Member-only story
It’s been so long since I’ve had a Monday morning to myself — suddenly, I’m on the other side of the working world: I’m one of those weird people who sit in coffeeshops and don’t seem to ever have to submit to the even weirder world of professional life (doctor lawyer teacher banker etc). But of course — many, perhaps most, people on laptops are performing cognitive labor, invisible labor… it’s just externally indistinguishable from leisure.
I find this interesting, if disturbing: the meshing of leisure and labor.
I think Americans are profoundly uncomfortable with leisure: it’s almost as if we have to be laboring in some way, on some level, to enjoy leisure. Which is completely fucked… — but —
A homeless women comes into the cafe, which is filled with cool, pretty, tattooed, designer-glasses-wearing people: she is quickly ushered out.
Moral life is an awakening. There is no difference between moral and spiritual life. If your experience is spiritual, it’s automatically moral. Morality really, is just a sense of, and respect for, the aliveness of things. It’s so much different, so profoundly different, than conventional morality.
If you’re not rebelling against something, then what are you doing? Do you really think this world is good as it is? That it should be accepted at face value? Even if you’re sitting in a phoofy coffee shop — you don’t have to melt into the background; melt into automaticism; becoming a prop — like the rest of the decor. You can always start by fighting back phenomenologically — altering your perceptions, your posture, your position in space and time. You can begin by resisting in your very being…
