mjp
Founding member
The reality of all of this is, unless you are particularly lucky, you have to weight your options. Freedom versus job-work.
The lucky are born into money, or born into a talent that can carry them through without a "normal" job.
For the rest of us there is poverty or work. Many people here seem to have done both. I have experience in both myself, and work - in my experience - is preferable to poverty. Of course it depends on the work.
This is the main focus of all of Bukowski's writing. Think about it. You can boil it down to this: we have a right not to work. Rejecting work is not a sign of weakness. But - and he mentioned this too - if you choose that path you choose a life of relative poverty, and if you can deal with that, cool. Freedom awaits you.
But I have personally known multi-multi-millionaires who were not free. In fact, they were the farthest from free that you could be. Every minute of every day was already planned before they went to sleep the night before (if they went to sleep the night before). Wealthy, yes! Free, I think not. I would not trade places with them, despite their seeming advantages in life and society.
The truth and the balance lies somewhere in between.
The lucky are born into money, or born into a talent that can carry them through without a "normal" job.
For the rest of us there is poverty or work. Many people here seem to have done both. I have experience in both myself, and work - in my experience - is preferable to poverty. Of course it depends on the work.
This is the main focus of all of Bukowski's writing. Think about it. You can boil it down to this: we have a right not to work. Rejecting work is not a sign of weakness. But - and he mentioned this too - if you choose that path you choose a life of relative poverty, and if you can deal with that, cool. Freedom awaits you.
But I have personally known multi-multi-millionaires who were not free. In fact, they were the farthest from free that you could be. Every minute of every day was already planned before they went to sleep the night before (if they went to sleep the night before). Wealthy, yes! Free, I think not. I would not trade places with them, despite their seeming advantages in life and society.
The truth and the balance lies somewhere in between.