A place for thoughts

I sit amidst an assorted arrangement of items all of various technological complexity and origin. Wireless, wired, electronic, mechanical, stationary, cloud-based, analog; all methods of improving my existence, or so I’m told. The past few weeks I’ve been wrestling with the idea of information overload, sensory numbing due to short-burst attention placed on half-digested ideas and iconographics. What do I even do during my day anymore? I feel constantly busy, but am I truly accomplishing things or simply stuffing my seconds with cheap substitutes for hard work? Even more complex, what is hard work anymore?

I recently listened to an interview on NPR with the founder of “crop mobs” which is a new social movement where people, mostly ghostly pale 20′s and 30′s urbanites, gather on farms to assist with manual labor the farmers might need. We’re talking raised-bed cultivation, weed pulling, fence mending and other “salt of the earth” type tasks. In the interview, one of the participants said, “I just want to feel like I’m doing real work a couple of times a month. Nothing I do is real, I sit at a desk and make digital decisions. I’ve never sweat at my job unless the A/C’s busted.” This got me thinking, is it time for a re-definition of “hard work”?

I share the same current employment situation as the crop mob participant. Sit at a desk, change a few lines of code here, tell a remote tech what cable to connect there, hold a few meetings to feel human again. There are plenty of days where I come home feeling un-whole, a bit fraudulent about the difficulty of my line of work. But when I heard those thoughts through the filter of another person’s mouth, I suddenly felt the need to examine why I feel this sense of inadequacy. Are my opinions and judgments based on a practical assumption or on stereotypes that are due for a re-examination?

I began by asking if “honest work” was a function of anything quantifiable. In other words, if I accomplish X amount of Y is it “work” and if I accomplish X* of Y is it “honest work”? My first thoughts were drawn to sweat. If I sweat a certain ounces of water per day, have I put in a good day’s work? Well, in Arizona, I could literally lay in a hammock anytime between May and November and sweat about 1 gallon of water, never raising a finger, so that’s out. If I wake up feeling sore the next day, I got a good day’s labor in? No, I could have just slept weird or pulled a muscle reaching into the depths of my freezer for a popsicle. I moved onto a less objective quantifier: stress. But you only have to watch one episode of Jerry Springer or Judge Judy to see that stress levels are too subjective and often over-inflated for other reasons to be treated honestly. So what is it?

We wrap ourselves in technology so as to distance ourselves from the reality and complexity of life. This is an instinct for survival and propagation. From the wheel to the MacBook, humans have continually discovered and invented ways to ease our workload, so as to distance ourselves from the difficulties of being alive. And each step we take further and further away from digging in the soil we become more disconnected from the realities of being alive. It became clear that what the crop mob folks were attempting to do was not an honest day’s labor. That’s their 21st century selves trying to justify a more primal yearning. Rather than searching for hard work, we need to feel hard living. The stress a 20-lb stone places on your finger tips as you dig it from the soil you are preparing for spring’s planting. The stress of a summer’s heat wave killing off your crop, facing possible starvation through the hard winter. The stress of a distant howl in the dead of night as you tuck your children in for bed. We’ve become so isolated from life’s real stressors that we create and inject stress into manufactured situations and lives.

What became clear to me is that crop mobs are a wonderful idea, but not because they are honest work, rather, because they are honest life. It’s not a function of measuring that work and calling it better work than a desk job, it’s a function of realizing just how far away from the dirt your constructed and manicured lifestyle has taken you. And how you can reclaim that. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.