Are you interested in understanding how to write a blog?  If so, this blog post is a good place to start.

If all you are interested in is having a personal blog for vanity’s sake, it’s free and easy to begin.  This is a WordPress blog, which is what I recommend.  If you have any difficulty whatsoever setting it up, you can do a Google search and get some technical help.

If you want to start a free blog as simply as possible, though I haven’t used it myself, I’ve read that blogger.com, which is run by Google, is even easier than WordPress.

The Buddha said, “If anything is worth doing, do it with all your heart” (The Dhammapada, Easwaran, tr.).  If you are going to trouble yourself to learn how to write a blog and then actually write one, why not do it well?

In this case, doing it well means creating excellent content and informing others about that content.  If you don’t create the best content you are capable of creating, why bother?  If you create good content and don’t market it to others, why bother creating that content in the first place?

In fact, if you work hard, you may eventually be able to monetize your blog, in other words, make money with it.  To work hard on your blog is to create an excellent post every day, or nearly every day, and also to do some marketing for your blog every day.

Before you decide to proceed, here are five questions to ask yourself:

*Do I enjoy reading?

*Have I sometimes thought after reading someone else’s blog, “I could do better than that?”

*Have I had a recurring desire to write?

*Am I willing to work very hard to write well?

*Am I interested in words?  (In other words, am I interested in their etymologies and shades of meaning?  Am I fascinated by how they sound?  Do their combinations sometimes excite me?)

If so, consider pursuing this more.  One fellow who has a lot to say on blogging is Yaro Starak.  He has a free blog tips email newsletter at entrepreneurs-journey.com.  He provides free videos on how to set up your own blog at BecomeABlogger.com.  I recommend his free e-book Blog Profits Bluebprint; you will be able to download a copy when you sign up for his newsletter.

Blogging may or may not be for you.  If you commit yourself wholeheartedly to it, learn from your mistakes, and persist, you won’t only learn how to write a blog, but also you’ll master blogging.  If you do, good for you!

Let’s use “unemployment” only to refer to not having a job.  To have a job is to trade your time and effort for money.  If you don’t need the money a job would provide, there’s nothing wrong with being unemployed; however, if you need the money, being unemployed can be very stressful.

Since it’s possible to own your own job, this yields five categories:

(1)    You want to be employed because you need the money, but you are unemployed.

(2)    You are employed because you need the money, and you own your own job.

(3)    You are employed because you need the money, and someone else owns your job.

(4)    You are employed even though you don’t need the money.

(5)    You don’t want to be employed, and you don’t need the money.

Most employees are in category 3; most people have jobs because they need them and  they work for someone else.  (Though I intend to discuss it in another post, the difference between categories 2 and 3 isn’t important for this post.)

Distinguish the idea of employment from the idea of working.  It’s good to work; it’s practically impossible to have high-self esteem without being productive and doing good work. It’s good to work for the well-being of others; it’s how sages live.  There’s no serious issue about that.

There is, on the other hand, a serious issue about whether or not it’s good to be employed.  If you have a job, there may be many days when you wish you could do something else instead of having to go to work at your job!  (I challenge you to talk to any employee you want and to find one who doesn’t recognize this.)

Of course, the benefits of having a job are good.  There’s nothing wrong with money, prestige, having a sense of purpose or identity, and other goods that can come from having a job.  There are, though, usually other ways to get those benefits without having to work at a job.  Furthermore, every job has its downside as well.

Which category listed above would it be best for you to be in?  Since being in one category isn’t necessarily better than being in another category, it’s not obvious.

Still, not needing the money, being in either category 4 or 5, seems to me to be the best.  Why?  Because you can still be employed and not need to be employed.  If you are employed, it’s better not to need to be employed than to need to be employed.  You can still enjoy the benefits of being employed even if you don’t need the financial benefit of being employed.  If you don’t need your pay, give it to your favorite charity!

Again, I don’t think there’s a serious issue about that.  Who wouldn’t prefer the freedom of being able not to be employed to the slavery of having to be employed?

There are, though, people who lie to themselves about that.  If you have to be in category 2 or 3, then you might think that you would stay there even if you became financially independent.  The only test that counts is to see what you actually do if you became financially independent.  In fact, many people who are financially independent are not employed.

This doesn’t mean that they don’t work!  Many do.

It’s natural to want to do your best at something that really resonates with you.  What would you spent a lot of time and effort doing if you had the chance? Would you write poems, novels, or movie scripts?  Would you be an inventor?  Would you work in a lab investigating diseases?  Would you teach the illiterate how to read?  Would you care for endangered species?  Would you do archaeology to try to understand the rise and fall of ancient civilizations?  Would you master a musical instrument?  Would you retire from the world and spend your days practicing spiritually to unite with the Divine?

It would be good to have the freedom to spend as much time doing what you really want to do, wouldn’t it?  You know how to recognize such work because it is wholly absorbing.  When you have found your niche and are working in it, you are focused solely on what you are doing.  You lose time consciousness—and awareness of your surroundings.  You actually lose self-consciousness.  That’s living well!

Of course, if you are able to find employment to follow your passion, terrific!  (In a sense, that’s the good fortune I had for 32 years as a philosophy professor.  It was sometimes hard to believe that someone would actually pay me to help others think better about living well!)

If you are unable to find such employment, might it be worth it to set yourself up in the fourth or fifth category?  There’s no way to tell; there’s no knowledge of whether or not it would be the right course for you to pursue.  What I’m suggesting is only that you consider it seriously.

Our values, what we consider good, are seriously influenced by our economic activity such as our working at a job.

“Alienation” may be the most important nonphysical impact of having a job on a worker.  Alienation occurs when, like Frankenstein’s monster in Mary Shelly’s story, a creation comes to dominate the life of its creator.

Our economic system was solely created by human beings.  When it comes to dominate our lives, when we become trapped by our own creation, we are alienated.

Marx argued that we all, wage workers and business owners alike, are alienated by the market system.  This is unfortunate since, as he himself realized, a free market economy is the most productive economic system ever created.

This is an excellent question to ask yourself:  does the free market economy exist to serve you, or do you exist to serve it?

If you need to have a job, then your life does not have a chance to have the quality it could have.  Please don’t misunderstand:  I’m not suggesting that there is anything necessarily wrong with having a job.  What I am suggesting is that you consider whether or not your life would be better if you didn’t have to have a job.

Let’s consider an oversimplified example.  Even though it’s oversimplified, notice that I am only counting time spent working on the job and not, for example, time spent preparing for the job, time spent commuting to and from the job (if any), or time spent recovering from the job.

Let’s suppose that you are a typical wage-worker at age 25.  You get hired and work at a job for forty years until you retire.  Let’s suppose that you work forty hours weekly for fifty weeks a year.  That’s 2000 hours each year for forty years, in other words, 80,000 hours.

It’s no exaggeration either to say that those 80,000 hours will be the prime hours of your life.  Much of the rest of your time will be spent sleeping, eating, and doing other routine tasks.  In other words, it’s not as if you go to work at your job when you’ve done everything else you wanted to do; it’s that you first go to work at your job and then try to fit in everything else that you want to do.

Time at work is usually spent working.  The office or factory is not the best place to form friendships, to study, to meditate, to write books, to raise children, to create works of art, and so on.  Instead, time at work is only a means to other ends like those; time on the job provides you with money that enables you to purchase other goods.  Money, though, is intrinsically worthless.

Therefore, instead of spending much of your life pursuing intrinsically valuable activities, you will spend much of your life pursuing something with no intrinsic value.  Remember, you are paid a wage or salary in exchange for your time and effort; you do not own whatever value your produce because that value is the property of your company.  You have alienated it for a wage.

It does not follow that there is anything wrong with work itself.  That’s not the point.  Without work, without productive activity, there could be no well-lived human life.  What does follow is that there are two kinds of work.

One kind of work is drudgery work that is also sometimes called “alienated labor” or “estranged labor” or “work done only as a means to some other end or goal.”  The other kind of work is creative work, which is also called “unalienated labor” or “intrinsically valuable work.”  Creative work is what you would do even if you didn’t have to do it, whereas drudgery work is what you would not do even if you didn’t have to do it.

What should you work at?  I have no idea.  However, I encourage you to ask yourself this question, “If I could do anything I wanted to do, what would I do?”  If you are honest with yourself, it’s very unlikely that you’ll choose something utterly unsuited to your particular abilities and skills.  It’s likely that you really enjoy activities that come naturally to you and that you are good at doing.  Wouldn’t you be happiest if you spent most of the prime hours of your life doing that kind of activity rather than doing whatever some employer told you to do?

We can become trapped by our own economic system.  We find ourselves with financial burdens such as mortgage or rent payments, insurance payments, medical and grocery bills, and so on.  We tend to panic when we lose a source of income such as a job.  However, loss, separation, is an excellent time for additional self-examination.

Why don’t you seriously consider becoming financially independent so that you are able to live your life doing what you really want to do?

Our values are seriously skewed by our economic activity. Our economic activity affects us deeply.  Karl Marx argued forcefully for this claim, and he was right.

If you spend much of your life making automobiles, wouldn’t it be natural for you, for example, to vote for politicians who value what is good for the auto industry?  If you spend much of your life caring for the ill, wouldn’t it be natural for you to have strong opinions about issues concerning health care?  If you spend much of your life logging trees, wouldn’t it be natural for you to be very concerned about the health of the logging industry?

Much more controversially, Marx argued that a worker who has a job is “exploited.”  Though I’ve read books on economic theories, I am not an economist.  In other words, I’m simply not an expert about this—and it is an important issue about which serious economists disagree.

However, when I talk with people in an ordinary, everyday context, I find general agreement that workers are exploited.  (This is especially true when people don’t realize they are agreeing with Marx!)

Suppose you have a job.  Your wages reflect the value you add value to a product or service.  Everyone agrees about that.

Here’s the question:  do your wages equal the amount of value you produce? If they do, then you are not exploited.  If they don’t, then you are exploited.

John Locke argued that the value of a product or service is created by the worker who works on it or by all the workers who work on it.  (Let’s pretend there’s just one worker for the sake of simplicity; the argument can easily be extended to more than one worker.)  If Locke is right, then it is just or fair if you, the worker, are rewarded in proportion to the value you add, and it is unjust or unfair if you are not.

Marx argues that, in a free market economy, wage workers like you must be exploited.  That’s not because you boss is evil and doesn’t want to pay you fairly.  It’s because, if a company’s workers were not exploited, the company must fail because there would be no profit.  Profit is created for a company by the surplus value provided by its wage workers; in other words, it’s created by the value that they add to a product or service and are not paid for adding.

IF Marx is correct, all workers are exploited.  All wage earners are underpaid.  This isn’t the fault of some particular capitalist or even of some particular class such as business owners; it’s the result of the nature of the whole market economy.

If you are a wage earner, since your activity while on the job affects your values, how would you feel about being exploited, systematically under-rewarded for your laboring activity?

Well, if you have ever recognized yourself as being in that situation, you certainly weren’t happy about it.  You may have felt trapped.  You needed the job to pay your bills, but you were exploited while on the job.  This can produce resentment, bitterness, and even anger.  It doesn’t foster peace of mind.

Have you a way out?  Well, you could quit your job and get another one.  Unfortunately, if Marx is right that the exploitation of wage-workers is endemic to a market economy, you’d still be exploited at your new job.

Even if Marx is right, you may ask, “So what?”  After all, you may still have a decent house, plenty of food and water, educational opportunities for you and your family, political freedom, sufficient leisure time, freedom to travel, and so on.  “Yes,” you might think, “I’m exploited, but the benefits are still so good that it’s worth it.”

With respect to having a job, though, there’s more to think about.  Even assuming that Marx is correct about systematic exploitation, being exploited is not the worst part of having a job.  I discuss what is in my next post.

What we do creates our selves.

Believe it or not, you are not a separate self.  You are empty of any continuant substratum.  Realizing this (as opposed to just thinking about it) is [spiritual] enlightenment, which is necessary for living well.  These ideas are controversial.  I argue for them elsewhere.  Here, though, I’ll just assume them.

Notice how naturally we identify ourselves with our economic activity.  We often think or say “I’m a physician” or “She’s a police officer” or “My brother is an accountant.”  It’s at least a quick way of identifying ourselves.  Actually, it’s a very important truth about our lives.

To have a job is to have someone else give you money in exchange for your time and effort, your laboring activity.  Jobs, of course, can be classified in many ways:  white collar or blue collar, well paid or poorly paid, creative or uncreative, and so on.

If you have a full-time job, what you do on the job constitutes the bulk of your economic activity.  (You also participate in the economy by consuming as well as by providing.)  You are participating in an economic system that distributes goods and services in exchange for money.  Your job occupies a good deal of your time; much of your daily life consists in preparing for being at work at your job, working at your job, and recovering from working at your job.  If, as is likely, the income from your job is important to you, your job is of ongoing concern to you.  The results of it are a source of motivation.

The value you add to whatever products you produce or services you provide is not a separate, self-contained part of your life.  The worth of what you think of yourself as being, doing, and having is not separate from the value of your economic activity.

Should you have a job?  Ah, that’s an interesting question.  Since, as I just argued, having a job may be of great value to you, if you lose a job, your attitude about yourself might decline.  If losing your job was in any way a reflection on the quality of your economic activity, you might take it as a blow to your self-esteem.  You might try to hide the loss of your job from others, and you might yearn to find a replacement quickly.  There can be a lot of emotion involved with obtaining, having, or losing a job.

Like alcohol and some other drugs, emotions can narrow our focus and prevent us from thinking clearly.  I propose to think clearly about having a job.  In particular, I propose to review a popular critique of having a job (in terms of “exploitation” and in terms of “alienation”) and propose an alternative that might interest or even stimulate you.

Money, financial wealth, won’t make you happy.  Nevertheless, it’s better to be financially comfortable than to be destitute.  Being financially secure feels a lot better than being financially insecure.

Past a certain point, though, accumulating more and more money won’t enable you to live better and better.  This is my layman’s understand of studies done by social scientists.  Not having enough money to enjoy what we in North America think of as being in the middle class is a source of unhappiness and financial distress.  Above that, though, it makes little difference.

Being able to enjoy financial security while being in the middle class is good.  Let’s think a bit beyond that.

Financial well-being (success, flourishing) is easy to measure:  the bigger one’s pile of money, the greater one’s financial well-being.  When it comes to money, the highest goal is financial independence.

How big should your pile of money be for you to enjoy financial independence?  It depends upon how you want to live.  Someone could be financially independent at $20,000 USD yearly, and someone else could lack financial independence at $5,000,000 USD yearly.  Though the annual income is relative to each individual, a master of the art of making money is a person who has put himself (or, of course, herself) in a position of financial independence.

If you are not yet financially independent and would like to be financially independent, how should you do it?

I don’t know.  Nobody else does, either.  Since (as I’ve argued elsewhere in these posts) there’s no knowledge of right and wrong, there’s no knowledge (demonstrative evidence, certainty) of what you should do to enjoy financial independence.  Therefore, if you are to succeed, your task is to figure out something that will work for you without knowing what you are doing.

Being financially independent is having enough money to do whatever you want.  In general, the more in control of your life you feel, the happier you’ll feel.  The only alternative to being able to do whatever you want is not being able to do whatever you want.

Freedom beats slavery. At least for me, it is better to have sufficient income so that you never need to think about money than it is to have insufficient income so that you frequently need to think about money.  Money has no intrinsic value.  Isn’t it better to think about and try to make concrete such (abstract) goods as friendship, beauty, physical wellness, spiritual enlightenment, and conceptual understanding than to be forced to spend one’s time in ceaseless pursuit of money?

Valuing financial independence is not the same as believing that it is possible for you to become financially independent.  There are various ways to become financially independent, but most are uninteresting.  For example, you could marry a wealthy person, inherit a huge pile of money, or successfully steal a lot of money.  The only interesting way is to earn it.

One of the glories of our society is that it is possible for any hard-working person of tolerable abilities to become financially independent.  If you don’t believe that it’s possible for you to achieve it, your own thinking will obstruct you before you get started.  It’ll be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I do not think that it is necessary to be financially independent, or even financially secure, to live well.  On the other hand, having a certain degree of financial security or even independence can make it easier to live well.

In other posts, I’ll offer you what I think are some encouraging, helpful ideas about improving your financial condition.