welcome to the book club for Jordan Peterson's new, very flowy and spiritual book We Who Wrestle With God.
On this day of Christmas -- I'm in the protestant Christian North where Christmas eve is the main event -- perhaps after having enjoyed what seems like a flurry of social and dining-related ordeals, the question of work is appropriate.
In and around p. 90 of the book, JBP discusses the virtue of work. He shoots off the Cain and Abel story, and what their fraternal rivalry symbolizes for us. It's the "presentation of the relationship between work and sacrifice", the fundamentally human ability to "transcend the instinctual."
At some level it's what makes us humans and what propels humanity, whatever that is, forward.
He asks, "What exactly are we and what should we be working for?"
Work is the delay of gratification, the investing of effort and time now for greater rewards later.
...Especially the "higher and complete order" resonates with me. Working (sacrificing) must be done with a purpose, a goal, a worthy end in sight.
"When I am working I am replacing what I wish I could be doing right now [...] with some demand of transcendent yet still brute necessity."
Again, the questions here might be more important than the answers: "What is the meaning of our effortful striving?"
So, fellow Stackers, this wonderful Christmas, ask yourself a what you are working for, what the moral order your daily grind is trying to achieve, what your efforts and sacrifices in the present aim to leverage for the future.
Is it worth it? Did you pick a good enough moral objective?
Peace,
/J