It’s useless work that darkens the heart
In Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, the leader of the anarchist colony on Anarres says:
A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well—this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.
Think of a society knitted together on those principles, and then think of our own.
- see also: cooperation is a form of pleasure and play, a theory argued by Pyotr Kropotkin, whose work was part of Le Guin’s inspiration for The Dispossessed
- see also: an amateur is one who loves — why shouldn’t love of doing a thing be the motivation we respect the most?