“Serious occupation is labor that has reference to some want.”
Pt. I, sec. 2, ch. 1
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Volume 1
“Degeneracy can be fun but it's hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation.”
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Afterword (1984)
Context: The hippies had in mind something that they wanted, and were calling it "freedom," but in the final analysis "freedom" is a purely negative goal. It just says something is bad. Hippies weren't really offering any alternatives other than colorful short-term ones, and some of these were looking more and more like pure degeneracy. Degeneracy can be fun but it's hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation.
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Robert M. Pirsig 164
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