The purpose of life is not to produce, but to enjoy. The guy who, say, spends his whole life documenting the life, work and history of an obscure regional rock band on the web has created something which others (however few) may yet enjoy and profit from, and which he derived pleasure from,and which gave him the opportunity to express his creativity. What were these people doing before they did this? They were probably squandering their lives in dead end jobs being productive for someone else's self-actualization. Well, maybe they're still in the same job and just as miserable at it, but now at home they can be a poet, scholar or an artist or a chronicler or a breeder of prize goldfish. Good for them.

Sure, we all need to earn our keep, we are all responsible for the welfare of others, too, to a certain extent. But we have the technology and the surplus capacity now to enrich our lives and those of our fellow men by means of study, craftsmanship, literature, communications, or a variety of other activities now made so much easier. This is what the computer and modern communications should do for us, not just allow us to put in more overtime at home so we can spend it all on ebay.

How productive is our time here on the Zone? For that matter, how productive is the time and effort I spend with my telescope and my sailing; or that my wife spends doing intricate electronic art on her computer? "Non-productive" activity is WHY we produced in the first place, to earn the time and resources to do what we truly love, whether it is the rich businessman flying his Cessna or the poor sharecropper playing his banjo. This is culture, this is why man is here. Perhaps the entrepreneur is an exception, his job is his hobby, as it is for a lucky few among us who are talented or lucky enough to earn our living doing what we love.

But we can't all be brain surgeons or astrophysicists; for the rest of us the act of work has become divorced from the process of living, and our work is either meaningless abstraction or pointless drudgery made somewhat more tolerable by our air-conditioned cubicles and our IRAs and health plans and vacations in Aruba. People are not naturally lazy, people love to work, they can't get enough of it, and the evidence is the time and effort they put into creative activity, whether it be trout fishing or dancing at the disco, or collecting Civil War memorabilia.

It has always been like this, the flint arrowheads I used to find around my childhood home in Florida were occasionally so finely crafted, so thin and perfect, that there were probably useless for hunting or war. But a Neolithic craftsmen did it just to show off his skill, for the sheer joy of it, because he could. Ok, someone has to clean the streets and do database maintenance, and we all need to shoulder the responsibility to do our share for the benefit of all and to pay the true costs of our pastimes. But we have the resources and the time and the right to do this. We've earned it.