labors lost?

We stand and look at these hard working men and women hurrying in all directions and ask ourselves, where go the proceeds of their labor?

When I read this in Brownson I knew that he was talking about the physical sort of prophet that is made from the very demanding work done by wage laborers during this time period, but the image of bustling men and women immediately brought Carnegie Mellon to mind. I couldn't help it. The tired dirty wage laborers were nothing compared to exhausted and burnt out students, hyped up on caffeine just to get through their last class, and their labor at least seemed more fruitful.

I don't mean to say that the conditions of the laborers were superior to or more desirable, or in any way more sort of affluent than the lives of students at CMU. I know that they were subjected to terrible practices in the same ways that sweatshop workers today are mistreated. I know that, even as broke college students, we are better off than they probably ever were or ever would be. What I mean is that the actual work that the laborer did produced a tangible result, and in that aspect was better than college life is now. A laborer could look at a bolt of cloth and say to himself “I made this cloth. It is an extension of my self and is also a beautiful and useful thing.” Students, and especially students in the humanities, don't take anything home with us on break. We don't point to our essays and say “Look mom and dad, I made that and it is a useful and beautiful thing.” Our product is all in our heads.

This grueling labor is preformed with no physical reward, and so it's often perceived as wasted effort. From the outside looking in there are a few thousand students in a university and all of them study like little hamsters on their wheels , eventually spinning off into the real world with various large job offers for carrots and layoffs for sticks. It certainly seems like that to those of us on the inside as well. There is sort of this ambiguity about how exactly what we do here leads to a concrete job. In this way, the certainty of the laborer's finished product provides more motivation to succeed that the intellectual, hard proven,.

I also want to clear something up about the disparity between my last blog post and what I said in class about the food portion of my meditation experiment. My initial experience was very positive, the way that I describe it ins my blog post. It was after I got done eating and had to look at food I was finished with that my experience turned sour. Sorry for the confusion.