Futility Every day I go into work. I don’t enjoy going in to work. I wish I could be independently wealthy so I didn’t have to go into work.
I think about why someone wants me to do what I do every day.
I think about what makes them want to come in every day to do the same thing.
I think about who makes them come in, who in turn makes me come in. I think then about what factors make the boss’s boss come in. Is it money? Is it the company?
What if the company didn’t exist? What if the desire, the want for whatever the company did in the world was not there?
How far does this go? (Buddhism – negate the desire)
I’ll try to explain why I think we work our entire lives for nothing. What do we have to show for it?
I mean, a dead billionaire is worth the same as a dead pauper…
So I go to work every day to fix something, to create a process for others to follow, to manage a project which the company has determined is a “business need”. What created that business need? The shareholders demanding everyone in my company has Windows 2000 on their desktop? I don’t think so.
So the basic drive for this project is that it will make employees work better, faster, maybe more effectively and therefore, the profits of the company should go up. If the profits go up, the shareholders get richer and as people want to get richer (instead of being content with their current wealth) then they continue to create work for me.
Should I be thankful? I’m not. In general, we become resentful. I hate driving an hour each way to work. I wish at least 10 people dead every journey and that’s only because I am impatient.
So you could make a flow-diagram out of this:
money = profit = richer shareholders = new incentives to make previous = more tasks for me = I drive an hour to work
What if I become a shareholder for my own company? Am I then responsible for creating initiatives to make myself richer?
What if we took away the desire to make money? What if the entire world just STOPPED doing what it is doing right now and everything continued at it’s current state without a single soul working for profit, or even money?
Could it be done?
Could we stop the desire to make money? Could I stop paying all my bills if the people who collect all the bills just stopped collecting them because they realised it was futile? Why make something, do something, fulfil a desire, which then creates more desires for others to fulfil???
I want to make a circular argument to back up this theory, but I have to think about it. I may even do it in Visio…