If there's one thing I hate doing, it's anything anybody else tells me to. That doesn't mean I'll refuse to do it (although, more often than not, I'll look for ways to get out of it); it just means that doing it will make me unhappy. This poses a problem, because in order to earn money to buy pie, DVDs, and other necessities of life, I must do what other people tell me to do for at least forty hours out of the week. But I think I've got a solution.
Brain partitioning would solve all my problems. The concept is simple: my brain needs to be partitioned in a way similar to a one-way mirror. One side would take care of those forty hours of work and would have access to the whole of my stored memories and experience, although it could only store new memories within its own partition. The other side would be devoted totally to fun, and would be completely oblivious to the work partition.
Of course, in order for all of this to be beneficial, my "ego", or that part of my essence which I think of as "me", would only exist in the fun partition. The work partition would still have access to it, so it wouldn't lack a personality or anything, but "I" would only ever be "awake" when I was having fun; all the work would be done without my knowledge. You follow?
This way, the work still gets done and the paychecks still come in, but I never actually have to experience the toil and suffering of doing the actual work. The other me does that for me. And, to make it fair, work-me will have complete access to fun-me's experiences, so it's not like he'll be working all the time.
I guess my brain might already work this way, though. Maybe I just happen to be work-me. Crap.
Comments
Wait a minute...
You mean you don't already do this? I thought everyone did.
The solution
Sounds like you need a good old fashion case of multiple personalities. I hear you can train your mind into it, but I am not sure about that. Plus, then you would have to have a way to make sure that you were the personality that was awake outside of work. I figure even if you were the one who had to work, if you stopped working, your other side would be forced to be the worker to keep eating pie. Then you would have a side that is just like you right now that works and plays, and you would have a side that just plays (you). It would be about the closest you could come to your senario in my opinion.
Nonono...
I think you will eventually end up doing a lot of "fun" things - as fun-loving you - but as soon as it gets to be a chore, your working you would have to take over whatever you're doing. So in the end, your fun-loving would you never finish anything - and your working you would finish everything. This effectively means that your fun-loving you will never experience the satisfaction of seeing a task through to the end, while your working you would have all the glory.
Perhaps a more practical approach would be to try and change your uni-you's perception of things and find elements of satisfaction in every task, be it work or play. It can be done fairly easily, since most people have the ability to find aspects of just about anything that interests them. You just have to ask the right questions and look at the right aspects of things. Search and thou shalt findeth.
Man, I should have been a football coach... :o)
Re: Nonono...
I think I'll get more satisfaction from completing the task of eating one of Mom's delicious pecan pies than I will from completing the task of writing a market opportunity simulation program for a natural gas company. Plus, pie tastes lots better than natural gas. ;)
Re: Nonono...
Trust me, even your Mom's delicious pecan pie would become a chore, if you had to eat it 24 hours a day, every day, all year round. I think you would at least need my help half the time for it to continue being a fun and satisfying experience. So, out of the goodness of my heart (hush, Tabor), I hereby volunteer to gain half of all the weight. :O)
Re: Nonono...
If you guys need any help, I'm here, too. :)
in resp. To a lethal Partitioning
There was a man. A Mover and Shaker of Western Thought. A dervish of nebulean realms.
He figured work was as life and life was as work.
with these ideas he and his followers achieved wonderous things, like Davi Blaine.
What I'm saying (cut to chase)is if you separate work from life.
Your busy dying.
The man was jorges gurdiejeff a four demensional thinker.
Re: in resp. To a lethal Partitioning
I don't know a lot about George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff - no one can really claim to know much about him and his teachings unless they have been taught directly by one of his predecessors - but nonetheless, I sense that you may be simplifying his ideas a tad. He appears to basically draw a line between our lives and our experiences and the truth, much like the Eleatics did in ancient Greece, and through his studies of Eastern religion compile a theory of "what it's really all about". I believe it is this process toward achieving a true perception, unclouded by conventions and freed from temporal, secular and worldly concerns, he is referring to with the term "work".
Bruce Sterling - Burning Chrome
I think you're after the "House of Blue Lights" Sterling desxribed in that short story. It's the last one in the book titled "Burning Chrome."