I saw two cats at a window today.

A propos of something, someone talked about the definition of labor versus work.

Labor is breaking rocks with a pick-ax while someone holds a gun to your head. Labor is your tenth hour in the warehouse when your vertebrae are starting to feel crunchy. Work can be challenging, surprising, effortful, emotional, but it isn’t something that requires intense coercion, although may require a little coercion, sometimes, in the form of a deadline or a structured work environment of some kind. Most tellingly, it feels rewarding, in a deeper way than the “thank fuck that’s over” swell of relief you feel at the end of a day of laboring. It feels like you did something on earth.

(If You Have Writer's Block, Maybe You Should Stop Lying)

A propos of something else, someone talked about not having to be anymore.

I think a rarely discussed but commonly felt desire is to simply not exist. This should of course be distinguished from its far more violent and permanent cousin, an act which, admittedly, still holds tightly to this longing for nothingness, but the former sensation is far more vague: to not have to experience this any more. [...] It makes little sense, one moment of freedom for an eternity of nothing, of permanent silence. Is this a worthy sacrifice? I think not. [...]

(the desire to simply not exist)

I can't imagine work. Isn't it all labor? Work must become labor, the satisfaction fades away because work must be continued, and skills sharpened, everything marches to irrelevance except if you are this generation's Gauss or Mozart or Leonardo da Vinci or von Neumann. But you aren't, because you'd know by now, and the question wouldn't be posed in the first place.

[...] It's not that hard. [...]

(This 12-Year-Old Has Taken the Art World by Storm)

And yet you are supposed to derive enjoyment from within you. And maybe pretend you're a hedonist: why not seek well-being?

The labor of existing, should it be work?

Maybe for a different baseline. But the negation of work and labor and all baselines, can you imagine?

I saw two cats at a window today. One was black, the other brown. I usually take it as auspicious.