In our physical work, the job is to be competent. To do quality work at a reasonable pace, with good focus, and reliable outcomes. We know it when we see it, in general.
The work of the soul is to become brighter, more coherent, more clear, and more open. We “do” soul work every day, although often it is done poorly, and not infrequently people are trending in the wrong direction, that of bitterness, anger, futility, frustration, humorlessness and the darkness that follows all of these.
But qualitative growth is possible and the core REASON we are alive. It is the meaning of life, if one wants to use that phrase. But it is a FEELING of meaning. This is what we want. It is neither necessary nor in most cases even desirable to explain it, any more than it is good to wonder why you feel good, or why a joke is funny. Just let it be.
And if one asks “how do you GET the feeling that life has meaning?” the answer is you don’t. Life well, and it alights on you like a butterfly. It may not stay there, but as time goes on, you see it more and more.
At root, the core problem of modernity is that our philosophers and scientists–I will note the latter often mistake themselves for the former–have lost this sense that “being” per se can be qualitative, and that it can be improved at the individual level.
At its root, Socialism is nothing other than the INEVITABLE emergence of a morality rooted in the abstraction of “society” made necessary by our innate moral sense–the moral sense of materialists who are also philosophical pessimists in most ways that matter–combined with an intellectual incapacity to figure out how to pursue it at the individual level. They have to pursue social morality when they cannot make sense of individual morality.
And self evidently social morality is a convenient hiding place for the dissolute and awful people of the world. Cheating and horrendous behavior come naturally to most people attracted to the Democrat faith. It is a church which both admits everyone, and demands nothing other than obedience to its POLITICAL creed, and at that to the words and ritual behavior, not to anything concrete that could ever be seen in the physical world, which is to say not to outcomes, and not to the alleviation of suffering, or even the AWARENESS of suffering. It is enough to brag, to preen, to posture, and to gloat.