Kamal Ghorui
Among the commonest of apolitical reels and posts across social media today are those about people poor-mouthing their jobs, their bosses, and the 9-to-5 employment culture in general. Such an attitude isn’t ill-founded.
For how many of us would really care about our jobs if it weren’t for earning a living? And the idea of spending much of your waking hours doing what it takes just to sustain life seems a daunting waste of human existence.
For a species perched at the pinnacle of biological evolution, shouldn’t life be about something much higher? What comprises this “something much higher” would differ from taste to taste, but it would invariably be something that one would be very much willing to do even if for free, for as long as our basic needs were assured.
Living to make a living seems to be the biggest scam of our times, something that withers the human soul, whose existence otherwise bristles with sublime exuberance and flair.
Before such poetic rhetoric succeeds in convincing us that doing what we please should be a fundamental human entitlement, let us not forget that much of man’s lived history attests otherwise. Our early ancestors inhabited such harsh conditions that successfully making a living and perpetuating their bloodline counted among life’s foremost luxuries.
Only late into the era of food surpluses and effort-reducing technology has passion even been a thing, except, of course, for the affluent and powerful. And to this day, successfully making a living remains a tall task for many, while gobbling up the better part of life for most others.
But what’s the point of it after all, we ask. Whose end does it serve for a man to live for making a living, often begrudgingly, as his heart longs to indulge his passions?
Certainly, things like these barely bother those whose minds, as the Buddha exclaimed, dote too much on their offspring and cattle for higher passions to have any significant chance. And seemingly, these are biological evolution’s most beloved children.
For if evolution gave a damn about man’s higher, refined passions, man would’ve already grown organs or mechanisms that allowed him to sail through life without having to bother much about earning a living.
From the beginning to time unto date, evolution has had one, default goal: that of improving our reproductive fitness for successfully perpetuating our species.
And so long as there’s a critical number of those, again, whose minds dote on offspring and cattle, evolution won’t bat an eyelid about what happens to us, the apostles of refined human passions.
As hilarious as the above line of argument is, it is not the point of this article. Rather, our concern is the fundamental area of philosophical friction that it exposes. Nature creates the human breast with a plethora of vivid passions that scale far beyond survival and reproduction.
Nature and its instruments, on the other hand, only respect those fit to survive and reproduce. And such friction, in its varied expressions, underpins much of philosophy as an institution. It is the reason why Swami Vivekananda proposed “freedom” to be the ultimate human goal.
By freedom, he didn’t just refer to moksha, the proposed ultimate liberation of the soul in Hinduism, but freedom from the shackles that thwart human passions every minute of their existence. For man’s passions, his own life is the counter current. And it is insofar as such friction persists that philosophy and spirituality remain relevant.
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