Week 3: Zen and the Art of Digging Straight, 2cm Deep Lines

So this post is a tiny bit anachronistic, as I did not actually read/listen to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance until a couple weeks later, but to be fair, most of what I'm writing about is only tangentially related to the book. The main portion of what I will be writing this week is about the nature of "hard work" and how to approach it.

If you have not gathered already, I am a particularly lazy person. I am not terribly interested in doing work that I don't have to do, and look to avoid it if at all possible. Don't get me wrong: I can and do work very hard, but under most circumstances that enthusiasm for labor is predicated largely on how it will enable me to expend less effort overall, even if that effort is front-loaded. To be honest, I say this with pride, and see absolutely nothing wrong with it. In fact, I would argue it's the most natural way of doing things: Water always takes the path of least resistance, flowing to the lowest point. Chemical reactions will only ever take place if the energy required to take place is less than the energy required to stay separate. Animal behavior of every kind is inclined to laze about and do nothing unless something: hunger, fear, lust, boredom, compels it to do something. Even human invention is regularly spurred not by genius or necessity, but just because some guy was spending too much time on something for his liking, and so front-loaded his effort in inventing some tool to make his life easier.

And so, with all this being the case, here I was, alone, chipping away at an empty clay pit, first to be exposed to the sun, too far away from everyone else to even hear their conversations, let alone converse with them myself. I understood why I was digging straight, 2cm deep lines in the soil: even though the pit turned out to be as empty as I figured it was going to be, we had to make sure there was nothing interesting in there: Apparently last year they found a golden tunic bauble in that same pit. You never know when you're going to strike it rich again. But as I scraped away at barren clay with my medium-pick and trowel, I remembered my past realization that work, in general, is a sucker's game.

Now I know what you're thinking: I must be some kind of reprobate. How can this student not value hard work? It's what we strive for! To work hard so that one day we can "make it" To this I say: yes, it is what we strive for. Why exactly? What even is "making it?" I'm sure everyone has their own idea of what "making it" means: often it will be some material standard: to upgrade yourself to the next social class, to keep up with the Jones, to retire and not have to work, but live in relative luxury and explore the world! All of these are fine goals, but from my own pragmatic laziness, there is a major flaw the work/payoff ratio is terrible. Unless you're scraping your way out of abject poverty (and good luck with that in this economy), you really aren't getting much out of the rat race. Sure, you get your bigger house, fancier duds, more attractive children, but give it two or three months and you're right back where you started, vaguely uneasy and anxious to get more. The fact of the matter is, there's diminishing returns to material satisfaction, maxing out around $85,000-$212,000 p/a depending on how stratified your community is (turns out, it gets lower the less stratified it is: thus the pragmatically lazy would necessarily support higher social equality). So hard work to "make it" is indeed a sucker's game. If our dear leader leading Republican candidate (this is late June 2016 remember. It was a simpler time), has yet to be satisfied with his life of stupendous alleged wealth and luxury, I can't think of how taking on more work and responsibilities to raise that portfolio a couple more decimal places is anything but playing yourself. To paraphrase one of the most venerable sage of our age, DJ Khaled: don't do that.

So then, what does all this philosophical nonsense have to do with digging straight, 2cm deep lines? Well this is where the Zen comes in. Well, unlike the Protestant Work Ethic, in which you're supposed to work hard because God wants you to hate yourself  wait hold on, because the poor deserve to be poor nope, still not it, it's because fun is evil and being miserable builds character  dang it, one more time: you're supposed to work hard because "hard work, discipline and frugality are a result of a person's salvation in the Protestant faith." (thank you Wikipedia), the Zen Work Ethic is something along the lines of "work hard and become skilled for the sake of being fulfilled by the work itself." Ideally, this should result in a trance-like state in which you are skillfully performing your task entirely intuitively without any conscious focus, known to people who don't actually know what Zen is as "going all Zen," but under most circumstances, a deliberate meditative focus on your work is good enough. For the Protagonist Formerly-Known-as Phadrus in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the work which he usually focuses on is, well, maintaining his motorcycle. For me, it was digging straight, 2cm deep lines in an empty clay pit. When I started doing this, this is when my abject misery started to snowball into sincere enjoyment. Turns out, the pragmatic idler can be convinced to work hard for no describable reward. If the work itself is the reward, then it's not really work, now is it?

Dang. I think I just played myself.

Michael