Nursing, teaching, social work, music, & art are widely known to be some of the least paid jobs in our society today even though, at a human level, we all agree that they’re important.
The thing is, capitalism doesn’t seem to reward (or need to motivate), the stuff we’ll do anyway. Teaching and caring for one another is something that lives deep within our programming. To not do so feels some how inhuman to many (not all) of us. The same goes for writing, poetry, music, and visual art. Telling stories is so ‘below the surface’ of what it means to be human that we’re often not even aware we’re doing it.
In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, two characters talk about why they toil on the land in the face of a progressing world when, instead, they could be doing far more profitable things with their time. One looks to the other and says, “I don’t know, to keep the sacred fire burning, I suppose.”
I like that.
