On learning and labor

How best to make use of a weekend to recover from a workweek and restore body and soul to working condition? Is that what Labor Day is for? Put another way, what can I learn from the challenges of the past week(s) that will make me whole again and give me tools and perspective to function more effectively? Labor Day as restoration, celebration, and education.

The mind and body need to switch gears at the end of the day and move into another activity with another set of conditions and another purpose. Examples: going from spreadsheets and schedules to trees and flowers; from logical analysis and rational planning to romantic musing and playful pipedreams; from the keyboard and the screen to the bicycle and the ball; from the procedures manual to the novel.

Being able to switch gears at all is a survival skill that for some people seems to develop naturally and intuitively, while others have to work at it, and some would rather not be bothered. Some acquire an adaptive facility early and continue to refine it with age. Others struggle with it or have no idea. Is it an exaggeration to say that addiction and other self-destructive behaviors are symptoms of the inability to make the shift from left-brain activity to right-brain activity and back? Is it an oversimplification to suggest that bad decisions are usually the result of relying excessively on one side of the brain and neglecting the other?

Work hard, play hard, take a break. How many alcoholics, overeaters, stoners, spouse abusers, schoolyard bullies, deadbeat dads, and compulsive liars just want to go home and relax but haven't learned how?

D.H. Lawrence said the poverty of coal miners in northern England consisted partly of a lack of beauty in the slum housing and ravaged landscape of mining towns. What had earlier been a region of peasant farms and villages was turned into an industrial war zone at great profit to others. Most of those people were poor to begin with, but the material and spiritual poverty they endured was a different kind of suffering. So-called alienated labor works only for the dollar (pound, franc, mark, whatever) without regard for the work except as a means. It's a mean existence, and it can make people mean because what they do has no meaning.

It is well known how the change from farming and herding to mining and manufacturing affected the British culture and economy. Workers were moved off productive land and into mines and factories, populations were displaced from the countryside to cities, and technology powered a faster, bigger productive system. Wealth was generated. It is just as clear that "social problems" like crime, violence, and public health issues arise in part from the same concentration on extracting resources from the ground, burning fossil fuels, and building bigger weapons of mass destruction.

Lots of nineteenth-century rich people got richer and did some stupid things; many more nineteenth-century poor people got poorer and dumber and did some stupid things. You don't have to be a Luddite to see that some kind of counter-measures are needed to mitigate the negative effects of technology, and I'm not talking about TV, fast food, and cheap beer. Not many people want to live off the grid. Many are convinced that it's the workers' own fault if they don't have the knowledge, skills, and good taste to make rational consumer decisions and act like people with class.

Before I completely veer off-topic (too late), let me say that I don't see any solutions in the current political standoff between Democrats and Republicans, union and management, or lefties and righties, while realizing that adversarial gamesmanship will continue to play out people's personal dramas. What I'm looking for is a way to adjust my own habits in the micro-practice of making ends meet every month, while adjusting my view of the macro-practices of the company I work for, the state I live in, and the global economy that is either falling apart at the seams or morphing into something new and strange and dangerous. Hello oligarchy!

I have no doubt that the strains pulling on the social fabric are the shared responsibility of the workers and managers and stockholders and brokers and buyers, all of whose irresponsible excesses are doing more harm than good. The reforms and adjustments to come are bound to be difficult, with a lot of options to determine the means and the consequences - intended and unintended - of the choices to be made. I think the micro-adjustments I choose to make and the macro-adjustments made by S&P, Goldman Sachs, the Eurozone, Saudi Arabia and other major players will make a difference in how things shake down in the 15 months before it all falls down on 12/12/12.

If enough of us learn from our labor how to shift from linear/logical/positivist/objectivist thinking to fuzzy/holistic/aesthetic/pluralistic thinking, it might affect the outcome of the choices we make. And we have to remember to shift back when it's time to go to work the next day.