WelcomeIf you don't....☒
So you want to play golf? Get together with your friends and make yourselves a golf course and maintain it yourselves. What's the problem?
You want a fancy meal? Clean up your own dishes. My idea is to clean the pots and pans you needed to cook the meal before you sit down to enjoy it so that there will be almost nothing for you to clean up after the meal is finished. But make the recipes simple so they wil not make many dirty pots in he first place. My favorite meat dish is a raw filet mignon, with a little salt, pepper, gralic and olive oil (all the latter being optional). You can't get much simpler can yuo get than that, can you? And the key to it is that the meat itself be excellent quality.
My idea of dirty dishes: I would own one plate, one bowl, one knife, one fork, one spoon and each would be of at leat museum quality, and after each use of each, immediately carefully and respectfully wash it for its next use. Each item of daily use being a secular Holy Grail.
Less is more. Less stuff means fewer people doing less menial labor. No, this will not annul the Abrahamic Deity's curse on Adam for eating a piece of fruit, but it would make the problem a lot less worse. Make something bad small enough and if you can't completely do away with it yet it still might become more "tolerable". To repeat: Uf you don't mess it up then nobody has to clean it up, not even yourself.
Oh, dear! What then shall we do with less? We will be borded with our selves to death and not want to go to work at our meaningless jobs to prouduce more of the crap avery day.
Obviously, you should do more with your less. Mies also said: "God is in the details." So every little thing needs to be made so that there is a lot of god in it. You know: "Good things come in small packages." What can you do with a styrofoam coffee cup after the coffee is gone besides throw the part of it that didn't dissolve in what you drank out of it in he trash? Pick it apart with your fingernails? But a coffee cup made by a master potter or quality production of a Bauhaus design can be interesting to study for a very long time even if you never again "use" it for any purpose: it's a work of art.
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My father said that in the Army Air Corps where he served in World War II (he never saw combat), in the mess hall [cafeteria], there was a sign:
Take what you want; eat what you take.
This, of course, does not apply in civilian life, because it is communistic and we are a capitalist country. There is nothing I, or you, my reader?, can do to see to it that we can get what we want on the smorgasbord of the American present, Mr. Joe Biden President and governed by Silicone Valley oligarchs such as Jeff Bozos and Mark Suckerberg.
But we can each do the other part: eat what we can take. We can pride ourselves on not personally producing a lot of garbage even if we don't produce anything of value in meaningless jobs such as I had in my last working years. There is another shibboleth which is similarly two-sided:
Waste not, want not.
We may not be able to fend off want, but we can surely eschew waste, can't we? "Father, why do we have a lawn you have to mow every weekend in your limited time off from work?" [fill in the blank] (Such a question did not exist of my, nor presumably also in his, mindspace. Everything just was what it was, lawn and all.)
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There is no final solution to this problem, because we did not create the universe and therefore are stuck with whatever it does to us. But we could easily reverse the situation from a little leisure for a few to a lot of leaisure for many. Artificial Intelligence (AI) industrial robots can increasingly do the scut work, and the less scut work we make, the fewer industrial robots we will need to make to clean it up.
+2023.01.16 Interpolation: I had not imagined how serious the issue of AI/VR is becoming. It's like "global warming": A lot worse a lot sooner than expected:
¶ Your Comment on Alarmed by A.I. Chatbots, Universities Start Revamping How They Teach
The New York Times <comments@nytimes.com>
6:30 AM (1 hour ago) [+2023.01.16]
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Bradford McCormick | New York
Whtever all this new AI and VR (Artificial intelligence and virtual reality) stuff is, it is all extremely risky. Students and the rest of the public are users of it. There are a few people in megacorporations who are running it all. Everybody should watch the old, fun but profound movie: "The Truman Show". I used to think it would be good for philosophy courses, now it's political science. Want more? My virtual reality experiment: [follows a repeat of my story about my vitual reality experiment which can be found: here.]
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As for what remains, the answer is to be found in the place where young men were safest in the Middle Ages: monasteries:
Laborare est orare.
Make the work we have to do be richly meaningful even if it is nominally menial. And if your retort is "that's not possible", remember that John F. Kennedy said we should go to the moon, not because it was easy but because it was hard. Are you going to shy away from difficult problems because you don't have "The right stuff", folks? If yes, please be decent and fess up to your limitations: "We're not good enough to make our lives better; all we can do is cook up more gadgets and gizmos, and make more mess for you to clean up. Will that do?"
 Unfortunate for themself, the person who lacks one; unfortunate for others, the person that is one. Don't be an a**hole! |
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