What to do if you want to work? – “Lie down, maybe it will pass …” It looks like a funny answer to a funny question. However, the anonymous author of this dialogue could, if desired, refer to a very solid source – the ancient Chinese philosophical treatise “Luishi Chunqiu”.
“Man by nature longs for rest and hates work” *. An axiom that has been completely forgotten as an annoying and, moreover, immoral absurdity in our business age. A moral model is almost unconditionally recognized as one who, exactly the opposite, craves work and hates rest. He was given a name: workaholic. It is customary to call this name people who are distinguished by transcendent diligence and remarkable performance. The best representatives of the human race – what is called the salt of the earth.
However, the question arises: if the “salt of the earth”, why on earth did we come up with a name for them by analogy with the term denoting a sad and widespread addiction – alcoholism? Doesn’t this mean that our collective unconscious, while offering loud and, I must say, well-deserved praises to “those who hate rest”, secretly sympathizes with their inability to refrain from work?
The phenomenon of workaholism was emotionally but very aptly commented once by the outstanding English physicist Ernest Rutherford. Leaving his empty laboratory at the University of Cambridge after a hard day’s work, he noticed a lone laboratory assistant who was fiddling with some kind of device.
– Why don’t you go home? Rutherford asked.
“I am working,” was the reply.
– What have you been doing all day?
“I worked,” the lab assistant replied.
“What will you do when I leave?” Rutherford continued to interrogate.
“Work,” answered the young man, not suspecting a dirty trick.
– So when do you think? the master exclaimed.
Only where there are pauses, islands of complete peace, there is a place and time for enlightenment.which create the basis for the full maturation of the personality. It is from this soil that, in fact, the workaholic refuses. For he cannot stand pauses and therefore artificially immerses himself in a state that can be called partial sensory deprivation – he climbs under an invisible dome, where sounds and all other signals from the outside world barely reach.
In everyday life, he does this with the help of work. Hiding from reality, he, of course, avoids solving his most pressing personal problems. And when to solve them – again, you have to work! It turns out that the recommendation of “Armenian Radio” is not so anecdotal. To the advice “lie down” it remains to add: look and listen. Having given us eyes and ears, the Lord has already made sure that we are always in business. So there is nothing to invent something more than that. For it is said: what is more than this is from the evil one.
* “Philosophical heritage”, v. 132 (Thought, 2001).