Tag Archives: work

Thinking about work, creativity and the meaning of life

My sense is that not a lot of deep thinking about labor goes on on Labor Day. Do we even toast labor or laborers with our beers? It functions more as a last gasp of summer. In a tourist destination it has a somewhat different meaning. Do Cape Codders still wave goodbye to exiting summer […]

The importance of distinguishing between two kinds of work

Were any glasses raised on Labor Day to toast workers or work? It seems to me that the holiday is about work in name only and mostly about the end of summer. Robert Frost wrote a poem about two different sorts of labor: labor to make money vs. labor of love. It depicts the poet […]

The creativity of everyday life

We tend to use the word and concept “creative” very restrictively. Mostly for artists, maybe inventors. Most jobs are not considered creative. Or most lives. There are creative people and there are the rest of us. We tend to put creative people on a pedestal. But if you back off from this common creative/uncreative dichotomy […]

Creativity and the bearing of fardels

The meaning of Labor Day, insofar as it means anything these days, is about kicking back, eating hotdogs, drinking beer, in general giving ourselves a “well- earned rest” from our labors. Something like that. Labor is the hard stuff and pleasure is its reward. But there is a school of thought that argues that that’s […]

The Outer Cape’s European work and play ethic [op-ed CCT 29 June 2005]

In a recent column, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, knocks European workers for “trying to preserve a 35-hour work week in a world where Indian engineers are ready to work a 35-hour day.” Lazy Germans and French have “grown used to six-week vacations.” Oh, the decadence. It’s been 15 years or more since […]