chớ lặng bước vào màn đêm tĩnh mịch, cuồng nộ, cuồng nộ lên trước tia sáng sắp tàn. - Alan Watts

The difference between having a job and having a vocation is that a job is some unpleasant work you do in order to make money, with the sole purpose of making money. There are plenty of jobs because there is still a certain amount of dirty work that nobody wants to do, and that therefore they will pay someone to do it. There is essentially less and less of that kind of work because of mechanization. If you do a job with the sole purpose of making money, you are absurd, because if money becomes the goal–and it does if you work that way–you begin increasingly to confuse it with happiness or with pleasure. Yes, one can take a handful of crisp one dollar bills and practically water your mouth over it, but this is a kind of person who is confused like a Pavlov dog, who salivates on the wrong bell.

Consider the difference between the two types of globemaps of planet Earth, the physical and the political. The first is a marvelous wiggly affair, blue, green, brown, yellow, and occasionally white. The second, especially on the North American continent, is angrily scratched across with straight lines, and the one earth (and we should not forget the one air) covered with patches of contrasting colors to identify the domains of differing bands of gangsters. Which of the two more closely resembles Earth as seen from outer space?

No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living fully now.