Karl Marx was a really cool guy who among other things wrote about boredom. It is fascinating how he explored boredom while criticising the capitalist perspective.
As I talked in one of the posts earlier (albeit it was kinda a joke post, but I realised later it did have some serious point to make), boredom can be the cause of a lotta evils. Marx attempts to strike at the root of boredom in modern society by positing the concept of alienation. He holds that capitalism, by focusing on specialisation and division of labour in factories results in detachment of the workers from their tools of trade. So that a person cannot feel the same way about his work as he did pre-industrialisation. A world where people loved their trade and felt pride in their creations. But post-industrialisation this love disappears and not just because now the worker is "a worker" i.e. working for someone else, and so there is lack of attribution, in the sense of loss of connection between the creator and the end-user. Think as a writer or an entrepreneur, how much it matters to hear from people how much your work has impacted their lives. But now, he can no longer see his work...he can no longer see what difference he has made. Work is, well....work...and not something you can or even, should be able to enjoy.
Next, because he is engaged in the same kind of work day after day. He is not allowed to grow with the new demands of the end-user and his needs. He is no longer allowed to think or exercise his creativity to solve peoples' problems. It's just routine, mechanical work which the factory requires of him. This intensified particularly after the entry of the assembly line method of production, dubbed the most revolutionary of developments in factory production.
The point Marx made and the point I make is that human mind is way richer than to be satisfied with mere routine work. In fancier words, it is called specialisation and increased productivity. But serves only to dehumanise. The human mind is essentially creative and longs for newer arenas to justify the creativity and to vanquish boredom. And boredom is quite an underrated feeling and a very dangerous feeling indeed. Sadly hardly any of our social institutions aim at exterminating it. Even though, ironically, it is a large focus of the business sector. So one one hand we create boredom via our system, on the other, we employ the entire system to find ways to vanquish it.
Of course, addressing boredom in the human and social sector require unprecedented radical changes. Why not go through them and make our lives vastly better and enjoyble? What are we scared of? =/
As I talked in one of the posts earlier (albeit it was kinda a joke post, but I realised later it did have some serious point to make), boredom can be the cause of a lotta evils. Marx attempts to strike at the root of boredom in modern society by positing the concept of alienation. He holds that capitalism, by focusing on specialisation and division of labour in factories results in detachment of the workers from their tools of trade. So that a person cannot feel the same way about his work as he did pre-industrialisation. A world where people loved their trade and felt pride in their creations. But post-industrialisation this love disappears and not just because now the worker is "a worker" i.e. working for someone else, and so there is lack of attribution, in the sense of loss of connection between the creator and the end-user. Think as a writer or an entrepreneur, how much it matters to hear from people how much your work has impacted their lives. But now, he can no longer see his work...he can no longer see what difference he has made. Work is, well....work...and not something you can or even, should be able to enjoy.
Next, because he is engaged in the same kind of work day after day. He is not allowed to grow with the new demands of the end-user and his needs. He is no longer allowed to think or exercise his creativity to solve peoples' problems. It's just routine, mechanical work which the factory requires of him. This intensified particularly after the entry of the assembly line method of production, dubbed the most revolutionary of developments in factory production.
The point Marx made and the point I make is that human mind is way richer than to be satisfied with mere routine work. In fancier words, it is called specialisation and increased productivity. But serves only to dehumanise. The human mind is essentially creative and longs for newer arenas to justify the creativity and to vanquish boredom. And boredom is quite an underrated feeling and a very dangerous feeling indeed. Sadly hardly any of our social institutions aim at exterminating it. Even though, ironically, it is a large focus of the business sector. So one one hand we create boredom via our system, on the other, we employ the entire system to find ways to vanquish it.
Of course, addressing boredom in the human and social sector require unprecedented radical changes. Why not go through them and make our lives vastly better and enjoyble? What are we scared of? =/
posted from Bloggeroid
