A cooperative ignorance

Why can a working life be at odds with a spiritual life? If we analyze work in its most basic description, we may find an opportunity toward, and not away from, the expansion and grounding of our awareness. In our most natural condition, the need for sustenance and protection makes work a constant obligation. The food we need simply doesn't appear in our hands when we are hungry. We must go out and get it somehow, and this takes an effort. The same is true for the clothes we wear, the houses that shelter us, and any other man-made object that is integral to our material lives. Before civilization, the work needed to create these goods was as obvious as it was necessary. Unless we ourselves hunted, fished, grew, and built, the forces of nature would easily vanquish us, and we would not live. Indeed, unless we found in our hearts a humble, adaptive attitude, one that would be essentially spiritual, our very survival might well fall into jeopardy. However, such opportunities are all but extinguished in the world we know today.

Today, in a civilized setting, we delegate most of this basic life support to other people, with the actual production of most goods taken up by machines they run. It is easy to look at the products we buy, none of which were signed by their actual creators, and forget that work was needed to realize all of them. Even the simplest product we buy could be the result of the cooperative effort of literally thousands of people. We do not see this.

Our own participation in the economy is a part of this system. In our jobs, we are not tasked with creating our own next meals; we are instead required to perform some task or set of tasks for an employer, comprising a contribution to the creation of a product or service, all of which is sold to people we mostly likely do not know in any direct way. Our employer, also a stranger, then compensates us with the means to find our sustenance. Here we have the great arrangments of barter, delegation, and finance - the very fundamentals of civilization itself - and though all of it provides the means for a life with riches and results that were impossible in previous generations, it hides from us the direct link between our work and its benefits, and from the people who are directly responsible for these benefits.

Here, then, we have a primary challenge. We focus on getting our own jobs done, because we're not paid to do otherwise, and at the end of the day, we drive cars, eat food in restaurants, and sleep in beds without knowing anything about who actually created these things for us. Most of the time, such questions do not even interest us, which is in keeping with the universal demand of employers to keep us focused on our own responsibilities - a mode that is easy to stay in even after we leave our desk. We live out our working lives in a cooperative ignorance.

A possible step forward in awareness - toward spirituality in our work - might be to take some interest. How did it all get this way? Who made it so? Where are the people who made all that is around me? And were they treated fairly as they did so?

These are not simple considerations.