Day 8 |
December 25, 1997 | Outbound |
699 Miles Today: 4 Miles |
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Mystic
Forest RV Park Klamath CA |
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 22 secs at 28.8 Picture list |
Slow day; drove a few miles north to Lagoon Creek trailhead and parked there. S. and I went our separate ways - good to be on my own. Spent most of the day thinking about work, and what would be worthwhile doing. | ||
| It struck me that for most people the work they were being paid to do wouldn't seem very valuable - due to simple economics. Not that I've done Econ 101, but from first principles: a market economy is based on the fact that value systems among participants are not shared. | |||
| Say I have lots of seashells. A few more are essentially worthless; but if you don't have any, and would like a few, they'll have a comparatively high value for you. Shells and money are exchanged, and both sides feel they got a good deal. | |||
| Likewise, the skills I might bring to a job (if I'm lucky enough to have one) are like a pile of seashells outside a fisherman's door. My employer values them more highly than I do, and the money it pays me is probably worth less to it than to me. Both sides feel they get a good deal, that is, both feel that what they're giving away is worth less than what they're getting. For employees, this translates into feeling that they are burning their life away doing worthless work. Employers might worry about employees walking away, or even feel they are exploiting their workers. | |||
| What's worth doing | I spent some time listing things that I thought would be worth my while doing - no surprises here. I rated proving Fermat's Last Theorem or writing a book that changes how people see the world, but discounted making $10 million or being happy. Miserable sod. Ambitious, miserable sod. | ||
| It's been another glorious day: not a cloud in the sky. It was a joy walking along the coast and sitting in the (black) sand. Scrape your finger through the dry top-sand to bring up some of the damp crumbly stuff; pull it up a little incline. Over the next few minutes you get little scurrying trickles of sand all over the place, as the damp mounds dry out and collapse into equilibrium with the rest of the surface. Looks like little bugs skittering and disappearing. I've never noticed this before; it may that it's the black sand: it heats up and dries out faster than the white stuff, so the effect is much easier to notice. | Noticed here for the first time that the sand is no longer white, as in Oregon; wonder where the geology changes? | ||