Sometimes I feel mild physical sickness when I see ad catalogs. When I go to our mailbox outside, I separate the ads from the proper mail and put them in the boot of my car. When there are enough of them, I take them to a recycling container at the parking area of the nearest Citymarket.
We have the "ei mainoksia" sign, and what does slip through gets recycled unopened.
When I took bags full of gardening waste including rotten apples to the waste center the other day, those ads came in very handy as material to spread on the floor of the boot of the car. The bags they were in turned out to have small holes in them through which pretty foul stuff leaked.
The people who have "ei mainoksia" are my heroes. Whenever I see new one on my route, it makes me smile :)
I have tried "Ei laskua" also but they keep coming.
Lol, people always wish I didn't bring bills – I'm just the messenger, dude! :D
Oh, I get that mild "sick" feeling too. I think that once paying attention with some knowledge of the intention and process behind things, that sick feeling is common.
What's actually tragic is that many people's gainful employment and their sense of purpose and dignity depends that marketing effort succeeding and that stuff getting bought.
Most of the jobs in this world are quite useless for our survival as a species. It would be great if one day all the necessary and mundane was done by machine and we as humans can focus on human creative processes.
I actually disagree. That would make things much worse in terms of uselessness of the work done. People who do necessary and mundane work are often capable of deriving a sense of meaning from their jobs. On the other hand, the production of many goods and services, for which demand has to be engineered painstakingly and with great cost, involves many creative processes.
I find a future where everyone is forced to earn a living by maximizing their creative potential a living hell. Creativity cannot be forced and most people are not terribly creative to begin with. The creative professions can take quite a toll on people's mental health.
I read a story of a woman in I think the Philippines who spent 12 hours a day inspecting glass bottles for dirt. She derived no pleasure from that job.
As said, creative human pursuits can still go into design processes.
You can always find some extreme example to present as anecdotal evidence. Besides, pleasure does not equal meaning. Typical jobs that are mundane and necessary exist in transportation such as driving a van or a truck (driver is the single most common men's job), medicine (most of what nurses or even doctors do at the typical general clinic is routine), cleaning, construction etc. The list of jobs that have to be done but involve little creativity is very long.
Creativity is not some holy grail of happiness or meaning even for those people who excel at it. As a hobby without any pressure to perform, sure if it is enjoyable, but the creative professions can and often are extremely demanding.
In a hypothetical world where disease was cured, does that mean that someone who enjoys nursing can never be satisfied again? There are other things that one could do that satisfy the same needs.
My only point here is that the elimination of routine jobs with only the creative ones being left, is no pathway to human happiness. Having to earn on one's own creativity can be as hellish as the most mind-numbingly dull routine work. Besides, a world where one's social status entirely depends on the ability to monetize one's creativity is a winner-takes-it-all society to much greater degree than the one we're currently living in.