This person is just describing the psychological factors underpinning self-determination theory as it applies to work but without the language to convey it: https://selfdeterminationtheory.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/2017_DeciOlafsenRyan_annurev-orgpsych.pdf
Ain’t it funny how that can happen? How someone can “stumble across” some academic theory or whatnot without knowing it. This isn’t at all to say academia isn’t necessary, this is just an observation.
Academia is just very strict standards of thinking and talking about thinking. This makes it difficult but reliable.
Oh, I personally love to see it. It’s how we bridge the gap of academia and the real world. There are many things that people feel or experience but don’t have the language to discuss, but once they do it can be very empowering. If you’re familiar with urban planning discours online then you’ve maybe heard of the word “stroad” describing the horrible 6 lane + type roads in much of the US filled with stripmalls. Being on one you can get this feeling of alienation and artificiality, like something isn’t right. However once you have a name for it, you can now discuss and advocate to change the “stroad”.
I actually enjoy my work, most of the time, sue me.
I guess getting an education in what you like and are good at while it’s in demand by the market is kinda lucky though.
Yeah, this exactly. I actually really love my job, most of the time, and it pays pretty well, with a strong union and an excellent work/life balance. But I look out at the market, and it doesn’t take a genius to realize, boy was that a miracle. I’m not so blinded by my own anecdotal evidence to not realize things drastically need reform, and that everyone deserves a job as fulfilling as mine.
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This gets kinda close to whitewashing exploitation.
That wasn’t my intention – my intention was to point out the history of it, in order to set up the argument that we in the present, with our tools of communication and education, should be better than this because we can understand the value of cooperation and other professions not directly producing necessities.
Exploitation is one tool, but it is a cruel and unjust tool, and by no means the only or best tool. We can and should do better. We can look to the past to see the patterns, but we can also look at the present to see where they can and should be broken.
It’s true that progress has been driven by specialization, surplus food production, and advances in storing food which further contributes to food production.
For the most part, peasant families had to be self-sufficient all-rounders, producing food, clothes, (simple) tools, fetching water, maintaining their homes and all that is required for running a farmer’s household.
Most specialization to do things beyond that, enabled by the surplus, weren’t done by the peasants that made up the majority of people in settled societies.
Additionally the entire point of agriculture with domesticated plants has always been the big surplus it provides (and more importantly how reliable it is).
The additional production supports a greater population density, but without some mechanism to transport it from those producing it to those in other professions, they’d mostly put it all towards their own households and neighbours and some other people in their general vicinity.
You’ll pay your toolsmith in kind (=food, textiles), you’ll feed your elders but why would you sponsor some layabout sitting in his room all day “thinking” and “writing” instead of actually working his share, if you can’t really grasp the benefit his thinking and writing brings?
Essentially, the “surplus” would be consumed by an increase in populace, up to the limit the available land will support – at some point, more labour won’t help you produce more food and clothing, so it’d just mean you have to spend less time working and more time at leisure. Note this point, I’ll get back to that.
Saying that it’s the exploitation in particular that has driven progress is a strange take.
The distinction I might not have made clear enough is between “extraction” and “exploitation”: Extraction of additional labour and the resulting surplus in resources is what enables professions not directly concerned with producing those resources.
Exploitation is one method by which this was historically achieved. It’s not the only method, nor in my opinion the best method.
The progress I mean also isn’t the agricultural improvements themselves – those, as you point out, are self-serving. But a collier – someone who oversees the process of turning wood into charcoal – is a specialist whose value might not immediately be visible if you can just go and use the wood for your fireplace directly. Sure, the charcoal burns hotter, but you don’t really need that for heating your home and food.
You do need it for processing iron ore into iron and steel, and those into tools, which will in turn help with many other tasks. Obviously, we now know this dependency, and we’re familiar with the concept of science, but if, say, someone came to you and said “Hey, can you give me food? I need to bash rocks together and don’t have time for work” you’d probably still be sceptical. If someone else then comes and says “I need some clothing, but I’m busy turning bashed rocks into a paste that’ll make it easier to build your house” (keeping in mind just how time-intensive producing fabric was), you might be intrigued, but that second guy won’t come around until the first guy has had enough chance to bash rocks.
These people need the leisure to work on their stuff that’ll hopefully eventually pay off. One way of affording that is to force other people to give up some of their food and textiles.
Again, to stress my point: We can now understand that value. We should fund science just in case someone comes up with a novel way of bashing rocks to make our life easier. We don’t need to force people, if those people can be convinced to contribute willingly. We could and should afford people that leisure to try stuff, and I don’t believe we need to be forced.
We absolutely shouldn’t be feeding the modern equivalent of landlords and nobles growing rich from our contributions while inventing new ways to squeeze even more personal gain from us. That is the part that strictly still requires force.
Do you have a source for the claim that farmers don’t produce a surplus without being threatened?
To be fair, that is a simplification. The way I’ve seen it phrased is “Subsistence and a little more”, as in: you’ll want a certain excess, not just for safety in case the harvest turns out worse or something happens to your stored grain, but also because having enough to share with others affords some level of prestige.
But at some point, the additional safety and prestige more work could produce, even if you had more land available, yields diminishing returns. Even with all their preservation methods, food generally didn’t keep as well as ours does today, and armies would obviously prioritise more lucrative areas to plunder for supplies along their march.
What extortion (and other, better methods) can achieve is getting the peasants to part with some of their surplus, instead of consuming it / converting it into population growth. In a way, exploitation forces the surplus to actually become surplus instead of just resources and safety margin.
Generally, I recommend reading Dr. Devereaux’s series on pre-industrial farming, textile production and the general lives of peasants. The whole blog is interesting, but these series in particular touch on the topics of prosperity, surplus and extraction.
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Could you try explaining what the user said that was incorrect instead of calling them racist four times and citing some book?
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Housing is basically free as well. Have you seen caves!?
Unfortunately we would have a cave housing crisis on our hands very soon. Although our numbers might dwindle in the bear wars.
Yeah, if you don’t take into account the fact that it’s probably slippery and cold and wet and full of bats and bugs, caves are very good housing.
I like the architecture
Food production is at an all time high and yet food prices and food waste is insane. It is 100% price gouging. They would rather waste massive amounts of food and ruin topsoil and insist on shrinkflation instead of sacrificing a few dollars.
Transportation cost. I live in a city that makes a specific brand of granola bars. If I go buy a box off the shelf at the store, that box has traveled a minimum of 400km before I touch it (ignoring converters and whatnot in the production facility.)
Centralization has really fucked up the cost of things.That, too.
I can’t remember when or where I read this so please take it with a grain of salt; but most food shortages are caused by market speculation
Islam forbids this kind of profiteering off food and stuff. I am an atheist, but the fact that stuff like this is mentioned in very old religions is telling for how far back this bullshit goes.
I believe it is mentioned under the concept of suht (if im not wrong), another thing that is atrocious in our time are taxes are based on income ie the working class has to pay. Where as, islam preaches wealth tax (in form of zakat) which would work as a good barriers against billionaires. Literally no one needs a billion dollars but somhow it is the norm that billionaires exists and pay little to no taxes but everyone else who do work have to pay ~20-40% in taxes
Food production is at an all time high
and so is world population, so it balances out.
We produce so much food we can feed the entirety of China on just the surplus alone.
i read somewhere that we produce about twice as much food as we consume. the rest is either thrown away, processed into biogas (biodiesel) or used very inefficiently, such as feeding livestock with it.
HOWEVER, it is important to notice that it is very important that we produce excess food.
because food is a natural product, it is subject to natural changes in food production rate.
for example, a 1815 volcano eruption in Indonesia (!) caused the sky to darken sothat less sunlight could reach the ground, which meant that plants had difficulty thriving. It led to bad harvests in places as remote as India, North America and England. Wikipedia writes:
The crisis was severe in Germany, where food prices rose sharply, and demonstrations in front of grain markets and bakeries, followed by riots, arson, and looting, took place in many European cities. It was the worst famine of the 19th century.
Depends on what we call work. Food in nature is free in the economic sense, but spending time and effort gathering it can be considered work as well, and maybe isn’t as joyful as we can expect, especially when doing it for the 3427th time, and when it hasn’t regrown since last time we collected, so we need to go further of find alternate sources.
I like to put a clear distinction on what is work in the broader sense, and what is capitalist work. We don’t need capitalist work to live, and we would be better without it, but some form of daily struggle to maintain ourselves, we will probably always have, unfortunately.
Getting rid of capitalist work would be great. We can mostly leave things as they are, except git rid corporate ownership of anything, and corporate personhood.
You sign a contract with a real, living person. If you must sign with a company, you sign a contract that binds every officer of that company personally. If a company does something illegal, well, it didn’t. A person in that company did something illegal and the highest ranking person on that contract needs to take personal responsibility for it and go to prison for murder, tax evasion, or whatnot.
Also regulate the stock market until it’s almost completely gone. It’s not a good place for retirement accounts, and that’s the only good thing that the stock market has going for it.
Then add in a few fix actions in general, like limit home and land ownership to what a person actually uses. No squatting on homes to rent them out.
Also full medical and dental for everyone, no private ownership of either practice. As a doctor, dentist, or nurse, you are suddenly a government employee, with government certification and training programs that are open to anyone who applies. Most people wouldn’t make it through the program (and background check) but anyone could try.
Add in some more social safety nets, and life could be good.
Fuck that sands like a great mid step on the way to full Communism. Even just the part of forcing there to always be an accountable person would be amazing and fix so many issues.
That’s why he distinguished work from effort though. But I think the concept we’re looking for here is called alienation.
I like to put a clear distinction on what is work in the broader sense, and what is capitalist work.
This here. Also important when you ask people about their work; I try to make it increasingly clear that I’m not asking about where they get their money from.
People for the last twelve thousand years: “Hunting and gathering cannot support the needs of a growing population. We should create a system where crops can be grown efficiently and in high quantities, and animals can be bred and raised. It will be labour-intensive and require specialized knowledge, skills, and equipment, it will lead to the economic stratification of society, but it’s the best way to not have most of our people starve to death.”
One guy who recently read the Communist Manifesto (abridged version): “But food is literally free!”
I mean, yes, food is not literally free. But there are certainly ways to organize an agricultural society that don’t automatically lead to social hierarchies, and that would be vastly preferable, imo. The enclosure of the commons has been a disaster
So I went and planted a seed, I took care of that seed, I go there everyday check on the plant, protect against pests and weather and then when its finally ready some random guy just comes and “This is ours my comrade”.
Nah boi that’s MY fucking plant. Do you want to eat that plant you gona have to give me something for it.
…and to get something to give me in exchange, guess what? You gonna have to work! You’ll either have to plant something else, hunt, make something etc.
Just because you don’t like to work it doesn’t mean I owe anything to you
Edit: I just wanted to point out that work is not the problem. The problem is the economical model, some stupid ass works, monopoly etc
“growing population” is a sedentary problem. Hunter-gatherers didn’t reproduce like rabbits.
They still did, a bunch of kids just died or were infanticided because that was the closest thing to birth control.
I don’t believe infanticide was a common thing at any point.
For one, people in the past were well aware that some herbs had a dampening effect on fertility (not as comprehensive as modern methods, but still apparently visible emough). Together with a longer breastfeeding period and less nutrition, that will have been enough to curtail the actual amount of pregnancies.
People loved their children. There are enough grave inscriptions and stories detailing the depth of grief or framing a willingness to sacrifice your own kid as remarkable obedience (Abraham and Isaac, Cepheus and Andromeda). I see no reason to believe that this should have been so different in the cultures before recorded history.
i remember reading that higher calorie supply makes people more willing to breed, so agriculture kinda caused people to have more kids, because they could.
Nope, that started after the neolithic revolution.
Before that, people had way less kids since 1. diseases weren’t as rampant then as they were after beginning agriculture (turns out that living in close corridors and near your animals that are full of diseases and parasites may not be healthy), and 2. people breastfed their babies until 3-5 years, unlike later, when people only breastfed them for a year or so, or even used wet nurses, which allowed the mother to get pregnant again soon after giving birth.
Of course a lot of kids surely died, but not nearly as much as in later societies up until the introduction of vaccines and other parts of modern medicine.
As for infanticide, I’m not particularly knowledgeable on that, but I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t nearly as common when births were much rarer and attitudes towards groups that later cultures usually killed as babies, such as disabled people, intersex people, and others that were considered ‘deformed’, were much more lenient.
do you have any sources for infanticide?
was infant mortality higher for hunter-gatherers compared to Neolithic or even medieval times?
some information from a quick search (i’m not an archeologist or anthropologist. I was just very interested in Neolithic period at some time 🤷
After the adoption of a sedentary lifestyle with a more steady supply of high-calorie foodstuff ensured by agriculture and animal husbandry, the birth rate increased and demographics changed. Better nutrition and reduced female mobility led to shorter intervals between births, and ultimately to a significant growth of the Neolithic population. This ‘baby boom’ is also known as the Neolithic Demographic Transition. Whether a shortened period of lactation is also a factor in this development, is currently under investigation in a project led by Sofija Stefanović from the University of Belgrade, Serbia. The availability of suitable weaning foods such as cereal grains might have enabled to wean babies earlier, which led to a quicker return of mothers’ fertility.
In the typical pattern of Neolithic societies, siblings are now born in quicker succession, leaving only two to three years between births. Farming communities are known for having many children – not only because they can be supported nutritionally, but also because their labour is needed for the plentiful work in the fields. The physical toll of childbirth probably increases for the mothers, and their social position may change significantly. If they no longer go out on gathering trips as much and remain close to home, presumably with other women in the same situation, confinement and control can be one consequence.
Human hunter-gatherers, for example the Gainj of highland Papua New Guinea, have an average of 43 months between births. Pennington (2001) calculated 39 months for hunter-gatherers, taking the mean of four non sedentary populations. Three and a half to four years between children seems normal for prehistoric people before the Neolithic, i.e. the adoption of agriculture, animal husbandry and a sedentary lifestyle.
How is this child spacing achieved? Mothers breastfeed their babies for at least the first two years of life, and unrestricted breastfeeding suppresses ovulation, preventing further pregnancies. How exactly this mechanism works is still under debate – and do not try this at home: it has been shown that in well-fed, western civilisations with a limited nursing culture breastfeeding alone is not a reliable method of birth control. The continuous, around-the-clock suckling of infants produces hormones in the mother that suppress ovulation, but the energy balance of a lactating woman may also have something to do with it (Thompson 2013).
https://motherhoodinprehistory.wordpress.com/2015/08/31/prehistoric-child-spacing/
Currently reading the Bobiverse take on this. It’s still ongoing and I’m curious where the author will fall in the end.
Except that we do that and we still have people starving to death. Maybe we ought to try something different.
Sure, but the answer isn’t hunting and gathering.
No one suggested that we go back to hunting/gathering.
We’ve extended our population far beyond what “remove the fences and weapons and let everyone scavenge” could support.
Personally I think people who didn’t contribute to that problem should get to scavenge whatever they want, though.
I think a big reason why work feels bad is because in many jobs the surplus value of your labor is being stolen by the executives. When you put in effort to personal projects that feels good because you are actually getting to reap the rewards of your labor.
People like doing stuff that’s useful, not just for ourselves but for others as well. What we don’t like is being exploited.
Yeah the myth that people don’t want to work is crazy to me. How do all these insane open source projects exist then? Why did I spend extra effort to contribute to a project when I already got it working for myself? Most people just inherently like working on things they think will help other people.
Probably because a lot of people find programming fun. I am not convinced that people hold the same enthusiasm for customer service or sorting through recyclables, despite people generally agreeing that people need to be serviced and materials need to be recycled. And when I got slapped while working the register it definitely was not the fault of the exploitation inherent in the capitalist system. In fact I don’t think I would have enjoyed it even if I directly pocketed every cent handed over to me as the fruit of my labor.
Yeah I would agree with that, but I think even working retail, with no managers breathing down your neck making sure you aren’t relaxing for 1 second, and having not dead inside coworkers with you so any rude customers are less of an issue, even that could turn into “want to work.”
Sorting recyclables yeah and I would add things like sewage work, definitely some that very few would want to work at. I would say a majority could be “want to work” though, like repair work, tech support, even yard work is pretty rewarding if you’re not forced to do it 8 hours a day to survive.
All my jobs involved doing stuff that I already liked — and of course, I also complained about it, but it sure was way better than working for Amazons or coal mines or whatever it is USians are doing these days.
/c/im14andthisisdeep
Yeah. There’s not enough naturally occurring forage to support everyone, hence why argiculture is a fucking thing that existed before explicit monetary systems.
You also have the inherent issue of greed. Not everyone out there collecting the forage wants to share. I guess that’s an abstracted version of “building fences”.
You can’t find a solution to things if you’re going to ignore the path and reasons why things ended up like this in the first place. That reason is that some humans suck, and selflessness has not always been a virtue over time. There is purpose and survival value to selfishness in certain scenarios, so even if we could magically erase it, it might not be the best idea in all situations.
“Put on your own mask before helping others.” “Don’t set yourself on fire to keep others warm.”
Like a lot of things, moderation is key.
This is also why so much of so many cultures, society, and even religions are attempts to create external motivations to look out for your fellow man.
“The world would be so much bettee if people weren’t, you know, people.” is not a particularly groundbreaking thought, lol.
Also, “No one can explain why effort feels good but work doesn’t.” Because you don’t enjoy your job, which is fairly normal, unfortunate, and not a guarantee. More often than not I get all those warm fuzzies of stretching myself, solving a difficult problem, and accomplishment from what I do for a living. It’s one of the big reasons I haven’t fucked off into the woods. Not every day is enjoyable, but more are than aren’t.
The way I see it, if I enjoyed it too much they wouldn’t pay me to do it.
maybe it’s their first real job
screams early 20s to me
food is literally free until someone builds a fence around it and guards it with weapons
This is the violence inherent in the system.
Yep. And not just our system - it’s inherent to life itself. After all, other animals hoard food, too. If we just “let nature run its course” things will never change - we need to be proactive in building systems that work differently.
Dude, other animals are food.
Preferably not. That wouldn’t be dismantling hierarchies, even if most humans were on top. We’d still be enacting violence against the “others” in order to enrich ourselves.
What a stupid world.
We are mycelia networks with legs. Seek the most effective source of food for your local cluster, procreate, and eliminate all threats to achieve those ends. That is the base code of our function. We invented the rest in our over achieving pattern recognition brains.
Yeah. Life is an accident, and not always a pretty one.
Fortunately it seems we have the power to change ourselves. It isn’t easy, but it is possible.
Doesn’t seem worth it
It does to me, I suppose that’s where everyone’s different.
If we stop believing in the possibility of a better world, it will never come to pass.
I’ve been disappointed by humans too many times to believe a better world is possible anymore.
I understand that, these are dark times. But people have made progress during even darker times than these, so we shouldn’t give up on a better world now.
This person has never heard of the tragedy of the commons
and you have never heard of the book “governing the commons” by Elinor Ostrom, which is a book explaining in great detail and with the use of real examples how the tragedy of the commons can be avoided
Looking at her work, the first stipulation on pooled resources is:
Clearly defined boundaries: Individuals or households who have rights to withdraw resource units from the CPR must be clearly defined, as must the boundaries of the CPR itself.
That seems like she is aware that commons can be misused and simply calling out that societies have found ways to manage them, which in turn kinda refutes the arguement being made in the post.
no it doesn’t? these are people working together in order to all use something, not someone who guards something with weapons and takes a cut of the value of your work
You’re adding in additional concepts that change the arguement. The original post talks about fences and guarding resources, not about someone taking a cut of other people’s work.
Additionally, even in the self-governance principles mentioned above there is a need for:
- Graduated sanctions: Appropriators who violate operational rules are likely to be assessed graduated sanctions (depending on the seriousness and context of the offense) by other appropriators, by officials accountable to these appropriators, or by both.
You could argue that “sanctions” and “weapons/violence” are separate things, but ultimately even the economists mentioned above call out there is a need for enforcement on how “commons” are used.
Edit: quotes are from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom
The tragedy of the commons is ahistorical bullshit used to prop up bad policy, and it is completely detached from any resemblance of how the commons actually functioned. Garrett Hardin had no idea what he was talking about. Elinor Ostrom literally won the Nobel Prize in Economics for her work studying how common-pool resources are collectively managed in real life.
Isn’t the whole point of the “tradegy of the commons” narrative to draw attention to the fact that the “commons” need governance?
The image you posted seems to be in support of non-goverance, which would be the opposite of what people like Elinor Ostrom advocated.
The tragedy of the commons, as Hardin put it, supported the need for government to impose regulation to prevent “rationally self-interested” actors from depleting the common resource. However, the scenario he imagines in which that’s necessary does not mirror the real world. What Ostrom found was that when faced with a dwindling resource, communities find ways to cooperate and develop rules to manage those resources without requiring a central top-down authority.
I actually don’t find all that much connection between the image I posted and the tragedy of the commons argument. (I just really hate Garrett Hardin.) My interpretation of the post is less an advocacy for no rules in managing common pool resources, and more a complaint and pondering of how work seems to lose meaning when it is on behalf of someone else
I don’t have any issue with the bottom part of the image, it’s the top part that seems to be oblivious to how the world works.
Lol without agriculture you would literally end up eating shit and dying.
Not true. Other ways to cultivate plentiful food that are not ‘agriculture’; adjacent practices
No there aren’t. Not at the scale that humanity currently exists. We would literally die even if we just couldn’t make fertilizer. There would be no way to produce enough food for this many people.
Your mom isn’t at the scale humanity currently exists!
Real, this is a delusional slop post. All food requires some degree of labour, maintaining food supply or access to food requires even more labour.
Civilisation ≠ the natural human ecosystem, it’s something we created… To feed ourselves.
every civilization around a large body of water makes this a half truth
Not really… No major civilization around bodies of water subsists without agriculture. Fishing just supplements the protein requirements of the population, and unless they’re fishing just mackle it’s not likely to be sustainable.
major civilization
Going the fence a name doesn’t make it not a fence.
I cannot opt out of being inside of fence, if I’m really lucky I might get to choose between a couple of them.
Anyone who misunderstands the issu, does so because they cannot accept their position as just another peon.
I actually like my job enough that the feeling of this meme is mostly background noise. I can still empathize because I have refused to allow the fences to beat it out of me. That is a never ending battle. It’s a pity so many have lost the battle but I get it, that ignorance does look blissful.
true but major is doing some value lifting here
even though farming is credited with allowing for population density supporting civilization (tech, stratification etc) plenty of peoples subsisted on the coast for numerous generations prior
we’ve been a species much longer than we’ve had farming (30x?) not really fair to toss all that out just because there is no historical documentation
we have oral traditions arguably from before farming societies
but fish ponds off the coast supported relatively large populations in antiquity, just by then farming was also a thing so there was no reason not to do both
even though farming is credited with allowing for population density supporting civilization (tech, stratification etc) plenty of peoples subsisted on the coast for numerous generations prior
Generations prior to agriculture? I don’t really see how that’s relevant to the current conversation.
but fish ponds off the coast supported relatively large populations in antiquity, just by then farming was also a thing so there was no reason not to do both
Since the advent of agriculture grain, legumes, and vegetables have made up the vast majority of calories that have supported human life. Up until relatively recent times animal protein was a relatively small part of most people’s diets.
if we managed to survive as a species for 30x our time vs farming we’re not going to eat shit a die
that was the point
bad faith argument, you can eat vegetables without farming, it just doesn’t have the same population density, hence my point about ‘civilization’
but also not every culture skews that way, just humanity at large
Fair, but fishing still requires a lot of work.
it can still be feast or famine but the ocean was once plentiful in many costal areas, pacific islands have some written history from sailors / explorers of some pretty great living conditions all things considered
won’t be for much longer
Berry picker mentality
This person is certainly not a berry picker because we know how much work it’d require to completely live off of foraging.
First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him – that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity – so is the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.
– Marx
In fact, one must not imagine Sisyphus happy, for the labor he does does not belong to his intrinsic nature.
Well said!
