When we begin to awaken the light of soul, life takes on a new death. […] Beyond work, survival, relationships, even family, we become aware of our profound duty our own life.*
(John O’Donohue)

This society produces many useless things, and to the same degree many useless people. Man, as a cog in the production machine, becomes a thing, and ceases to be human.**
(Erich Fromm)

The industrial landscape of bigger and more provides for us, but at a great cost.

Employment can be soul-less employment when all are capable of being craftspeople.

So many industries not really interested in person’s hand or mind or relational skills.

Erich Fromm is reflecting on the industrial-sized dangers foreseen by Karl Marx who wrote that:

the production of too many useful things results in too many useless people. […] Machinery is adapted to the weakness of the human being, in order to turn the weak human being into a machine.^

The work landscape is changing, but it is changing towards both the soul-full and the even more soul-less.

This is simply a plea to make some time to identify what we are each capable of and feel passionate about, towards being able to make something that matters to us, rather than consuming what others are making.

To somehow reconnect thought and feeling, mind and heart, truth and passion in a commitment to squeezing all we can from our life so there is nothing left over at the end.

Though the possibility may be that at the end we feel ourselves to be the most full of all, because the more we give, the more we receive.

*From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty;
**From Erich Fromm’s The Revolution of Hope;
^Karl Marx, quoted in Erich Fromm’s The Revolution of Hope.