Meditation for December 6th
Earning a Living
If we want to live, and I mean stay alive, we must earn a living. This is called a job. If we look at the definition of earn, to come to be duly worthy of or entitled to, it means that if we can’t earn a living, we aren’t worthy to live. Some can’t earn a living because of disabilities, or they have other responsibilities like taking care of kids or elder relatives, or they struggle to keep up with the demands that jobs require. No matter what, only those who can earn a living deserve to live.
Why the need to earn a living with a job? We can go back to the original duo, Adam and Eve. After the stealing of the forbidden fruit, God kicked them out of Eden and cursed them. While Eve got the periods and labor pains that women are supposed to endure, Adam took the men’s side of the curse. Per the bible, “To Adam he said, ‘Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘Cursed is the ground because of you; through the painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground; since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”
Christian and Jewish men are cursed to work till they die, if you had a hard time deciphering that. This means not only that you have to earn a living in a capitalist society, but also that you are cursed never to know rest or fun. If you take the religion seriously, the reward is never while we are alive, but after we die, in the afterlife. Heaven is the reward, not the weekend.
And women had their own curse, but now they are also working – having period cramps and a full-time job!
This is the burden of our society; we are put in a cycle of sweating from our brow until we return to the earth. Some say the balance is 8 hours of work + 8 hours of sleep = 8 hours of whatever you want. The issue is that we can’t just turn it on and off from the start to the end of our shift. We have to commute, we need to eat to get enough energy to work, and we try to sleep so that we’re rested for work. We even see therapists to help with our anxiety and depression of being stuck at a job that not only pays our wages but also gives us health insurance (at a cost). If we dare, dental and/or vision (for more of a price), and the job takes our energy so that the “8 hours” become useless due to spacing out and trying to forget the hell of work.
One job isn’t paying the bills. But luckily, technology, which should have made us work less, has created more jobs so we can make up for the money our full-time jobs don’t provide. We are driving our cars to pick people up or to pick up food from the grocery store or restaurants. We try to commodify our hobbies, these things we love, because everything must be a revenue stream, so it kills the very thing that gives us life: passion.
I struggle to keep my mind sharp enough to write these meditations and draw the cute pictures, but work drains me. I’m not going to lie, I hate work, but if I am going to live, I have to earn it. Life is now based on a subscription model, and if I can’t afford it, well then…
Prayer
God,
Okay, we get it,
Adam should not have eaten the fucking apple.
I’m not asking to get back into Eden,
But Jesus fucking Christ,
Can we cool it on the work sitch?
It’s been what?
6,000 years?
8,000?
I think we have learned our lesson.
Are you that vindictive?
Are you really holding a grudge for that long?
Let it go!
Like your cousin (brother? uncle?) Buddha,
let it go.
Forgive Adam and stop taking it out on his great-times-a-thousand-grandkids.
Amen.
Craft
One of the biggest complaints people have is about the homeless people in “their” cities. They see their tents and them walking with their shopping carts. They want to solve the homeless problem, but when they say “solve”, they mean to make them disappear.
What these homeless people lack in homes, they make up for in freedom. They aren’t earning a living; they are just living.
So why are you wasting your time with so much? You can have a tent, some warm clothes, and a grocery store cart to bring your things wherever you go! These people have broken Adam’s curse!
Goal
Curse or no curse, we didn’t ask in the first place to be here, so why do we have to earn a living?