• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Charles Eisenstein

  • About
  • Essays
  • Videos
  • Podcasts
    • Charles Eisenstein Random
    • New and Ancient Story Podcast
  • Courses
    • Climate — Inside and Out
    • Conversations with Orland Bishop, Course One
    • Conversations with Orland Bishop, Course Two
    • Conversations with Orland Bishop, Course Three
    • Dietary Transformation from the Inside Out
    • Living in the Gift
    • Masculinity: A New Story
    • Metaphysics & Mystery
    • Space Between Stories
    • Unlearning: For Change Agents
  • Books
    • The Coronation
    • Climate — A New Story
    • The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible
    • The Ascent of Humanity
    • Sacred Economics
    • The Yoga of Eating
  • Events
  • Donate

Who Will Collect the Garbage?

June 27, 2007 by Charles Eisenstein Leave a Comment

June 2007
This essay has been translated into French.


I had a conversation today about the beautiful world that I believe will be born out of the converging crises of our age. One characteristic of this world will be that each person will have recovered a very basic, simple birthright: to wake up in the morning excited and happy about your work for the day. We will be in love with what we do; in other words, we will all be artists.

Everybody has probably experienced this feeling at one time or another, the feeling of being passionately involved in a creative project. That passion is the sign of what might be called authentic work, true work, or soul work. The human spirit rebels at doing anything we don’t truly care about. The rebellion is closest to the surface in the young: hence, the sullen, resentful, rebellious, angry teenager. As we get older and the spirit crumbles, we come to accept that life is “just like that.” Working in drudgery for external rewards so that you can live your real life during your “time off.”

Think of the assumptions built into that phrase, “time off”. Time off from what? If we enjoy freedom only on the weekends, vacations, and evenings of our lives, then what does that say about the rest of life? It is slavery. What about being free all the time? That is what you are, when you do something you love. You are free.

I am not just speaking of the obvious drudgery of the working class here. Even among the elite, many occupations are not rewarding on their own merits. One corporate executive told me that his job consisted of “lying to the customer.” Another told me that his job was to scare customers into buying computer security systems that they didn’t actually need. And imagine if your job were to promote Colgate over Crest, or Pepsi over Coke, or any brand over any other, essentially identical, brand. Or if your job were to write software to help someone else do that.

Or to provide the financing or insurance for someone to do that. Something in you would say, “I was not put here on earth to sell soda. I was not put here on earth to lie to the customer. I was not put here on earth to make children learn standardized testing curricula. I was not put here on earth to push a broom. I was not put here on earth to fill out medical billing statements. I was not put here on earth to collect garbage.”

The nature of work-­as-­we-­know-­it—tedious, routine, degrading to self or others, unfulfilling to the spirit—has very deep roots. One root grows from the Machine, with its requirement for standardized, replaceable parts and processes. Another grows from the mentality of domestication, laboring today for the sake of a future harvest. Ultimately, all originate in our sense of self as discrete and separate. More for me is less for you. The true artist never does anything merely “good enough”—good enough for the grade, for the customer, for the boss. The true artist keeps working and working on a project until he or she can look upon it with satisfaction. Then, and only then, is it ready to give to the universe. The true artist might receive money for her work, but the work is not done for the money because no amount of money is sufficient. The real motivation is elsewhere. True art is beyond price.

My conversation partner asked, “But in such a world, who will collect the garbage?” My short answer was, “In a more beautiful world, we are not going to produce very much garbage!” Now I would like to give a longer answer.

Both the question and the answer were spoken on two levels, the first literal, the second metaphoric. On the literal level, we can envision an economic and monetary system that structurally discourages waste. When all costs are internalized, a huge incentive is created to produce goods that are fully reusable or recyclable. This is a return to the very recent past. My ex-­wife recalls that in her childhood in rural Taiwan, there was no such thing as a garbage truck. Food scraps were composted or fed to the pigs. Newspaper, metal, and glass were all recycled. Food bought at the market was taken home wrapped in bamboo leaves. Containers were refilled by local distributors or producers. Another friend of mine recently returned from a visit to Cuba, where she was amazed to find that an entire village of several hundred people only filled one garbage can a week.

Ultimately, to make an object beautifully requires that we consider its entire history and future. The artist-­engineers of a more beautiful world will incorporate re-usability and sustainability into their design specs. They will do so for beauty’s sake, for their own joy and satisfaction, and they will have an economic incentive to do so as well. Products that generate waste will be more expensive. Beauty and money will no longer be at odds. If you are curious to know more, read the economics of Paul Hawken and Amory Lovins, as well as Chapter 7 of The Ascent of Humanity.

But really, the question was about more than just garbage. Generalized, it might go something like this: “There are a certain number of unpleasant, tedious, degrading tasks that have to get done in order to have a modern society. Who will do these tasks in a world where everyone insists on work that is rewarding?”

My answer generalizes too. Tasks like that will become much less necessary when industrial design consciously seeks, not to minimize costs, but to minimize drudgery, tedium, and waste.

Secondly, our demand for endless piles of cheap, generic consumer items will diminish as we transition into a new conception of wealth and surround ourselves with durable, elegant material objects made with love. I believe that many consumer goods that are mass-­produced today will revert back to local, more labor-­intensive production. This is especially true of food, and also to some extent clothing, medicine, shelter, and entertainment. Thirdly, as new currency systems render money into no longer a scarce commodity, we will no longer support enterprises whose dominant motivation is to reduce costs and maximize dollar efficiency. We will desire goods and services produced by artists, not slaves. Such a thing as a garment made in a sweatshop will seem ugly and repugnant to us. To have a surfeit of such things is a strange concept of wealth indeed. To me, true wealth would be to live among unique treasures, not mass-­produced uniform objects made with the crass motive of profit above all.

In a more beautiful world, we will not be comfortable eating at restaurants or staying at hotels or working in office buildings that depend logistically on masses of broken souls pushing mops, washing dishes, flipping burgers, and entering data. Nor will there be many people sufficiently broken, by training or poverty, to do such work. Any enterprise will have to make consideration for human dignity.

I believe there will still be such things as hotels and restaurants in a more beautiful world, and there will still be a limited amount of work washing dishes and chopping vegetables and pushing mops. These jobs are really only degrading and soul­-destroying when you feel compelled to do them day in and day out, with no hope of anything better. For a teenager to do something like this a few hours a week for a year or two is a different matter entirely. One of the best jobs I ever had was in a cafeteria dish room in college. There are times in life as well, personal transitions for instance, where a period of mindless labor can be comforting. So there may always be a limited place for such jobs in even the most beautiful society. No one will feel that he is stuck there, though.

People will do many more things for themselves. It is degrading to clean other people’s toilets all day; it is not degrading to clean your own toilet, or even another person’s toilet out of love. I do not find it degrading to change my son’s diapers, or to physically care for an ill loved one. Such tasks are part of the richness of life, yet ironically, in this, supposedly richest society on earth, we pay other people to perform the tasks of daily living, converting them from richness to degradation. I think that the toilets in tomorrow’s office buildings will be cleaned by the people who work there.

All the same, it is nice to be pampered sometimes, and there are people who love to do that for others. A more beautiful world will abound in inns, restaurants, spas, massage clinics, and other places devoted to making people feel great. Inns and restaurants will operate on a smaller scale than today’s mega­-hotels, and all the slogans about personalized hospitality will come true.

There are some who say that if everyone suddenly insisted only on rewarding work, and refused to compromise their dignity, then society as we know it would fall apart. From this assumption follows the whole regime of oppression and control, with the associated guilt of knowing that your freedom and fulfillment is based on another’s slavery and misery. Well, this way of thinking is correct about one thing: society as we know it would indeed fall apart. But that doesn’t mean a descent to barbarism. In fact, I doubt the transition would be nearly as difficult as you might imagine if, say, all the garbage collectors of the world went on permanent holiday. Your purchasing habits, your composting habits, and so on would change very quickly I am sure, soon to be followed by our production systems.

If all the mop-­pushers quit, saying, “I’m too good for this”; if all the burger­-flippers quit, saying, “I am too good for this”; if all the marketers decided that lying were beneath their dignity, if all the soldiers said, “I will no longer kill”; if all the manufacturers said, “I will no longer produce in a way that pollutes the air”; if everyone just refused to go along with anything that felt wrong, can you imagine the world we could create? Let us not be afraid to create a world in which no one is broken to be anything less than an artist.

I think we can all begin creating a world like that right now. We can become refusers ourselves, as much as courage allows, and we can encourage each other with the knowledge, “You are meant to do something beautiful here.” Most of all, we can see in every maid, every check­out cashier, every janitor, ever data drone, a divinely creative spirit that is much bigger than that role. See everyone as big. Never through word or deed imply that they are small. Every time you treat one of the lowest functionaries of our society with humanity and respect, you are committing a small, revolutionary act, because your respect contradicts what the system has made them. Even if they are 99 percent broken to their role, even if they accept with 99 percent of their being that life is just like this, even if they willingly comply with their own degradation, there is something deep down that refuses ever to accept it. No human spirit can ever truly be broken. Your humanity and respect will speak to that tiny, buried, and indominable spark of dignity and rebellion in every human soul.


Previous: The Ubiquitous Matrix of Lies
Next: The Testicular Age

Filed Under: Money, Gift, & Economics Tagged With: Essay, force, purpose, Sacred Economics

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

All Essays

Peace-building

Time to Push

The Rehearsal is Over

Some Stuff I’m Reading

Beyond Industrial Medicine

A Temple of this Earth

The Sacrificial King

Words to a Young Man

How It Is Going to Be

What I’m doing here

Charles Eisenstein, Antisemite

Mob Morality and the Unvaxxed

Fascism and the Antifestival

The Death of the Festival

Source Temple and the Great Reset

To Reason with a Madman

From QAnon’s Dark Mirror, Hope

World on Fire

We Can Do Better Than This

The Banquet of Whiteness

The Cure of the Earth

Numb

The Conspiracy Myth

The Coronation

Extinction and the Revolution of Love

The Amazon: How do we heal a burning heart?

Building a Peace Narrative

Xylella: Supervillain or Symptom

Making the Universe Great Again

Every Act a Ceremony

The Polarization Trap

Living in the Gift

A Little Heartbreak

Initiation into a Living Planet

Why I am Afraid of Global Cooling

Olive Trees and the Cry of the Land

Our New, Happy Life? The Ideology of Development

Opposition to GMOs is Neither Unscientific nor Immoral

The Age of We Need Each Other

Institutes for Technologies of Reunion

Brushes with the Mainstream

Standing Rock: A Change of Heart

Transcription: Fertile Ground of Bewilderment Podcast

The Election: Of Hate, Grief, and a New Story

This Is How War Begins

The Lid is Off

Of Horseshoe Crabs and Empathy

Scaling Down

The Fertile Ground of Bewilderment

By Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Them

Psychedelics and Systems Change

Mutiny of the Soul Revisited

Why I Don’t Do Internet Marketing

Zika and the Mentality of Control

In a Rhino, Everything

Grief and Carbon Reductionism

The Revolution is Love

Kind is the New Cool

What We Do to Nature, We Do to Ourselves

From Nonviolence to Service

An Experiment in Gift Economics

Misogyny and the Healing of the Masculine

Sustainable Development: Something New or More of the Same?

The Need for Venture Science

The EcoSexual Awakening

“Don’t Owe. Won’t Pay.”

Harder to Hide

Reflections on Damanhur

On Immigration

The Humbler Realms, Part 2

The Humbler Realms

A Shift in Values Everywhere

Letter to my Younger Self

Aluna: A Message to Little Brother

Raising My Children in Trust

Qualitative Dimensions of Collective Intelligence: Subjectivity, Consciousness, and Soul

The Woman Who Chose to Plant Corn

The Oceans are Not Worth $24 trillion

The Baby in the Playpen

What Are We Greedy For?

We Need Regenerative Farming, Not Geoengineering

The Cynic and the Boatbuilder, Revisited

Activism in the New Story

What is Action?

Wasting Time

The Space Between Stories

Breakdown, Chaos, and Emergence

At This Moment, I Feel Held

A Roundabout Endorsement

Imagine a 3-D World

Presentation to Uplift Festival, 12.14.2014

Shadow, Ritual, and Relationship in the Gift

A Neat Inversion

The Waters of Heterodoxy

Employment in Gift Culture

Localization Beyond Economics

Discipline on the Bus

We Don’t Know: Reflections on the New Story Summit

A Miracle in Scientific American

More Talk?

Why Another Conference?

A Truncated Interview on Racism

A Beautiful World of Abundance

How to Bore the Children

Post-Capitalism

The Malware

The End of War

The Birds are Sad

A Slice of Humble Pie

Bending Reality: But who is the Bender?

The Mysterious Paths by Which Intentions Bear Fruit

The Little Things that Get Under My Skin

A Restorative Response to MH17

Climate Change: The Bigger Picture

Development in the Ecological Age

The campaign against Drax aims to reveal the perverse effects of biofuels

Gateway drug, to what?

Concern about Overpopulation is a Red Herring; Consumption’s the Problem

Imperialism and Ceremony in Bali

Let’s be Honest: Real Sustainability may not make Business Sense

Vivienne Westwood is Right: We Need a Law against Ecocide

2013: Hope or Despair?

2013: A Year that Pierced Me

Synchronicity, Myth, and the New World Order

Fear of a Living Planet

Pyramid Schemes and the Monetization of Everything

The Next Step for Digital Currency

The Cycle of Terror

TED: A Choice Point

The Cynic and the Boatbuilder

Latent Healing

2013: The Space between Stories

We Are Unlimited Potential: A Talk with Joseph Chilton Pearce

Why Occupy’s plan to cancel consumer debts is money well spent

Genetically Modifying and Patenting Seeds isn’t the Answer

The Lovely Lady from Nestle

An Alien at the Tech Conference

We Can’t Grow Ourselves out of Debt

Money and the Divine Masculine

Naivete, and the Light in their Eyes

The Healing of Congo

Why Rio +20 Failed

Permaculture and the Myth of Scarcity

For Facebook, A Modest Proposal

A Coal Pile in the Ballroom

A Review of Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years

Gift Economics Resurgent

The Way up is Down

Sacred Economics: Money, the Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition

Design and Strategy Principles for Local Currency

The Lost Marble

To Bear Witness and to Speak the Truth

Thrive: The Story is Wrong but the Spirit is Right

Occupy Wall Street: No Demand is Big Enough

Elephants: Please Don’t Go

Why the Age of the Guru is Over

Gift Economics and Reunion in the Digital Age

A Circle of Gifts

The Three Seeds

Truth and Magic in the Third Dimension

Rituals for Lover Earth

Money and the Turning of the Age

A Gathering of the Tribe

The Sojourn of Science

Wood, Metal, and the Story of the World

A World-Creating Matrix of Truth

Waiting on the Big One

In the Miracle

Money and the Crisis of Civilization

Reuniting the Self: Autoimmunity, Obesity, and the Ecology of Health

Invisible Paths

Reuniting the Self: Autoimmunity, Obesity, and the Ecology of Health (Part 2)

Mutiny of the Soul

The Age of Water

Money: A New Beginning (Part 2)

Money: A New Beginning (Part 1)

The Original Religion

Pain: A Call for Attention

The Miracle of Self-Creation, Part 2

The Miracle of Self-Creation

The Deschooling Convivium

The Testicular Age

The Ubiquitous Matrix of Lies

You’re Bad!

A 28-year Lie: The Wrong Lesson

The Ascent of Humanity

The Stars are Shining for Her

All Hallows’ Eve

Confessions of a Hypocrite

The New Epidemics

From Opinion to Belief to Knowing

Soul Families

For Whom was that Bird Singing?

The Multicellular Metahuman

Grades: A Gun to Your Head

Human Nature Denied

The Great Robbery

Humanity Grows Up

Don’t Should on US

A State of Belief is a State of Being

Ascension

Security and Fate

Old-Fashioned, Healthy, Lacto-Fermented Soft Drinks: The Real “Real Thing”

The Ethics of Eating Meat

Privacy Policy | Contact

Charles Eisenstein

All content on this website is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Feel free to copy and share.

Celo: 0x755582C923dB215d9eF7C4Ad3E03D29B2569ABb6

Litecoin: ltc1qqtvtkl3h7mchy7m5jwpvqvt5uzka0yj3nffavu

Bitcoin: bc1q2a2czwhf4sgyx9f9ttf3c4ndt03eyh3uymjgzl

Dogecoin: DT9ECVrg9mPFADhN375WL9ULzcUZo8YEpN

Polkadot: 15s6NSM75Kw6eMLoxm2u8qqbgQFYMnoYhvV1w1SaF9hwVpM4

Polygon: 0xEBF0120A88Ec0058578e2D37C9fFdDc28f3673A6

Zcash: t1PUmhaoYTHJAk1yxmgpfEp27Uk4GHKqRig

Donate & Support

As much as possible I offer my work as a gift. I put it online without a pay wall of any kind. Online course contributions are self-determined at the time you register for each. I also keep the site clean of advertising.

This means I rely on voluntary financial support for my livelihood. You may make a recurring gift or one-time donation using the form below, in whatever amount feels good to you. If your finances are tight at all, please do not give money. Visit our contact page instead for other ways to support this work.

Recurring Donations

Note from the team: Your recurring donation is a resource that allows us to keep Charles doing the work we all want him doing: thinking, speaking, writing, rather than worrying about the business details. Charles and all of us greatly appreciate them!

One-Time Donation

Your gift helps us maintain the site, offer tech support, and run programs and events by donation, with no ads, sales pitches, or pay walls. Just as important, it communicates to us that this work is gratefully received. Thank you!

Cryptocurrency Donation

Hi, here we are in the alternate universe of cryptocurrency. Click the link below for a list of public keys. If your preferred coin isn't listed, write to us through the contact form.

View Keys



What kind of donation are you making?(Required)


Recurring Donation

We are currently accepting monthly recurring donations through PayPal; we use PayPal because it allows you to cancel or modify your recurring donation at any time without needing to contact us.


Choose what feels good, clear, and right.

One-Time Donation

We are currently accepting one-time donations with any major credit card or through PayPal.


Choose what feels good, clear, and right.
Donation Method(Required)

Name(Required)
Email(Required)