Almost anything can be fun for a while. Baking bread, for example. But no matter how much enjoyment may come from mixing and kneading and baking and turning out a perfect loaf, being forced to do it is a chore. Being forced to do it over and over is work. There is usually little joy in work, so defined.

Oh, but pride later in a job well done? The glow of accomplishment? Well, yes, but there are many ways to achieve that, some quite hands off. I mow my own lawn and like to see the resulting green carpet. My neighbors simply call a lawn service and, I am sure, have the same satisfied smile.

As one climbs the ladder of recognized achievement and wealth, “doing” becomes more and more esoteric. First simple delegation, then active managing, then planning, or just “vision.” At the highest levels it is almost magic_ just snap fingers and “build a dam.” Or whatever.

Hobbies let us drop down to tactile doing for a while, which is their great gift. And so I think will be the eventual fate of a lot of what is now paid work. Writing only when we want to, for the sheer joy of thinking. 

But, what then, will remain of all the relatively painless work many have been paid for lately? 

Those who believe in extraterrestrials are hard to talk to. They are so puppy-eager to believe, for various reasons, that one feels like I used to when discussing Santa Claus with my children when they were toddlers. You can’t argue with “it makes sense that” or “surely in an infinitely vast universe…”

When I was young, still immersed in the fading cloud of my early scientific thought, it was all so simple. Life evolved to become more complex. Complexity required more thinking, and the most complex survived and ruled. Consciousness was the natural apex of a massive darwinian pyramid. Humans and _ by implication _ I myself were the crown of almost inevitable creation. Surely the same steps happened elsewhere.

But very recently all that is wiped away. Maybe life is easy to get started from amino acids and stuff, but necessary conditions may also be rarer than we once believed. Beyond that? Well even the transition to photosynthesis and multicellularity may be really unlikely, dependent on for example, a large moon or a molten core shielding radiation. The steps to a spine or brain are pretty flaky. And dominant dumb species have lasted for millions of years and crush competition unless there is a massive cosmic accident.

More to the point, human consciousness is the result of so many unlikely events _ the latest being ice ages of just the right depth and duration _ that _ well you get the idea.

Perhaps there will be alternative AI intelligence soon, but I think that artificial consciousness is a very long shot. It will happen here, because I strongly suspect the stars are forever empty. 

The value of “work” has always been an American obsession. “Growth” and its mythology has increasingly stifled any view of pure fun as good and wholesome.

Examples abound but just a few are: meeting other people has become work at networking, reading or travel must be justified to increase mental perspective, sports are the chore of keeping body in shape for adults, a path to scholarship for the young. Just as “investment” is now convoluted to include any expense, joy itself has now become defined only by its role as work.

Obviously, I’m an adherent of pure enjoyment and fun. It’s the one thing machines and AI cannot take away from us. We have a right _ I would argue a duty _ to appreciate and enjoy the wonders of our existence. Just for being itself, not for what it might accomplish.

I know people still experience joy and have fun. But the increasingly claustrophobic concentration on work, meaning, and purpose is a form of slow death. Like an ancient monk huddled in a cell. The saying used to be “smell the roses”, but now it perhaps should be “leave work out of it.”

Work and ritual are always part of human society. We cannot _ and should not _ ignore their power. But there is also grace in doing nothing but being alive, smiling and being amazed at seeing beauty, and laughing for no reason at all.

I see “wokeism” as a degenerate form of anti-colonialism. And in complement, I’ll call “whiteness” a simplification of what used to be “eurocentrism.” Both consist of low intellectual thresholds and angry activism.

Whiteness is not simply, perhaps not even primarily, racism. Yes, skin color is an important marker. But the crucial tenants of whiteness concern the restricted role of women, the assumption of a masculine authoritarian anthropomorphic god, meritocratic class justification of wealth and power, and a vision of destiny fueled by conquests of land and technology.

The anger of both sides is aggravated by modern change. Whiteness believes it is being destroyed by the tribalisms of the woke crowd. The woke on the other hand, see themselves as simply in the right and being repressed. But both sides view the struggle as a moral war, with no compromise possible.

Whiteness probably disturbs me more than wokeism because I came from a more moderate, but nevertheless eurocentric background. I dislike dumb thugs of any type, and right now such people seem to cluster in whiteness, although they are everywhere.

At it’s finest, eurocentrism used to mostly value getting stuff done and trying to improve life. Whiteness lost that ability, along with much else, and prefers to see things decay rather than fixing them.

For years, I considered myself an artist. As a painter sometimes full time, sometimes hobbyist, but never commercial. As a software creator, a kind of Renaissance minor character putting unique code frescoes in tiny commercial corporate monasteries.

Visual art has entranced me, off and on, and added a great depth to my life. There are so many aspects that I begin by numbering this entry in the expectation that many more explorations will follow.

This particular focus is on the validity of alternative self-views in our lives. It has become far too easy to become a compulsive self-declared expert and slip into a constricting rabbit hole. Maybe social media, maybe work, maybe family, maybe almost any odd thing. A blinding obsession distorting or eliminating all else.

I used art, mostly, as a balance. It opened doors to other goals when I studied the lives of artists.. it granted me new perspectives on meaning as I considered such things as aesthetics. And on an intimate level, it let me feel I was doing something real when all else went badly.

But I emphasize the “all else.” My life involved work, family and a few other necessities. Art remained a side reward. I think that is the value and purpose of hobbies.

There is a dirty little secret in economics, which is that for a typical industrial worker it makes little difference in what economic system he finds himself. That person has niche things to do, he may be rewarded or reprimanded depending on how well tasks are accomplished, but the greater picture is the same whether in a brutal free enterprise, comfortable democratic monopoly, directed government company, bureaucracy, slavery, or just about anything else.

Your immediate boss in any system may be lazy or fanatic, marvelous or incompetent. Far up the ladder decisions are made into which you have little or no input. External forces wreak havoc.

So whether working for the state or some wildcat visionary or anything else, a worker tries to remain sane, receive the support needed to live in society, and get through one day to the next. With luck things might get better if you work hard. In any system, no guarantees. And lots of unexpected turmoil.

In industrial society, at least so far, by far the bulk of citizens are employees of some type. And no matter the announced political ideology, their lives are much the same. No matter whatever the opportunities of risk and luck, most workers are for one reason or another stuck with eternally being workers.

Like any mythology, economics believes it considers the grand important ideals. But truly very little of it matters to most of us day to day.

In medieval tradition, kings were appointed by God. That Divine Right meant that a king could do no wrong. A badly run country or an evil king was not the result of God making a mistake, but rather a sign of his displeasure with those being ruled.

The Industrial Revolution replaced that ideology with the divine right of wealth. Capitalism assured that meritocracy could guarantee that those who were rich deserved all they had because they were better than anyone else. If things were going wrong in society, it was because capitalism was being foiled by those being ruled.

Republicans have further distilled this creed to wealth being the only measure of worth. They need guns to protect wealth, strong borders to protect wealth, a strong police power to protect wealth, and an intrusive government to make sure capitalism protects the wealthy at all costs. Once in a while a poor person will ascend to riches which _ like knights or saints from the peasantry in the olden days _ proves everything is working well.

Eventually, for better or worse, the kings were replaced by various new mythologies, capitalism being only one among many. At some point, the sheer increasing folly of any system causes social collapse.

I’m not sure exactly what point we are at, but the voices claiming wealth is always right have grown very loud.

Drove to the post office to drop off two letters with checks _ there have been episodes of “check washing” around here recently. I ended up musing on how fast things I take for granted are going away. 

The pandemic years will probably mark a boundary. A decade from now there may be no daily mail, no checks, no printed newspapers, darn few internal combustion vehicles. Such bad and massive transitions have occurred before, as when automobiles replaced horses.

The experts preach that short-term pain will lead to long-term gain. Perhaps so, but the world will feel much different. Anyway, we elders know that for us “short-term pain” is pretty permanently the rest of our lives. It takes young folks to get excited about the wonderful possibilities of massive turmoil and wreckage.

All I can do is take some effort to appreciate what is and has been. To notice as everything becomes something else or a mere historic memory. I understand as well as anyone that things come along .

So I drive, enjoy weather and flowers and shopping, and try not to worry too much about what might happen. I have this day, and_ well used _ a day is all I need.

In American story books and our immediate definition, spring _ particularly April _ is a wonderful breakout from dreadful winter. The air is pleasantly cool, flowers bloom in profusion, bees buzz everywhere, trees break into brilliant new crisp foliage. And there is some truth in all that, in general.

But in particular, April has some nasty surprises. Depending on where you live it has frost, snow storms, high heat, tornadoes, floods, destructive wind. It can be filled with mud, black flies, mosquitoes, and ticks. Each day varies tremendously even if the average matches our idealization. 

And I think that summarizes a lot of the problems with our thinking in general. On average, maybe mostly true, but reality always contains contradictions and extremes and varies a lot from place to place and day-to-day. And even the idea of “average” is a little suspicious. As the old saying goes, “if you have your feet in boiling water and ice on your head, on average the temperature is just right.”

So I am suspicious of media reports about how things are going “in general.” People are angry, youth is violent, and so on and on. Maybe on average, maybe not, but even if true less meaningful in particular situations then it sounds.

Today, fortunately, is one of those fine April days that matches the beautiful myth. 

Wall Street Journal editorials are often infuriatingly silly. Recently Gerard Baker claimed western civilization was committing suicide because of “woke” business practices, which apparently to him means caring about anything but short-term making money. He crowed about how he along with other best and brightest happily made the world great as employees of Goldman, KKR, Bain and so on.

For me, the great divide was the “”Chicago School “of economics, which claimed that the only rule of business was immediate profit, the only proper goal of the elite “makers” was to generate money, the only role of the masses of impoverished “takers” was to be religious, and the only function of government was to aid the wealthy, who deserve it all because in a meritocracy by definition the best are the richest.

Actually we know that in the “good old days”, in the US, business was more complex. Small firms were part of the community, large firms were part of society, and there was an implicit agreement that for the most part employers and employees were in it together for the long term.

The corporate raiders ended that. They trumpeted “creative destruction,” but they practiced pure piracy. Gobble up anything with a bad quarter resulting in excessive assets, plunder it, sell it off, move jobs offshore, close plants, get rich on paper stock manipulations.

They turned life nasty and mean. If cultural suicide happens, it is because they have already stabbed and poisoned civilization into everyone-for-self hedonistic nihilism.