I ran across this precept about life purpose from Eric Hoffer:
Our doubts about ourselves cannot be banished except by working at that which is the one and only thing we know we ought to do. Other people's assertions cannot silence the howling dirge within us. It is our talents rusting unused within us that secrete the poison of self-doubt into our bloodstream.
I have been reading Where The Wasteland Ends, written by a young academic named Theodore Roszak (1933 - 2011) back in 1973. Roszak was a leading intellectual of the counterculture then, and is actually credited with coining the term "counterculture."
Alas, the book has not aged well.
The labored references to Friedrich Nietzsche and William Blake seem now to be pretty thin stuff -- some baubles to impress undergraduates with, perhaps, but nothing much to offer any serious student of either history or modern society. And Roszak's random potshots at straw-man burlesques of capitalism and Protestant Christianity seem like nothing more than paleo-wokeness: virtue signals to his free-thinking tribe of liberal arts professors, coffee house Marxists, hippies, and true-blue George McGovern believers.
All the same, one still has to admire Roszak's vigorous prose. Here is his colorful denunciation of modern life, as seen from the ivory tower:
For most people, work is a bore and a burden; it is done for other people's profit and to other people's specifications. It is done for money, rarely for love. So of course everyone rushes to unload their labor on to the machines and the big systems. These in turn justify their existence by grinding out the swanky garbage which the official economics tallies up into a statistical mystery called "the standard of living." And the void that is left behind when the machines have taken over the drudgery that no one ever wanted to do in the first place is called "leisure" -- a vacuum rapidly filled with cheerless, obsessive getting and spending, with idiocies like pre-packaged tourism (the chance to make an international nuisance of oneself), or with pure boredom.
I was so delighted with the phrase "make an international nuisance of oneself" that it redeemed my slog through these hundreds of pages of academic claptrap.
However, I worry that I am being too hard on Mr. Roszak. Decades ago, when I was a college student, I myself was intrigued by countercultural ideals of peace, love, Woodstock nudity, self-actualization, and vaporous spirituality, with a dollop of yoga and Transcendental Meditation as a chaser. I was even invited (even pressured) to join a commune by a vivacious coed.
But now I am old and fully molded into my niche in the military-industrial complex. Perhaps my skepticism concerning Roszak's manifesto is merely evidence that I have lost my grooviness.
