The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton. Botton delivers big time in this witty and funny philosophical musing on our mundane livelihood. Wish he wrote this when I was in my teens; I would have probably better prepared to embark on this working world alone.
"It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement."
- Abraham Maslow
On Biscuit Manufacture:
We should be wary of restricting the idea of meaningful work too tightly, of focusing only on the doctors, the nuns of Kolkata or the Old Masters. There can be less exalted ways to contribute to the furtherance of the collective good and it seems that making a perfectly formed stripey chocolate circle which helps to fill an impatient stomach in the long morning hours between nine o'clock and the noon may deserve its own secure, if microscopic, place in the pantheons of innovations designed to alleviate the burden of human existence.
On Career Counseling:
Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or a bicycle.
On Rocket Scientist:
Yet I felt the awkwardness of having to look up to rocket engineers and technicians as our ancestors might once have venerated their gods. These specialists were unlikely and troubling objects of admiration compared with the night sky and the mountains. The pre-scientific age, whatever its deficiencies, had at least offered its members the peace of mind that follows from knowing all man-made achievements to be nothing next to grandeur of the universe. We, more blessed in our gadgetry but less humble in our outlook, have been left to wrestle with feelings of envy, anxiety and arrogance that follow from having no more compelling repository of veneration than our brilliant, precise, blinkered and morally troubling fellow human beings.
On Painting:
To convey the particularity of artistic work, he quotes Hegel's definition of painting and music as genres dedicated to the 'sensuous presentation of ideas'. We require such 'sensuous' arts, Hegel suggested, because many important truth will impress themselves upon our consciousness only if they have been moulded from sensory, emotive material. We may, for example, need a song to alert us in a visceral way to the importance of forgiving others, a notion to which we might previously assented purely in a rote and stagnant way after reading of it in a political tract - just as it may only be in front of a successful painting of an oak tree that we are in any position to feel, as opposed dutifully to accept, the significance of the natural world.
On Transmission Engineering:
He had devoted a decade and some of his colleagues later surmised, some of his sanity, to fabricating a tube consisting of two heavy weights separated by a spring, which resonated at a different frequency from the conductor and thereby ensured the stability of the pylon as a whole. There seemed to be few man-made innovations whose creation had not exacted a disproportionate degree of sacrifice and ingenuity.
On Accountancy:
I feel my boredom turn to pity for someone who one might otherwise imagine had precious little to be pitied for.
Office civilisation could not be feasible without the hard take-offs and landings effected by coffee and alcohol.
On Entrepreneurship:
These inventors are elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world for better, one deodorant-dispensing machine at a time.
Nevertheless, these entrepreneurs could be at least be celebrated fir embodying a honorably stubborn side of human nature, one which other areas causes us to get married without duress and to behave as if death might be an avoidable condition. They were proof of the extent of which we ultimately prefer excitement and disaster to boredom and safety.
"To see ourselves as the centre of the universe and the present time as the summit of history, to view our upcoming meetings as being of overwhelming significance, to neglect the lessons of cemeteries, to read only sparingly, to feel the pressure of deadlines, to snap at colleagues, to make our way through conference, to behave heedlessly and greedily and then to combust in battle - maybe all of this, in the end, is working wisdom. It is paying death to much respect to prepare for it with sage prescriptions. Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves."
"It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement."
- Abraham Maslow
On Biscuit Manufacture:
We should be wary of restricting the idea of meaningful work too tightly, of focusing only on the doctors, the nuns of Kolkata or the Old Masters. There can be less exalted ways to contribute to the furtherance of the collective good and it seems that making a perfectly formed stripey chocolate circle which helps to fill an impatient stomach in the long morning hours between nine o'clock and the noon may deserve its own secure, if microscopic, place in the pantheons of innovations designed to alleviate the burden of human existence.
On Career Counseling:
Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or a bicycle.
On Rocket Scientist:
Yet I felt the awkwardness of having to look up to rocket engineers and technicians as our ancestors might once have venerated their gods. These specialists were unlikely and troubling objects of admiration compared with the night sky and the mountains. The pre-scientific age, whatever its deficiencies, had at least offered its members the peace of mind that follows from knowing all man-made achievements to be nothing next to grandeur of the universe. We, more blessed in our gadgetry but less humble in our outlook, have been left to wrestle with feelings of envy, anxiety and arrogance that follow from having no more compelling repository of veneration than our brilliant, precise, blinkered and morally troubling fellow human beings.
On Painting:
To convey the particularity of artistic work, he quotes Hegel's definition of painting and music as genres dedicated to the 'sensuous presentation of ideas'. We require such 'sensuous' arts, Hegel suggested, because many important truth will impress themselves upon our consciousness only if they have been moulded from sensory, emotive material. We may, for example, need a song to alert us in a visceral way to the importance of forgiving others, a notion to which we might previously assented purely in a rote and stagnant way after reading of it in a political tract - just as it may only be in front of a successful painting of an oak tree that we are in any position to feel, as opposed dutifully to accept, the significance of the natural world.
On Transmission Engineering:
He had devoted a decade and some of his colleagues later surmised, some of his sanity, to fabricating a tube consisting of two heavy weights separated by a spring, which resonated at a different frequency from the conductor and thereby ensured the stability of the pylon as a whole. There seemed to be few man-made innovations whose creation had not exacted a disproportionate degree of sacrifice and ingenuity.
On Accountancy:
I feel my boredom turn to pity for someone who one might otherwise imagine had precious little to be pitied for.
Office civilisation could not be feasible without the hard take-offs and landings effected by coffee and alcohol.
On Entrepreneurship:
These inventors are elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world for better, one deodorant-dispensing machine at a time.
Nevertheless, these entrepreneurs could be at least be celebrated fir embodying a honorably stubborn side of human nature, one which other areas causes us to get married without duress and to behave as if death might be an avoidable condition. They were proof of the extent of which we ultimately prefer excitement and disaster to boredom and safety.
"To see ourselves as the centre of the universe and the present time as the summit of history, to view our upcoming meetings as being of overwhelming significance, to neglect the lessons of cemeteries, to read only sparingly, to feel the pressure of deadlines, to snap at colleagues, to make our way through conference, to behave heedlessly and greedily and then to combust in battle - maybe all of this, in the end, is working wisdom. It is paying death to much respect to prepare for it with sage prescriptions. Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves."
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