destined to be at best mediocre at.

what ppl want is culturally determined too tho. it's not like you want to be a shitty artist bc your soul is crying out for it. u want it bc that nonsense is built into the american dream. it's the capitalist approved way of resisting capitalism or whatever.

― Mordy, Thursday, March 21, 2013 12:01 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't buy this at all, and I've never heard the American Dream defined as including trying to be an artist.

artist can be more flexible than 'dude who paints paintings', you can be an artist at playing video games or trolling threads etc etc

Artist in that Romantic sense is absolute lya product/mode of capitalism

question tho: is the act of questioning how to live a product of cultural conditioning?

resisting capitalism is the capitalist approved way of resisting capitalism

question tho: is the act of questioning how to live a product of cultural conditioning?

― Easter Humphreys (Noodle Vague), Thursday, March 21, 2013 12:05 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

i would say so, yes

there are values beyond artistic ambitions is my point i think. like being a good person, doing good works, etc.

art opens the mind. more chance to be a good person the more rounded you are. if you really get into something artistic you do feel happier, at least ime. it doesn't mean you have to do it for a living but i think some sort of outlet is pretty helpful for people.

capitalism eats everything, so everything can be framed as a product of capitalist conditioning. So yeah, you could say that capitalism itself engenders the idea that we should choose a life or a lifestyle or whatever (as opposed to feudalism, which just says fuck you you're a peasant farmer or a blacksmith or whatever). I never find going down this path very productive "maybe it's all just overdetermined by capitalism!" and maybe my thoughts are just overdetermined by my language. Whatever. I want to play music.

And if that is a capitalistic way of thinking, then I guess I just want capitalism to live up to its promise and potential.

isn't that the whole point of building a first world in the first place? i mean, what the fuck are we even free FOR

― goole

free to perfect the elimination of suffering and injustice from human existence iirc

yeah hurting otm, wanting to be 'self-directed' (as they say) is not an impulse that slots into capital or anti-capital

question tho: is the act of questioning how to live a product of cultural conditioning?

― Easter Humphreys (Noodle Vague), Thursday, March 21, 2013 12:05 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

i would say so, yes

i think maybe the form of questioning, but discourse on ethics is spread thru a lot of different cultures

xp

yeah and thoughts and acts of refusal aren't peculiar to capitalist societies

but there might well be a form of "self-determination" which is peculiar to and only thinkable within capitalism

i don't do what i do because i love it, i do it because i love the results or at least aim to. if those results could occur without me having to sit in a specific place using specific equipment for hundreds of hours then i would take that without much thought. sitting at desks staring at screens clicking mice just isn't that however worthwhile the end product might be. for the artist it's surely the biggest drawback to creating with technology as it's 'advanced'. moving less over more time.

There have been numerous studies that demonstrated that kibbutz model was psychologically traumatic to children raised in communal style xp

This is a rather glib argument as you've stated it. There are children who grew up in trauma all over the place. I've rarely met someone who hasn't experienced some kind of childhood psychological trauma or hurt that didn't extended into adulthood in some way. For most people, experiencing some psychological trauma is part of growing up.

Also, linking to a Google Scholar page just using the terms "kibbutz" and "psychology" doesn't show us anything meaningful except that people have done studies in kibbutzes. I'd like to see a study (or better yet, a meta-study) that specifically lays out how kibbutz life is inherently more dangerous than non-kibbutz life, and how it systematically creates damaged people. And that the type of damage that they suffer is worse than the type of damage they suffer from being a part of mainstream society. And that the damage that they suffer is damaging within the context of their own society, not that they feel damaged when they emerge into an outsider ("mainstream") culture that they weren't raised in.

maybe someone studied a mouse kibbutz

so read the Bettelheim book xp

There are many different models of "communal" child raising with varying degrees of communality vs individual parent involvement with their own kids. My mother in law is one of those children who grew up on a kibbutz and was traumatized by it, though certainly not to the point of being an empathy-lacking psychopath, but the kids on her kibbutz really were pretty much isolated from their parents.

really not sure what it has to do with the thread, in any case

me and darragh went for a ramble iirc

If you want to know how I feel about communal living, this film sums it up better than I can:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Together_(2000_film)

great movie!

really not sure what it has to do with the thread, in any case

It seems very relevant to me. It's about whether personal meaning and fulfillment could be found more easily in another model of community that's unlike your standard post-industrial capitalist society.

yeah and actually I think the wiki description makes it sound more sour on the concept than it really is in the end.

to respond to goole upthread: yeah, this thread isn't about becoming an artist, but I think for at least half of the people itt (myself included!) the 'bliss' in 'follow your bliss' meant becoming a writer. : \

but i think even if you replace 'artist' with elmo's fudge maker or some other profession a lot of the issues raised itt still hold. there are lots of burnt out people who burned out doing what they 'love' that wasn't 'art'

local mouse follows bliss: http://www.wharfedaleobserver.co.uk/resources/images/1917709.jpg?type=articlePortrait

I hate the phrase "follow your bliss" fwiw, because bliss is not a word I associate with meaning or fulfillment at all and sends exactly the wrong message imo, as though if you find the right work it will make you feel high all the time.

i'll give you guys the chinese perspective to this question since I think i'm better qualified than most to comment on it: which is, above all pursue stability. and stability usually means, and is synonmous with having money. being boring, bone-gnawingly boring, is okay if you're getting money, it's better than taking risks + being poor. almost a kind of delayed gratification, u can do whatever the fuck u want once u get your cash right and it doesnt fuck up your cash. ur allowed to have ur mid-life crisis once you have money to have the crisis with! i guess. i dunno, it's probably just as viable a model as graduating college and diving into the unpaid internship world for your chance at doing 'what you love.'

I hate the phrase "follow your bliss" fwiw, because bliss is not a word I associate with meaning or fulfillment at all and sends exactly the wrong message imo, as though if you find the right work it will make you feel high all the time.

― space phwoar (Hurting 2), Thursday, March 21, 2013 12:40 PM (48 seconds ago) Bookmark

i called up my great-grandaunt once, who used to be a rich person psychiatrist, and asked her what i should do with my life. she literally said 'follow your bliss' to me.

I had never heard the phrase before this thread

apparently it comes from joseph campbell, the guy who made star wars.

you don't understand, bliss is the name of my dog

a lot of people have the dream of working for themselves, or owning their own business, or doing something with their hands, or doing something that they know is good, or just getting the hell out of their hometown, or out of the city...

it's a much bigger question than "i'm so jealous of lena dunham" or w/e

once again i feel like the baby boomers are to blame here. i've seen too many 80s sitcoms where the dad has a mid-life crisis and decides to "follow his bliss", w/ hilarious consequences (getting a harley?? no way dude!)

basically we're all just living in the shadows of 80s sitcom dads

This seems to be based on a false premise, due largely to the context in which a lot of us engage in those things that we self-professedly "love" to do. For a lot of us - myself included with regard to some previous jobs - the mere fact that we're not "at work" (however defined, but, universally, doing that which we need to do as opposed to being able to NOT do) is something we love, in and of itself. Space, silence, no barking from the boss, no deadlines looming - these all make for a good day, even if we're not doing anything within that context. If we take up a hobby that we only do during that non-work time - blogging, music, visual art, cooking, exercise, etc. - it seems to me that it takes on some of that contextual bliss of being unstructured.

Once you make it your primary activity, it would seem to lose some of its luster. Thus, was it ever really that thing you love the most?

I'm procrastinating. Carry on.

We bought a zoo! xp

no barking from the boss, and momma cooked the breakfast with no hog

does the world owe us a living?

COURSE THEY FUCKING DO

this thread was also kind of inspired by talking with a few friends who are m/l 'following their bliss' (one working in publishing, the other in public radio) and they have confided to me their actual jobs are miserable and awful

This seems to be based on a false premise, due largely to the context in which a lot of us engage in those things that we self-professedly "love" to do. For a lot of us - myself included with regard to some previous jobs - the mere fact that we're not "at work" (however defined, but, universally, doing that which we need to do as opposed to being able to NOT do) is something we love, in and of itself. Space, silence, no barking from the boss, no deadlines looming - these all make for a good day, even if we're not doing anything within that context. If we take up a hobby that we only do during that non-work time - blogging, music, visual art, cooking, exercise, etc. - it seems to me that it takes on some of that contextual bliss of being unstructured.

Once you make it your primary activity, it would seem to lose some of its luster. Thus, was it ever really that thing you love the most?

i really don't agree with this. like, this would imply the thing itself doesn't matter. or that if you blogged or painted or whatever, all day, then working in an office for two hours in the evening could be relaxing and fun.

brb starting a travel agency that specialises in all inclusive 2 weeks' filing breaks in Croydon

lol sounds like a sketch from the armando iannucci shows

i become more cynical about any possibility of doing anything that subverts the totality of capitalism as i get older and maybe anesthetization is the best you can expect - this essay was influential on me in undergrad: http://www.revalvaatio.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/buck-morss-aesthetics-and-anaesthetics.pdf particularly:

Drug addiction is characteristic of modernity. It is the correlate and counterpart of shock. The social problem of drug addiction, however, is not the same as the (neuro)psychological problem, for a drug-free, unbuffered adaptation to shock can prove fatal. But the cognitive (hence, political) problem lies still elsewhere. The experience of intoxication is not limited to drug-induced, biochemical transformations. Beginning in the nineteenth century, a narcostic was made out of reality itself.

sounds pretty sweet you know anyone that can hook me up?

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m25ab8ZcNv1qk3vnko1_500.jpg

xp wander large empty supermarkets

in an economy where most peoples basic needs can be taken care of w/ a very small workforce, most people should be shitty artists or w/e the fuck they want really

OTM

most people should be shitty artists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_Man_under_Socialism

i'll give you guys the chinese perspective to this question since I think i'm better qualified than most to comment on it: which is, above all pursue stability. and stability usually means, and is synonmous with having money. being boring, bone-gnawingly boring, is okay if you're getting money, it's better than taking risks + being poor. almost a kind of delayed gratification, u can do whatever the fuck u want once u get your cash right and it doesnt fuck up your cash. ur allowed to have ur mid-life crisis once you have money to have the crisis with! i guess. i dunno, it's probably just as viable a model as graduating college and diving into the unpaid internship world for your chance at doing 'what you love.'

― 乒乓, Thursday, March 21, 2013 12:40 PM (49 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i guess i am chinese in this regard

i'll give you guys the chinese perspective to this question since I think i'm better qualified than most to comment on it: which is, above all pursue stability. and stability usually means, and is synonmous with having money. being boring, bone-gnawingly boring, is okay if you're getting money, it's better than taking risks + being poor. almost a kind of delayed gratification, u can do whatever the fuck u want once u get your cash right and it doesnt fuck up your cash. ur allowed to have ur mid-life crisis once you have money to have the crisis with! i guess. i dunno, it's probably just as viable a model as graduating college and diving into the unpaid internship world for your chance at doing 'what you love.'

it's a really deep perspective, in my opinion. my thoughts on this whole q are informed by my day job having been the thing I always wanted to do for quite some time now though.

i guess i am chinese in this regard

― call all destroyer, Thursday, March 21, 2013 1:32 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

welcome to the tribe!

I feel like I was raised with an unfortunate mixture of 乒乓's "above all pursue stability" and whiney's "whole tail-end-of-gen-x-thru-gen-y helicopter parenting ...kids who were told they were gonna live their dreams".

i agree w/ everyone who says boomers are to blame. they're just the worst.

suzuki method being kind of an encapsulation of the space between those two things -- i.e. immerse yourself in music from a young age but with the intention that it's only ever going to be a hobby.
xp

boomers are not to blame for convincing people they should do what they want w/ their lives, they are to blame for destroying the economy and welfare state and ensuring that isn't possible

boomers are to blame for convincing people that they should do what they want w/ their lives also for:

http://o.scdn.co/300/48d75ef6004f6015ac9432ab8b600bf1e85aecc4

if we kill them them all as soon as they turn 65 then we can do a lot w/ the medicare and ss money, we can all be shitty artists even

My bliss is to attend properly to my heirarchy of needs. Also, I take showers instead of baths. I get clean either way, but showers waste less time and water.

kinda feeling dayo's chinese perspective; it def dovetails into my own upbringing somewhat.

also this really stuck out to me:

that's my other problem with this formulation - that as soon as you allow your primary love to also become your primary source of income, well it's pretty easy to see the balustrades start to crumble

― 乒乓, Thursday, March 21, 2013 7:58 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've always been wary of using my 'passions' to fulfill a career of any kind. Because that's what has filled my bucket outside of my working life. If I empty my bucket into my working life, then to me it follows that your bucket kinda winds up empty.

I was raised that a job is a thing you do to fund the things you love. Not in quite those terms but that's how I've interpreted it in my adult life.

I think trying to make 'bliss', whatever it it is, whether it's writing or skeet shooting, your whole life, or feeling like you should, can create more problems than it solves. Following your bliss is a nice idea and it looks good on a calendar, and it's a path that suits some people really well...but it can also make perfectly good people think that they are failing at something when they are not.

from an early stoppard play (he actually used it a few times, b/c he liked it so much iirc): "What is an artist? For every thousand people there's nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard who's the artist."

the weird thing is seeing that onion article posted on my feeds by people who i thought _were_ doing basically what they enjoyed.

they're doing it but they're not enjoying it

again, it's almost inevitable that "doing what you love" actually involves doing it according to someone else's set of demands/aesthetics/specifications/pricing/etc. Therein lies the rub.

no one who's paying you to do work ever says, "do it however you want, and at your own pace, and i'll pay you whatever you ask." I strongly suspect we could enjoy ourselves at work without the stipulations.

no one who's paying you to do work ever says, "do it however you want, and at your own pace, and i'll pay you whatever you ask." I strongly suspect we could enjoy ourselves at work without the stipulations.

― Poliopolice, Thursday, March 21, 2013 2:23 PM (6 seconds ago) Bookmark

this isn't true when the person paying you are your parents

the "follow your bliss" and "doing what you love will make you hate it" kind of stuff annoys me when it's applied to art. a lot of great art comes out of hard, torturous work. wanting to be an artist for a living is not about not wanting to work hard or wanting to just be happy all of the time. it's just about wanting to spend the majority of your time working on the thing you actually care about.

The "Chinese" perspective is sort of what I think I have come to on my own (certainly not thanks to my parents) -- I have a kid now, I need to build up a foundation and I'll come back to pursuing my creative pursuits more thoroughly later. That said, I recently realized that if I just don't use the computer much after I come home, I still have this nice window of time to practice after the baby goes to bed, at least on nights when work isn't busy, and that I can probably keep my skills in shape enough to play the occasional show if I'm disciplined about it. Completely pushing music out of my life makes me even unhappier than doing this (although I relate to the comment above that if you literally only can find like 30 mins a few times a week, it's so little that it's just frustrating and not worth it).

So I guess I'm basically agreeing with the Onion article?

like ok being an academic researcher means you spend time mucking with student projects and running around getting grants and etc so it isn't all roses, but this is in service of doing the research you typically actually want to do.

the "follow your bliss" and "doing what you love will make you hate it" kind of stuff annoys me when it's applied to art. a lot of great art comes out of hard, torturous work. wanting to be an artist for a living is not about not wanting to work hard or wanting to just be happy all of the time. it's just about wanting to spend the majority of your time working on the thing you actually care about.

― wk, Thursday, March 21, 2013 2:24 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Right, this. The point is that you're doing something that means something to you. No one said it was supposed to be fun most of the time.

being an academic researcher incidentally is being squeezed out of the current economic model

this isn't true when the person paying you are your parents

true, but getting paid by your parents doesn't contribute to your individual sense of identity, which is pretty important in western culture. thus, i could see how this may not actually feel very fulfilling.

like ok being an academic researcher means you spend time mucking with student projects and running around getting grants and etc so it isn't all roses, but this is in service of doing the research you typically actually want to do.

I've never met an research-oriented academic who isn't absolutely frustrated by the limitations and endless hoops imposed by the academic system. they can often continue because of their commitment to their research, but the system in which they operate severely cripples their ability to enjoy their work to the optimal degree, and many of them are forced to turn into people that they are not in order to cope.

xpost eh, if you can dress it up as somehow being of interest to the dept. of defense then you come out pretty well.

dear dpt of defense, plz pay me to research 17th century french amatory novels to help w/ bombing yemen. thx.

Early Video Art And Its Effectiveness in Mind Control

many of them are forced to turn into people that they are not in order to cope.

the pentagon should certainly be funding my investigation into early 20th century yiddish cinema representations of kol nidre services + other performative communal repentance models

sadly mordy you could actually spin that one.

my bliss was to stay in grad school forever :'(

(in math/physics/cs for years lots of stuff has been dressed up as having implications for 'secure systems' since that's a huge funding source. vague possible relevance to medical record management is another thing that everyone goes for, and also now some stuff with green energy).

the other day i read that Leonardo Da Vinci, when on his deathbed (possibly apocryphal), lamented that he wasted too much of his life with science and inventions, and he felt that he had let down God by not focusing more on his art. that really touched and disturbed me, because if Leonardo felt his life was misused, what chance do i have?

well for sure quick fucking around with yr science and yr inventions, that's a start

if Leonardo felt his life was misused, what chance do i have

overachievers are always unhappy

Deathbed conversion yaaaaaaaaaawn tbh

If Da Vinci would have died rich he would felt closer to God

it's just interesting because it's possible he felt he WAS doing exactly what he wanted, but instead felt that a more meaningful life wasn't personally derived but giving glory to god or whatever.

when you hear that the most common deathbed regret in our times is that "I worked too much" then it possibly means people felt they let themselves down more than anything. there's almost a sense now that exploring the "self" instead of god entails at most pursuing "interests."

the "follow your bliss" and "doing what you love will make you hate it" kind of stuff annoys me when it's applied to art. a lot of great art comes out of hard, torturous work. wanting to be an artist for a living is not about not wanting to work hard or wanting to just be happy all of the time. it's just about wanting to spend the majority of your time working on the thing you actually care about.

exactly. the entire point is that frustration in the name of something you love and something that excites you has a far more satisfactory payoff.

Sex

when you hear that the most common deathbed regret in our times is that "I worked too much"

the unspoken caveat here is that people didn't think their work had any value, which is the real problem

yeah i think that' s the implicaiton

Yeah they mean per hour

the real problem is that hindsight is 20/20.

- Gandhi

Jumping into the thread after three hundred posts, but why are is 'bliss' so hedonistically defined in the context of life/career choices? I think it's obvious that many (most?) of us see the slow, happy, gratification of a decent-job-well-done /as/ capably presenting blissful moments. In other words, for most of working universe, the low-key but constant gratification of, say, a career in life insurance trumps the sparkly novelty-fulfilling desire to be a celebrity spokesmodel – illusory, fleeting, and faintly ridiculous.

So. to me, this question raises less of a discussion of luminous artists vs. scratchy-wool clad lumpenproletariat, with a hard (and false line) betwixt, but a consideration of what personal satisfactions can be garnered from any a/vocation, provided they're personally meaningful.

Would type more, but I'm gonna go crochet a hacky sack and watch Justified.

but why are is 'bliss' so hedonistically defined in the context of life/career choices?

because ime that's where this advice pops up the most often...emphasis on career

there's no doubt in my mind that there's something very western (possibly very recent) about your identity being so bound up in your job. every time you meet someone for the first time, guaranteed that one of the first questions you'll get is about "what you do."

somehow this work thing is such a defining thing about your personality in this culture, that we feel a compulsion to align that with how we view (or want to view) ourselves, and how we want others to view us. I can remember when I was unemployed for a few months, I felt like I had lost my entire sense of identity.

i think being identified with yr job might go back at least as far as people using surnames like Smith, Cartwright, Baker etc etc etc

don't see so many people surnamed Welfare [/FoxNews]

yeah, exactly. I'm not sure there's anything so weird about one's personal identity being tied in with your function in society. it's just that you didn't have to ask Mr. Smith what his job was in your little village of 50 people a few hundred years ago.

my name is dave coolman

'what do you do'
'I'm a feudal lord'
'oh cool I'm a peasant'

But part of it is that since we've transitioned into post-industrialism and a more knowledge-based economy, there's much more variance in the prestige involved in different jobs. I think we fret a lot more about our position in life because of it.

if anything there might be something urban about it. if everyone in your town is a farmer it's a pointless question but I would imagine that professional identification started taking off as cities developed. members of trade guilds would have their own identifying insignias, etc.
xp

i imagine for the aristocracy at least, the most important/interesting thing about you was probably what family you came from.

I don't think there was much of a difference between what you did and who your family is for a long time.

I'm not going to read the article or any of the posts but I assume this is somewhat like the Subgenius idea of "Slack".

shit, i'm six generations in the pop trade, tracing a clear line to my great abuelo selling fermented citrus water and crusty pips to cabeza de vaca in trade for absolution and peppercorns

somehow the timing of that doesn't seem right

i make ping pong tables, like my father before me and his father before him

My family's owned the vinyard since forever

not having to see this twatty thread title would be a measure of bliss right now tbh

beta HideThreads script here, using a bunch of code from ledge's thing upthread and the kilzor script:

http://www.koogy.clara.co.uk/ilx/HideThreads.user.js

there's a new link at bottom of threads to hide / unhide.

threads are removed from lists ie SiteNewAnswers, NewAnswers, SiteNewQuestions only.

will still be visible in Search Results and Blog View (blog view is wildly different from the above. so whilst it's easy enough to find a blocked thread in blog view, it's hard to tell where it ends as it's just a mixed list of h3, span, p and br, there needs to be a div or something around each thread, a single thing to hide.)

hiding a thread won't remove it from bookmarks. Removing it from bookmarks will remove it from bookmarks.

― koogs, Friday, October 19, 2012 1:12 PM (4 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

follow yr bliss m8 :-)

the underscores pain my corneas

xo too much devotion required

xp

xo if u really want tho

it's what I've been fishing for since I got here

sorry if im just jumping in here but i think that one of the things that gets left out of this equation is the fact that often doing what you love really really sucks, sometimes for just a little while, and sometimes for months or maybe years. i imagine that the economic downturn has shifted public expectations on this quite a bit, like no, you cant just start a cupcake bakery or an all high heel store with a clever name and think "nailed it", this shit is hard.

theres a music store down the street that opened up three years ago owned by a young couple, and although initially i mostly was pissed at them for not bothering to think abt whther 2 music stores in a 5 block strip might be shitty monetarily for everyone involved, now i just feel bad for them. its sorta hit the painfully obvious "if we can string this out through the 5 year mortgage maybe we won't have to declare bankruptcy point" and i just blame all the do what you love bullshit that was foisted on people that were desperately looking for a solution in a time where jobs just werent lying around to grab. i mean i want people (conceptually) to work with their dreams or w/e but the potential repercussions in business of living your bliss arent just whoops tried and failed bummer, its like losing your house or destroying your marriage or malnourishing your kid.

i'd argue that the unpleasantness of work is directly related to the way we organise it and the way we organise our economies, but that leads to more questions - whether it's possible or desirable to change those things, how much of yourself you can sacrifice on that altar, whether you have an ethical duty to try to make things better for other people, including those not yet born, who mightn't feel the same way (or might have more tolerance for situations they don't like).

― Easter Humphreys (Noodle Vague), Thursday, March 21, 2013 7:15 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if a society that revolves around amassing commodities is causing you unhappiness, how do you persuade the people who think it's the only game in town - for whatever reason - to change it?

― Easter Humphreys (Noodle Vague), Thursday, March 21, 2013 7:18 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^huge posts imo

NV has been doing the lord's work itt for real

I do have serious things to say on this subject but I need to sober up 1st

you don't change the society. you change yourself. if amassing commodities is a big problem then maybe you are placing too much stock in it. otherwise if you are complaining about society, you are just victimizing yourself, and it's kind of a dead end.

^ the booming voice of capital

moishe postone has been blowing my mind re marx + capitalism btw and i want to share this amazing conclusion from: http://obeco.no.sapo.pt/mpt.htm

In Marx's mature works, then, the notion of the centrality of labor to social life is not a transhistorical proposition. It does not refer to the fact that material production is always a precondition of social life. Nor should it be taken as meaning that material production is the most essential dimension of social life in general, of even of capitalism in particular. Rather, it refers to the historically specific constitution by labor in capitalism of the social relations that fundamentally characterize that society. In other words, Marx analyzes labor in capitalism as constituting a historically determinate form of social mediation which is the ultimate social ground of the basic features of modernity -- in particular, its overarching historical dynamic. Rather than positing the social primacy of material production, Marx's mature theory seeks to show the primacy in capitalism of a form of social mediation (constituted by "abstract labor") that molds both the process of material production ("concrete labor") and consumption.

Labor in capitalism, then, is not only labor as we transhistorically and commonsensically understand it, according to Marx, but is a historically specific socially-mediating activity. Hence its products -- commodity, capital -- are both concrete labor products and objectified forms of social mediation. According to this analysis, the social relations that most basically characterize capitalist society are very different from the qualitatively specific, overt social relations -- such as kinship relations or relations of personal or direct domination -- which characterize non-capitalist societies. Although the latter kind of social relations continue to exist in capitalism, what ultimately structures that society is a new, underlying level of social relations that is constituted by labor. Those relations have a peculiar quasi-objective, formal character and are dualistic -- they are characterized by the opposition of an abstract, general, homogeneous dimension and a concrete, particular, material dimension, both of which appear to be "natural," rather than social, and condition social conceptions of natural reality.

The abstract character of the social mediation underlying capitalism is also expressed in the form of wealth dominant in that society.

It's about more than amassing commodities. I figure that I can remain in the bottom third of incomes relatively comfortably if I don't desire commodities and obscene luxuries - and not have children. I'm okay with that trade-off because I don't want kids to start with, but it's a pretty shitty bargain for a large chunk of people.

Aside from work-related issues re: the Onion piece, I don't know that westerners take into account the amount of time they spend consuming (TV, movies, games) rather than doing, and that's a fairly recent invention in the human reality. Watching TV or playing the PS3 vs. writing/painting/etc. is a choice many of us make - in part because we're tired from a day of work and want to shut off, granted, but still a choice.

i think that while we admire + privilege writing/painting/creative endeavors in an abstract sense, in a real sense situated in our society these are very difficult + often painful commoditized capital mediated experiences. we desire them, maybe bc we recognize that very rarely these creations do have the power to shock + breach + have a transformative element. (more cynically we are drawn to art out of social taste + class games.) but it's so rare. it's a little self-destructive being drawn to creating art i think; idk happy 420 etc. watching tv or playing the ps3 may be of more anesthesiac value than trying to paint for an hour after work every night

Watching bob Ross paint for hr in top 10 anesthetic pleasures

i think that's possibly because art still holds some elements of romanticism and self-actualization and all that that entails in a secular society. possibly what still appeals about being creative is that it addresses that undecidable distinction between 'capital mediated experiences' and some idealized notion of 'pure' creation or self-expression.

x-post!

oh man i tried to spell that word right so hard but in end i went with the closest i could force it to go xp

what appeals about art is the schopenhauerian notion of ceasing to exist in being enveloped by it

which is all I really hope for

enough with your being otm in this thread dayo

I'm cutting u off

haha i continue to feel that schopenhauer's due for a revival any day now.

watching tv or playing the ps3 may be of more anesthesiac value than trying to paint for an hour after work every night

I go drawing a couple of nights a week and most weekends (living the onion article pretty much to the letter) and it's completely absorbing like nothing else in my life, I cannot overstate the therapeutic value.

I mean for me, i'm sure other folk can get that out of videogames or whatever.

that's v cool ledge!

Obv I still curse my 9-5 drudgery Although as I like to say, if I hadn't had shit art teaching at school and basically given it up for 15 odd years, maybe now I could be a struggling penniless artist.

I'm fascinated by the decision to call oneself an artist. Like I know people who will confidently tell everyone they're a painter or director or whatever even though they've never actually made a dime in that field. And others who have had some small but decent level of success as an artist but still identify themselves with their day job. Sometimes it seems like a huge advantage to have the nerve to identify yourself with their dream calling but it's not something I've ever felt comfortable doing. It seems easier if you don't actually have a day job and a spouse or trust fund is supporting you because it's legitimately all you do even if you're not actually making a living off of it. I don't know, maybe it's a weird LA thing since everyone is a musician, actor, writer, or something.

what appeals about art is the schopenhauerian notion of ceasing to exist in being enveloped by it

which is all I really hope for

― 乒乓, Thursday, March 21, 2013 7:46 PM (33 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is the most inspiring thing I've heard all year.

Decision to call oneself an artist has really nothing to do w whether you are an artist or not. It's another signifier, like a shiny car, only geared towards a different social audience.

Or, it can be.

I don't mean necessarily in the sense of calling yourself "An Artist" in some self-important way but just where is the line between answering "what do you do?" with "I'm an actor" and answering with "I'm a waiter".

I've just noticed many complicated variations of this dynamic. people who do get paid professional work in their creative field but also have a day job that provides the bulk of their income, people who used to be highly successful in their field but aren't anymore, people who were highly successful in a creative field but are now trying to do something else so they don't mention the other thing, people who don't make much or any money in their creative field but do it full time because they're supported in some other way, etc.

The most successful artist I personally know - his works sell for upwards of £100,000 - doesn't even do art most of the time. He pops into his studio every couple of months, usually drunk, to give very vague instructions to the workers who make his pieces from start to finish for £7 an hour. They all identify as artists too, and some manage to put on shows or whatever outside the 9-5 drudge of selling their creative lives to someone else - resentment is directed less at this system than at their current position within it.

tell dale chihuly i said hi

thanks for that quote on marx, mordy.

i wonder how much the distinction we make between creating art and creating product is about control (or the illusion of control)? i definitely think it's a bit of an illusion or at least a red herring. like, at the end of the day we're just governed by a different thing, a grammar or whatever. we shouldn't look for happiness in creating something new. maybe in creating something that suits our awareness, or doesn't suit it but allows it or invites it to be involved, doesn't banish it. i think the pleasure people can get from literally all kinds of jobs can be the same as the pleasure people get from making 'art', the similarity being that the process can involve appreciating and mastering form and at the same time playing with form in that tiny little way or adding something to it. and at the end of the day value (or lack of it) is inescapable.

maybe we can't get away from labor and value as constitutive of social relations, but sometimes i wonder if there's a way we can stop measuring everything on a single sliding scale, or at least maybe it's worthwhile to just.. imagine other ways of measuring things that don't involve up and down, that aren't x-y graphable. that's what jumped out at me in noodle vague's post above, like the idea that how we're organized, along one or maybe two dimensions (money and time?) is not sufficient, that we aren't able to account for our relationships with the exchange of capital, and so that form of social organization cuts people off from each other. that fortunately is not the only reality but unfortunately it's the dominant shaping reality i think. anti-euclidianism as solvency. like if we have to have math, can't we make it more umm cyclical or something? and wouldn't that be a better match for us as organisms, as part of an ecosystem. i don't know, i'm not very sure of what i'm saying and even if i was it's probably fairly impossible for all intents and purposes. feel like my life is just going to be figuring out bits and pieces at a time, then watching them be destroyed by my own limits. at least they're there though, that's something.

the bits and pieces, i mean.

so i guess what i'm saying is that the revolution is a fractal maaan. n.b. i've never done any psychedelics.

and people who know anything about math probably want to kill me right now which, admittedly, would probably be a net benefit for human happiness.

"your bliss" is frightening.

also, you could turn out to be bad at it.

hahah cad (xposts)

thomas kinkade too may he r i p

if you blogged or painted or whatever, all day, then working in an office for two hours in the evening could be relaxing and fun.

This is my exact experience with temping (to supplement composing and teaching music).

I have plenty of old computer books from the early 80s and they tend to predict that in the future (now?) computers will pretty much do everything that needs to be done, people will have to work far less, and everyone will be able to spend more time following their bliss-learning, reading, drawing, composing, teaching, etc. That 1st generation of PC theorists were all hippies so that kinda makes sense.

I think we're pretty much on our way, and that they (and the OG hippies) were right about the future in a way. The arbitrariness of production work is manifesting itself more and more each year, instant global communication has been democratized, etc. The old power structures have such a tight grip on us that it's going to take a while. Unemployment is going to continue to climb as things get more and more automated and maybe it will be a generational thing but eventually the revolution is gonna come, it won't be violent or even political, it'll simply be people growing up in this new post-material world, structuring their society around different personal values than we have now.

It's either going to give everyone alot more free time to follow their blisses, or alot more free time to perfect their killer robot-battle skills.

I have plenty of old computer books from the early 80s and they tend to predict that in the future (now?) computers will pretty much do everything that needs to be done, people will have to work far less, and everyone will be able to spend more time following their bliss-learning, reading, drawing, composing, teaching, etc. That 1st generation of PC theorists were all hippies so that kinda makes sense.

Even a cursory understanding of the economy would suggest that this couldn't be true. How would these people working far less be earning money, unless they also owned the means of production?

was thinking about all this again, and it occurred to me that maybe the contemporary "follow your bliss" ethos, particularly in regard to creative/artistic pursuits, is so appealing precisely because it holds out the possibly of reconciliation between "capital" and "self-expression" or "self determination." it's this idea that you can not only do what you want and be some nebulous notion of "yourself" but even be compensated in/by the very system which is presently foreclosing those possibilities. (always thought the clearly facile "everyone's a superstar" thing is so interesting because of this.) difficulty of course is that any system of determination (and not just "capital") is by that very measure not compatible with the purity of "self" that is being aimed at in these pursuits.

there have been studies about this, and explanations of why we're unhappier about tasks when we're paid.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect

In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

Not gonna go back through this whole thread but I spent a good chunk of college agonizing over whether I wanted to stay on course to do software or if I wanted to switch streams and go for being a full-time musician in some capacity (I initially was thinking composition since I'd never really studied voice and figured I was behind the curve already to be a soloist with too small a range; oh how naive I was). I eventually decided that the facet of music I enjoyed the most was singing in ensembles and that was something I could do without having to have a music degree, plus going into the software field would allow me to earn enough money to be able to pursue singing as a side hobby. This wasn't as clear-cut a decision as I'm making it sound; the original driver was to find a discipline I enjoyed that would allow me to get a job without going to grad school, which was my college plan from day 1, but as school went on I found myself throwing more and more energy into singing things rather than computer things, making me question my major. Ultimately, a couple of contentious conversations with my parents and a continued desire to avoid grad school led me to finishing my CS degree and it wasn't until a friend asked me to sing in a pickup group he was putting together for grad school auditions, combined with other friends encouraging my wife and me to audition for a church choir full of alumni from our college church choir, that got me back on the regular singing path, which then wound its way into top-level volunteer gigs and then, miraculously, paid gigs. So, when I looked at that Onion article, I didn't think "oh damn, that hurts; I thought "I am amazed I get to perform at the level I do with so little comparative time commitment".

and people who know anything about math probably want to kill me right now

On the contrary, I know a lot about math and I'm here to tell you that you are basically trying to reinvent the theory of partially-ordered sets, which economists forget about at their peril

wut

In case you ever question that choice, you can keep this discussion in mind: http://www.wikihost.org/w/academe/music_theory_composition#sect11

xpost to DJP

(A CS background is increasingly valuable for composition-related jobs.)

the galois connection between employment and enjoyment.

build my galois high

The woman the year ahead of me when I studied CS (possibly not the only woman but the only one I met and there were only 3 in my year so probably not that inaccurate) is now a professional composer and turns up in the alumni magazine every so often after winning awards. It was observed that everyone in my CS tutorial group was v. musical except for me; of the four of us, two of the others had got music scholarships and one of them is now in several bands who are pretty cool and cultishly well-regarded if fairly low-key.

I scraped my way through grade 2 piano with like 3 points above the pass mark, gave up music lessons, and dropped out of CS too ;_;

to failure! *clinks glasses*

dropping/opting out of things is super-underrated.

not in Iceland, apparently

according to this book, Icelandic people are unusually happy because of their encouragement of failure and quitting

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geography_of_Bliss

In the process of bailing out on a career path I'd just started down right now actually. Gotta be honest, it feels pretty good. As a relative young'un round here (or so I'm led to believe) I'm at that stage in my life where I've got to try and make some sort of vague, ill-defined decision about my life in the directly foreseeable future, so I'm agonising over these sorts of issues on a more or less daily basis. Problem is of course that like most other people, I ain't got a fucking clue what MY BLISS might entail, and I'm wary of jumping into anything two-footed without having done a little bit of floating about trying to find out what this mysterious beast may be, or if it even exists at all. My brain, which has cost me a small fortune in government loans, hasn't been offering much besides ""CRISIS CRISIS CRISIS THIS IS HAPPENING NOW THIS IS YOUR LIFE A DECISION MUST BE MADE NOW NOW NOW" for the past year or so now either.

Totally aware that most everyone goes through this ("Oh but no one your age ever knows what they want to be - look at me, I don't even know what I want to be now", chortles EVERY OLD PERSON I KNOW ALL THE FUCKING TIME) but still can't help being in thrall to the idea that this first career choice is a biggie.

Steadily moving towards the conclusion that I might have to write my career off as a means of making money to fund the things that I actually enjoy (which can essentially be boiled down to 'my friends', which tbh is worrying the shit out of me right now as all of a sudden I don't seem to have many) and hence just stop worrying about whether or not I'm pursuing my ultimate destiny or any of that other Walt Disney bullshit. Sometimes that feels like the sensible, sustainable option, occasionally it makes me want to blow my brains out. My difficulty is that I cant tell whether that second response is me at my most selfish and petulant, or at my most lucid and in-touch with my own feelings. Or both? I suppose they mayn't be mutually exclusive

I have determined that figuring out what my dreams are and then achieving them is less important to me right now than being comfortable and safe and able to afford living on my own. Academia will always be there (unless it won't but w/e).