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Rank: Advanced Member
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 The one predominant duty is to find one's work and do it. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)
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...whether you're a pimp or a president.
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We start and end with the family, though "one's work" is also important for society, as well as taxes related to that work. Perhaps only difference between a pimp and a president is that they mostly serve a different clientele...
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one's work is a good target
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I can image a future where most "work" is done automatically and more people are freed to pursue their bliss rather than have to "work." The pursuit of happiness doesn't include "work," in my opinion. Aloha.
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Joined: 1/17/2012 Posts: 100 Neurons: 37,558 Location: Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv, Israel
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My view: the one predominant work is to find one's duty. However, both are cliched and simplistic platitudes. Man and life's philosophies encompass infinitely more than one predominant niche.
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Joined: 4/8/2014 Posts: 872 Neurons: 87,227 Location: Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada
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Our work is a good thing. It keeps us occupied, and prevents us from navel-gazing. It gives us something positive to do, instead of wasting away our hours on frivolities.
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Best Said....
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Not a line to use on your first date.
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Somehow her idea of duty sounds too insipid and poor.
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to Wisdom of Josh
It's funny, but I find your cliche/view quite refreshing... Unfortunately, not all in this world can have work or can work, but duty, care is available even for disabled people.
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One of my favorite sayings goes something like:
"Work is so wonderful that you should save some for tomorrow."
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Working in something you like is the problem.
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This sounds like one of those quotes which you need more context to appreciate. By itself, it doesn't stand alone as great wisdom.
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Joined: 7/23/2014 Posts: 1,700 Neurons: 5,804,368 Location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
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People whose work is like their hobby is lucky and will be happy. I guess she wants people to find out life's calling for each and every one of us.
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Joined: 9/9/2014 Posts: 221 Neurons: 236,143 Location: Uxbridge, England, United Kingdom
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Since leaving the Royal Navy (Fleet Air Arm) in December 2007, I have been trying to find a second career (one's work), but have - alas - so far failed. I continue to search...
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We desperately need many more like her.
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Bully_rus wrote:We start and end with the family...
Perhaps one's work could have something to do with family.
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I'm imagining people misplacing their work and having to find it. :) Seriously, how does one find one's work?
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S. Miranda-Hess wrote:Bully_rus wrote:We start and end with the family...
Perhaps one's work could have something to do with family. When we are born into this world, we have a family, not a job... The notion of family is wider than that of payable activity, aka job.
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OMF1969 wrote:Working in something you like is the problem. Why is that, Oh My Fabulous Sixty-Nine?
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman grew up in a capitalist nation. What the hell is she talking about?
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The quote is probably from "Women and Economics", 1898, or "The Home: Its Work and Influence", 1903. She was an early advocate of women's role in society going beyond housekeeping work. "The first duty of a human being is to assume the right functional relationship to society – more briefly, to find your real job, and do it." In "The Forerunner", her own magazine where she worked as editor, she recounted her postpartum bout with depression and how the treatment ordered by a specialist--stay home and avoid more than two hours of intellectual activity in a day, drove her almost insane. She wrote: "Then... I cast the noted specialist's advice to the winds and went to work again — work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite — ultimately recovering some measure of power." It was then that she wrote her best known short story "The Yellow Wallpaper". Sadly, her own remedy only worked for so long...but all in all she was right to choose being active, and was rewarded for doing her duty as she saw it.
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or passion
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What somebody called "simplistic platitude" here above, was very likely at the time the quotationit was written a deeply profound truth for a woman of such inspiration as Charlotte Perkins Gilman. You could call it lofty, if you wanted to give it any credit, particularly because it was such a novel idea: find your calling and pursue it, regardless of the custom of the day.
The irony is that in our time "to find one's work and do it" is not as simple as doing one's duty, for women and men alike. The choice may be there but how to exercise it, and the cost of it, that is another matter. Too many of us interested in the same work, not just for the sake of duty.
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