regardingjohn

I was lamenting to a friend about the cold this morning when I realized I had a bit of The Little Red Hen story going on — maybe that’s not the right story. I’d said that I didn’t like the cold, but I really liked the snow, and the frozen lake. I guess I’d been saying that I’d wished snow and ice were warmer since I was kid (back in the days when snowdrifts were over our head, and we’d spend hours on our bellies digging secret tunnels in them, until our fingers and faces were frozen). That was until I’d read about Ice-Nine in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. But I digress.

My point is one of contradictions of sorts — loving the part of winter that can only happen because of the cold, but hating the cold that allows it. Some would say that I do this a lot in life, and they’d suggest that I love playing but dislike the part of life that makes playing possible (“work” — defined as something *unpleasant* that we must do in order to play). My mother would always chide me that there are hoops in life that we all have to jump through, even if we don’t like it. And she is correct, but that doesn’t mean that those hoops are necessarily A Good Thing.

In fact, I contend that those who quietly acquiesce to the unpleasant and meaningless hoops are part of The Problem. (by the way, I seem to have inadvertantly set up my soapbox here. It wasn’t my intention when I started the post…). We are hard-wired to avoid unpleasantness (except in cases of curiosity), and since we typically find drudgery unpleasant, we dislike school, work, taxes, meetings, etc.

If those things were fun, we’d enjoy them more, no? So the trick is to either A) make them fun, or B) leave them to the folks who find them fun, or C) focus on the parts of them that we find fun.

The people in the world who are doing the most creative work typically don’t consider it “work” as much as they consider it “hard play.” We read about this all the time — the best inventions and most advanced technologies are often created *outside* of their job responsibilities, because they *love* it.
I put tremendous effort into things that I’m passionate about. That’s why I’m still in school — not for the schooling, but for the energy of the curious folks that surround me. My work at FML is like that. I work my butt off there, but it’s fun for me so I don’t consider it “work” (although it is a nice bonus that they pay me). And I want to continue to live in my fantasy world where the “work” I do is fun.

Sadly, society seems to eschew this idea. We have this masochistic (and often sadistic) work ethic that strays from the challenge by choice quite a bit.

My world, the one that I’m trying very hard to create for myself, is full of people who *can* do drudge work, but who try very hard to find fun alternatives to it. I want to find a joyfully capable and naturally silly woman to join me in this quest. It’s a fine thing to “be grown up” but not so great to give up on the playfulness of life because of society’s expectations and structure. Challenge and change the structure! (Playfully) fight the power!