There is a fairly common misconception that art is for leisure, that only when you are lying on your back rubbing your belly you can find some use for art.
That art is optional.
When I used to read these philosophical works when I was not even 20, I couldn’t find much relevance for it. My life was not that challenging that I would need to hear things like, one must imagine Sisyphus happy. I thought happiness would never be a question. That things would ever be so different that one starts evaluating their own happiness.
But when you start working and on good days it goes to about 10-12 hours and the busy season as they say might take 14-16 hours you start to question your whole life.
That all these hours that i will give to these people are in a sense really gone of course they will give me money but you will be working and then sleeping so you have not lived that day so in reality you have just spent a day spiritually comatose for some money and you are going to do this as a career and thats when you start to think about things that what the f*ck am i doing.
Of course not all work is going to put you in such spiritual coma. Work that you are really great at or work that you really love because of its nature or because it’s going to reward you a lot keeps your spirit active but it is when you’re not good at it, you don’t love it nor do you see a huge payoff and you’re still doing it. You are in a spiritual coma. Work, where you are engaged in it for a long long time and you do not identify any of that work with you is going to be dangerous because a surgeon might be working a lot more than that and they feel ferociously alive. A commander working nearly just as much will also feel the same way because their identity is aligned deeply with the work they are doing.
I always respect any profession that is teaching you something. Because whatever you learn, even if it’s the most irrelevant fact from 800 BC, it is going to emerge someday to help you. And in a lot of ways my current job is like that.
But still, how does one deal with the spiritual coma?
I think Albert Camus would just laugh at me and say: Hey buddy, you got a rebel.
Despite what world is doing to you and your Rule as an accomplice in it you have to rebel You cannot reduce yourself to just work and sleep even If you think after what the world has done to you cannot do anything else you have to rebel even after being tired You have to read because you love to read you have to sing because you love to sing you have to Meet your parents hug your girlfriend Go out on walk Write make content And do whatever that you like Despite the world making it feel like you cannot do what you want You have to rebel and do it anyways
I guess one must imagine Sisyphus is good but one must also imagine Sisyphus always rebelling and that’s what’s keeping him happy.
The world is absurd but your spirit is not no matter the world’s condition and your relation to it keep your spirit alive
Spiritual coma is what happens when the output of your life stops producing self-recognition. The brain needs some reason to recognize itself in what it spends its days doing: you are exceptionally good at it, you genuinely love doing it, you expect an extraordinary reward from it, or the work itself expresses something about who you believe you are. Any one of these can keep the spirit awake. But remove all four and then spend most of your waking hours there, and you are essentially spending your life generating evidence of a person you do not recognize. If you spent 30 days locked in a room doing and hearing nothing that reflected the real you, of course your sense of yourself would begin to blur. A spiritual coma is just a softer version of that process stretched across ordinary life.