The nasty cold that I've been battling these past few days has driven me away from my keyboard at a time when I desperately want to make some headway on my novel pre://d.o.mai.n/theSagaof/MilesTorvalds.
And that got me thinking.
I realized that it's always been this way for all mankind. Creativity ebbs and flows with the amount of time we have to "screw off", so to speak.
I heard that Google, the search company, allows it's employees to work on side projects for 20% of their work hours, to get them involved in new thinking and paradigm shifts.
I fear how impressed I am at this concept, that employees should be given the liberty to seek answers within the realm of the business for themselves, is the antithesis of the vast majority of the working people in this country. If creativity truly does get it's genesis from our down time, then the encroaching corporate structure is threatening to push us back to the stone age.
Let me take you back in time a few thousand years.......
Throughout our history as a species, only once we became relatively secure near the top of the food chain did our art evolve from crude cave drawings to sculpture, frescoes, etc.
Case in point, It's awful difficult creating entertainment and works of cultural significance when you are running for your life.
People who are considered "Cultured" typically have more free time due to either a job that allows them to pay others to perform mundane tasks that would typically consume said free time, or are independently wealthy and don't need to work.
Very few people that work 60 plus hours a week for middle income wages are considered "cultured", again, it's hard to muster the energy for art and deep thought when you are fighting for your life.
The only difference is that now the fight is societal and financial instead of physical.
This, in my opinion, is what has become wrong with this country. When you have to fight every day just to scratch yourself back to the line you started from, you don't have alot of energy to pursue new ground.
That new ground is our swagger as a society, our greatness. The enterprising spirit is still alive in this generation, probably the next as well, but if we don't start working for class equality, then the generation after that will simply succumb to whatever is thrust upon them, and our great nation will have enslaved itself to the very ideals that it fought against less than 300 years ago.
And that got me thinking.
I realized that it's always been this way for all mankind. Creativity ebbs and flows with the amount of time we have to "screw off", so to speak.
I heard that Google, the search company, allows it's employees to work on side projects for 20% of their work hours, to get them involved in new thinking and paradigm shifts.
I fear how impressed I am at this concept, that employees should be given the liberty to seek answers within the realm of the business for themselves, is the antithesis of the vast majority of the working people in this country. If creativity truly does get it's genesis from our down time, then the encroaching corporate structure is threatening to push us back to the stone age.
Let me take you back in time a few thousand years.......
Throughout our history as a species, only once we became relatively secure near the top of the food chain did our art evolve from crude cave drawings to sculpture, frescoes, etc.
Case in point, It's awful difficult creating entertainment and works of cultural significance when you are running for your life.
People who are considered "Cultured" typically have more free time due to either a job that allows them to pay others to perform mundane tasks that would typically consume said free time, or are independently wealthy and don't need to work.
Very few people that work 60 plus hours a week for middle income wages are considered "cultured", again, it's hard to muster the energy for art and deep thought when you are fighting for your life.
The only difference is that now the fight is societal and financial instead of physical.
This, in my opinion, is what has become wrong with this country. When you have to fight every day just to scratch yourself back to the line you started from, you don't have alot of energy to pursue new ground.
That new ground is our swagger as a society, our greatness. The enterprising spirit is still alive in this generation, probably the next as well, but if we don't start working for class equality, then the generation after that will simply succumb to whatever is thrust upon them, and our great nation will have enslaved itself to the very ideals that it fought against less than 300 years ago.
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