spending the best years of our lives at a job / you deserve a good life because you are alive

Eight hours a day, five days a week, for 45 years. When you express a disinterest in spending the entirety of what will likely be the healthiest and most autonomous years of your life working a job just to pay for the cost to be alive, some people will call you lazy or assume you just don't like hard work. But for me, and I think many others, it's because I believe time and labor are so valuable that I don't believe in using them carelessly, particularly when it isn't rightfully honored or fairly compensated. In a society that values material things, profit and power above all else, the human body is merely a means for productivity, and our existence is just something to exploit. We're a vital but mistreated resource, much like the water and the land. Modern society has reached the point where our technology offers the incredible opportunity to bring to life so many things that were once unimaginable, and naturally, we use it as a conduit for greed. Instead of addressing the inequities of our world, or the fact that wealth is so disproportionately hoarded that there are people sleeping on streets or starving to death while others have more money than they could ever spend, people use technology to create new intangible forms of currency just to have something else to control and hoard. To them, it's never enough. But I look around and I'm overwhelmed with a deep knowing that this is enough. Air to breathe, food to eat, a place to call home, and some people and plants to call friend is enough. When you strip life down to the essentials, you see just how accessible these are when not hidden behind a paywall. It's an accepted idea that because resources and labor are required to extract or prepare the essentials like food and water, it must have a price tag to offset the cost, and that price must be passed to the individual. But this thinking relegates an invaluable life-giving resource to a cold, inanimate commodity, and it minimizes the human to a soulless consumer to be marketed and sold to. We live in a world where billionaires who make their money off the backs of the working class and C-list celebrities take multi-million dollar flights to space just for the fun of it. Corporations seek to fill the night sky with advertisements that block out the stars, while billionaires are plummeting themselves to the uninhabitable depths of the ocean because they don't think there's anywhere their money doesn't entitle them to go, though the ocean sometimes reminds them otherwise. But trust me when I say there's no lack of money, technology, creativity, or design that render it impossible for the bare essentials of human survival to be made available for free and to fairly compensate workers for the labor to supply them. What we lack is the desire to do so, and instead have intentionally designed it to not be that way. I've unsubscribed from the notion that what's been placed in front of us is the only option, because at one point this didn't exist either. In fact, humans have only been life this way for a relatively short time, and at this point it's looking more like the failing wet dream of a few deeply disturbed, miserable individuals than the advanced way of life they've tried to convince us it is. Ultimately, we know the capitalist regime will fall, succumbing to its own unrestrained appetite. It'll eat itself alive, and in fact it's already begun to. And in its wake, what will remain is what was here before. Air, water, and earth. Though the devastation and dishonor of modern man will be felt, the earth will long outlast the human life form. We exist on a spectacular spinning rock, distanced so precisely from a burning star that it gives us life instead of setting us ablaze. Our beautiful ball of life is protected by a barrier within which a perfect array of ingredients exists in a perpetually renewing cycle that creates life of all kinds on every part of the planet. The water we can't survive more than a few days without flows in abundance from the sky above and from the ground beneath our feet. The oxygen we inhale is provided spontaneously by plants in a perfect exchange for the carbon dioxide we exhale. The nourishment our bodies require is readily found in plants and other organisms of our ecosystem. Our bodies are flawlessly designed to absorb the nutrients we need and expel the rest, and even what's expelled can be returned to the earth. And in an ultimate final offering, if given the chance, the death and decay of our bodies returns our life force back to the earth as nourishment for the next round of life. It is with grace, gratitude, and great fortune that we were born in this precise place at this precise time. Yet modern human society has relegated the gift of life to something we must earn the right to enjoy. But for millennia, humanity knew the good fortune it had been afforded and lived accordingly. Our reverence for the vast knowledge and beauty of planet and universe was integrated into our daily lives as practice and ritual. Through many timelines and ever-evolving technology, we still looked to the stars above, the dirt below, and the habitats surrounding us, knowing they hold deep wisdom and revering them as elders. We knew the differing appearance of other organisms mattered none in terms of their inherent worth or what they might be able to teach. We didn't believe humans to be superior or more deserving of the planet, and what we knew of humans relative to others within the ecosystem only deepened our connection to them. It's because I bear witness every day to the almost inconceivable interconnectedness of life on this planet that I simply can't believe I have to do anything more to earn my place here than simply exist and honor my inextricable ties to all there is. It's not that I don't or won't work. Like every other organism, I do what it takes to survive. But despite what the self-appointed rulers might have us believe, this is not the only way of doing life on this planet, and I personally don't think it's the right one. So I aim to treat my labor as an offering and extension of my gratitude for life on this earth by engaging work that aligns with this truth. Because the best way to honor life isn't to make the most money or to collect the most things. I honor the short life I'm given by actually enjoying it and by helping the other life that makes mine possible do the same. I don't pretend to have the answers, but I won't hesitate to call out what I know to be true. Humans are not alive just to work to pay bills, and committing most of our waking life to doing so is wicked. We deserve to engage our miraculous fleeting lives not as mindless idle bystanders, but meaningfully with purpose and joy and deep reverence for an earth that makes it all possible.