Percentage of teens ages 15-17 who work part-time/full-time
1. 🇳🇱 Netherlands – 62%
2. 🇧🇪 Belgium – 58%.
3. 🇸🇪 Sweden – 55%.
No doubt, the Protties will vaunt this as a positive of the “Protestant work ethic”, which we Catholics refer to as “the mechanising and dehumanising of children”.
I can’t recall if it was Edgar Allen Poe that wrote that a real gentleman has to have the luxury of laziness, but when I first read that I wholeheartedly agreed with it because I had come to the same conclusion. I was16 at the time.
By laziness, of course, Poe —if it was him— meant only apparent laziness. Which is the sitting on a porch or lying on the grass observing the clouds or the way the tree tops sway in the breeze or the rain falls on the grass, and such other seemingly “mindless” activities. Which, in reality, at least for me, are precisely the opposite of mindless.
The need for an intelligent and educated mind to contemplate, freely and un-rushed, whatever comes into it, was as necessary to me as breathing throughout my life. It was (and remains) a concept that the rest of humanity tries to murder in the crib. Starting with my own boomer father and boomers in general. It’s almost as if they sense and hate the mental freedom such activity entails.
It is only with such freedom and activity, which is labelled as “laziness” by the enemy and his minions, that actual civilisation advances. Only a mind that has learnt to contemplate can invent and create truly divinely inspired things.
And even now, with five children, endless work I can never hope to keep up with, never mind on top of, and the nagging of the state, income requirements and worries, and the total absence of spare time, I still, try to carve out slices of such activity. It’s not ideal, for doing so at 4 am when your kids wake at 5:45 is not conducive to the very height of human creation, but then, men who are men always did manage this, whether is was writing a poem while in a Siberian gulag or calculating the Schwarzschild radius while in the trenches of WWI.
And such ability to relax and contemplate, is not taught by instilling the fear of poverty or the need to “work” (for whom? To what end? For whose primary benefit? Why? How?). Rather it is taught by spending time with your children talking about life, nature, observing the flight of a bird or the shape of a cloud.
And I certainly hope, that my children find the way to have as much time to contemplate as to create. Hard work has never scared me, and I have never avoided it, but that is mostly because by contemplating life, I always could see the purpose of it even in places where others saw only effort and pain and no opportunity, while I saw opportunity that made the effort towards it a mere detail.
I have noticed in myself and gen z counterparts that the prot work ethic infestation created a generation who at school or work would rather stare blankly at a wall rather than continue to partake in the system. I believe, whether they know it or not, this rebellion at school or work is their souls grasp for something good and proper. They’re typically labelled as lazy for this, but everytime I’ve seen them in a rare good environment conducive to humans, even a hardworking one, they tend to work hard and do well.
I wonder, for those so sucked into this system and abused by it, when was the last time they had any original thought that was not primarily inspired by stressors from this system?
Yes. True. It is mostly why I write the books I do and the blog I do and the work I do and the solutions I try to give. The whole of existence on this planet is that you are either under the spell of the Prince of Lies or you are his eternal enemy and fighting to spread the light of truth to your fellow man. That is why the Catholic Church is known as The Church Militant. It’s a war.