interesting article

The real issue regarding life and work is the struggle. The struggle to transcend our own limitations. The arrow through the heart of the matter is the desire to achieve higher consciousness, greater power and meaning in life and work. This happens not through the anti-intellectualism, entitlement, sloth and the general existential malaise that pervades our culture. Disaffection, ennui and nihilism are for the weak. The pathetic characters populating Clowes' art school landscape, and those they appeal to, are Thoreau’s great mass of men who “lead lives of quite desperation.” Campbell’s "bliss" is the eternal sunshine piercing the fog of this torpor. Bliss is the pathway that the Sentient struggles to remain on. Bliss, that feeling of being deeply at home in something, denies external pressure. It denies duty and expectation in favor of knowledge of self. It should have been a critical component of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It is in fact, the primary mechanism enabling and leading to self actualization. It is akin to the Jesuit notion ofmagis, Latin for “the more.” Bliss enables and engenders magis. [5] In its simplest terms the concerns of everyday life appear to be at odds with Bliss and with self-actualization. [6] Yet this simply reflects a failure of imagination.

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