Status Updates From The Human Condition

Marx predicted correctly, though with an unjustified gkee, „the withering away“ of the public realm under conditions of unhampered development of the „productive forces if society“, and he was equally right, (…), when he foreswae that the "socialized men“ would spend their freedom from labouring in those strictly private and essentially worldless activities that we now call „hobbies“

Fortune depends on luck (…) although most people in their "pursuit of happiness“ run after good fortune (…) as though it were an inexhaustible abundance (…) There is no lasting happiness outside the prescribed cycle of painful exhaustion and pleasurable regeneration (…), and whatever throws this cycle out of balance (…) ruins the elemental happiness that comes from being alive

The blessibg of labour is that effort and gratification follow each other as closely as producing and consuming the means of substinence, so that happiness is a concomitant of the process itself, just as pleasure is a concomitant of the functioning of a healthy body (…)

Life is a process that everywhere uses up durability, wears it down, makes it disappear, until eventually dead matter, the result of small, single, cyclical, life processes, returns to the over-all gigantic circle of nature herself, where no beginning and no end exist and where all natural things swing in changeless, deathless repetition (p. 96)