What Is Your Philoponia?
Do You Know It?
Hey friends, today’s YouTopian Journey is paramount reading. I hope you enjoy it. If you haven’t subscribed yet, what are you waiting for?
If you already are a subscriber, consider upgrading to paid. You can change your life for spare change and help support my work and original art. Plus you get access to the full experience, which includes today’s issue. This is one of my most important issues yet. Make 2023 the year of you by subscribing.
Onto the good stuff.
Your Career Is Not Your Work
“How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It’s sad, really.”-Philip Larkin
We have been raised to think that work is nothing more than a series of tasks to be completed within a set number of hours. As soon as the clock strikes a certain time, the work is finished for the day. Or in some cases, we are forced to stay late, continuing to partake in the drudgery. This is work that gives no reward. It provides no meaningful bliss within. We had no desire to do it, no stake in it, and received no joy from it. We were simply a tool within a larger machine, a slave to the system that was not our own.
You don’t need this type of work.
The meaningless meetings.
The pointless emails.
The wasting of your time and life.
Understand that mind-numbing, meaningless, and dreary work constricts the individual. It reduces the human being to a drone, a beast of burden. It robs us of hope, removing our power and places it in the hands of an overlord. The individual needs to have strenuous but meaningful and soul filling work that they can be responsible for, that they can oversee and ultimately benefit from. This make’s walking one’s own path more than an arduous journey, but a quest for a better life!
And to complete this journey, you need something more than clocking in and clocking out.
You need philoponia.
Philoponi translates as love of work.
This is the type of work that is more than a career, more than a job, more than a series of meaningless tasks.
This is your vocation. Your life’s task.
Your magnum opus.
It is driven by purpose and passion. It comes from within. It is the work that you truly enjoy, a refuge from the modern world. A place you can call your own with work that is truly unique to you. Although this may be difficult to understand, it never feels like work. It is a task that joyfully consumes your time and infects every part of your being, work that you were made for and that was made for you.
And you need this now more than ever.
“Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.” – Rumi
This isn’t as easy as it sounds. You will need to discover your philoponia. You will need to explore your inner and outer world.
And you must begin as soon as possible.