There’s no other way to rid yourself of work besides giving back to individual creativity a confidence that has been, up to the present, stingily doled out to it, if not refused to it.
From Work to Creation
In order that creation might supplant work, an economy which will take its last dying profits from the healing of the earth and the production of sustainable energy will have to supplant the economy of denaturation.
The gradual passage from the factories to the workshops of creation will have, at least, the advantage of putting in doubt the old prejudice that saw freeness as merely an incongruous and abnormal gift, as an imperfection in the form of the process of exchanges, as the immoral retribution of those who do nothing. Then we will reencounter the assimilation of pleasure into a compensation for services rendered, into the recompense of the gods, into the repose of the warrior, into the relaxation of the body.
The artists, who for a long time passed themselves off as the only creators, have never ignored the mass of disillusionments and repetitive efforts which makes up the patient alloy of inspiration. The gifts of writing, composing, painting, gardening, caressing, dreaming, seeing, tasting, changing the world and life — these gifts do not fall from the sky; they are the freeness that creates itself, drawing itself up from the magma of impulses, struggling along from failures to retries, to germinate at last, one day or another, in a graceful, happy moment.
Only a constant insistence permits the creation of this accomplishment of the self, from whence all the happiness of creating flows. But so much feverish stubbornness must never be confused with work. There’s no hell of creation, since it is simultaneously enjoyment and the pursuit of enjoyments, the movement and its goal. The rage of dissatisfied desires to create does not transform into the renunciation-reflex which is the very essence of work; no, it only reconstructs more beautifully what was destroyed.
Far from losing itself in it, creation does not obey constraints, and is pushed along by the irresistible and often discordant force of desires. It is there that it goes into battle without dissolving, growing from what it gives, the very inverse of work, which only means wearing out and exhaustion. Because it comes from a nature which offers its wealth to those who know how to gather them, not from a nature which is raped by the oppression and glory of money.
Work always means working against yourself and against others. Creation is for yourself and for everyone’s pleasure.
To the Living, Raoul Vaneigem