TWO YEARS AGO TODAY: ((because i fucking miss this kid))

HRIR Statement of Purpose, Phil Schrader, 2005

"Human beings are creative, innovative, purposeful beings. They mix their labor with the material world around them in a reciprocal process of development. That is to say, they not only make and do things, but, in the process, they create themselves. Satisfaction in one's labor is a vital component of a happy, fulfilling life. When a person has the opportunity to freely and willingly pour her energy into her work, that person has the opportunity to discover a meaningful relationship with the world around her. When a person is robbed of that opportunity, when she is forced to work in a process which gives her no voice and no opportunity to employ her purposeful mind along with their body, then her growth as a person is stunted, her work becomes toil, and she toils simply to acquire the means to live, to return, and to toil another day.
"Higher wages are not a panacea for the frustrations of work. Human beings do not create simply for material wealth. We create even in the absence of compulsion. We create because we find something quenching and satisfying in the process. If, by some bit of luck, magic or divine act, all of humanity woke up tomorrow to discover that all of our physical needs were met for the foreseeable future, would we fall into a general condition of idleness? No. Beyond the physical needs of water, food, shelter, etc., there is a human need to engage the world, to do something meaningful with one's life and, in the process, to find out who we are.
"I see so many people who are frustrated with their jobs, not because they are lazy or because they are don't care. What strikes me is how much people do care about their work. How we endlessly talk about who did what at work and how everybody has a plan for making this or that process function better-- if only somebody would listen. I am convinced of the overwhelming importance of the relationships between people and their work and between people and their co-workers.
"My own satisfaction, as a worker and a person, will come from studying these relationships and throwing all of my talents and energy into finding more engaging, more satisfying ways of working-- ways that involve us as human beings.
"This search is of critical importance both for workers and for their organizations. In today's "flat" world, organizations will fail if they rely on the model of an executive head directing a body of workers. To be successful, organizations must find ways to utilize the ideas of all their members. In this respect, for once, the needs of workers and the needs of business are not in conflict. Both are seeking processes that engage people's creative, purposeful, innovative energy. At the end of the day, everybody wants to rest with the knowledge that they put their day's energy into something beautiful, harmonious and responsive to their touch."

((back to me)) Beautifully put. Very general about the creativity of human beings. People tend spontaneously to infuse a certain kind of 'creativity' into every kind of 'labor,' but there just seems to be too many important distinctions between the kinds of labor that we can engage in to collapse them all into one giant, undifferentiated category.

It's kind of crazy to see someone give themselves away like that on a statement of purpose for a business school application. I thought Phil would have learned his lesson after being denied enrollment at the University of Minnesota's Graduate School because under "intended major" he wrote "communism". ::sigh:: boys... I, on the other hand, would go for something less ideological... less Manifesto...