"First, to render this claim of identity comprehensible, a question: What is work? If I am doing what needs to be done, instead of what I want to do for the sake of present gratification, I am working. "Needs to be done" in what sense-and compared to what? Work is the subjugation of whim or, more precisely, it's the integration with other needs and desires into something of a higher and more complete order. Work is, to state it differently, the delay of gratification, and a sacrifice made in the service of others. It is an investment to best ensure the beneficence of the future, whose price must be paid in the present; an investment, as well, in the good will of the others on whose behalf something valuable (time, energy, attention) has been given up now. That means that when I am working I am replacing what I wish I could be doing right now-replacing what would otherwise seize my immediate attention and desire-with some demand of transcendent yet still brute necessity, all things considered; with something more calculated and longer term. This giving up or offering often is and can well be considered in any case as a contractual, communal, or covenantal obligation, implicit or explicit-one designed to meet the needs and wants of others (my family, my friends, my colleagues or partners, as well-and this is more difficult to understand, but crucial-as my future self).
There is perhaps no pattern of action more difficult to enact than voluntary subjugation of the present to the other and the future, given the conflict of that pursuit with the powerful appetitive, motivational, and emotional forces that strive to possess us and demand immediate gratification. Human beings are the only creatures that have ever come to understand how to subjugate now to later, [Moi ici: E eu sinto há muitos anos que o papel dos partidos políticos, todos, é o de apelar à gratificação imediata, é o de tornar mais difícil adiar a gratificação] routinely-as part of our mode of being-and are certainly the only creatures who determined how to ritualize, imaginatively understand, and then semantically represent that pattern of subjugation, work, and sacrifice. We had to learn all that (to sacrifice; to represent the pattern of sacrifice) the hard way, of course. We had to learn to work. Is there any purpose more profound for the great brains that characterize our species and require such lengthy socialization to develop than to transcend the instinctual and direct it toward the concerns of others and the future?"
Trecho retirado de "We Who Wrestle with God" de Jordan B. Peterson.
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