Consider the way two concepts have changed over the last two hundred years; 'love' and 'work'. Up until about a hundred and fifty years ago, say around the time that the industrial revolution was in full swing, having a paying job, any kind of paying job, was generally considered roughly the equivalent to slave labour. It was something to be pitied. It meant that you had little or no personal liberty, that you were beholden to a master, under someone's thumb and required to do their bidding. It meant that you were limited in your ability to partake in the truly meaningful and broadening aspects of life, enjoying the arts, reading, learning, philosophy, the natural sciences, assorted enriching social, creative and recreational endeavours etc. The idea that a job could be a point of pride, that it could comprise something meaningful, and represent the crux of one's self-definition would have been considered strange if not utterly depraved.
Love as a concept has changed radically over the last several hundreds of years, but it has mostly expanded, in the sense, I think, that it has become more elusive, and perhaps more individual and self-centered. While work is something we can trace definitionally, love is more slippery. Ask a hundred people and you will get as many different definitions, that will span the chaste Shakespearean romantic, transcendent notion of love to a sexualized more playful and youthful idea of love. Love is both something that is innocent, pure and unmarred by experience, and it gets better with age, growing and ripening into something richer and sweeter. While the old idea of work seems remote to us, eclipsed by a new supercharged definition that is all-encompassing, the definition of love seems to retain all its past meanings even as it evolves.
Because work is so all encompassing in the way we think of life's value, our culture so built around it and consumption of product, shunting all other pursuits to the margins, I wonder, does the way we think of work today represent progress or a challenge to our sense of personal and social well-being?
Does the way we think of love enrich our lives, or does it encumber our relationships and add to personal confusion? And what about how love and work fit together, or don't. Is there any room for both? Am I wrong to think that the pursuit, appreciation and cultivation of love relationships has become problematic for people these days?
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