No burdens can bow us down

Marx wrote: "If we chose to work for all mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all."

To what degree do your religious/spiritual/philosophical beliefs cause you to think that this ideal is a necessary element of a 'life well lived'?

Originally posted by @fmf
Marx wrote: "If we chose to work for all mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all."

To what degree do your religious/spiritual/philosophical beliefs cause you to think that this ideal is a necessary element of a 'life well lived'?

I feel the rest of the sentence and indeed many of the rest of his writings are needed to understand this sentiment from his perspective.

"....then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people.”

Marx appears to me (although I'm by no means an expert) to be a man of arts, of personal career and of high ideological values. However I sense that his writings are laced with the same machichositc righteousness, that ill-adopted mood of inwardness that plagued the self-flagellating monks, who also sat in a sort of cloistered gloomy denial of self-fulfilment.

Having said that, we have become a generation of self-serving miscreants aspiring to altruism but lacking the true desire to execute it, holding a form of religion but denying the power of it.

That is all I have to say about that...

Originally posted by @fmf
Marx wrote: "If we chose to work for all mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all."

To what degree do your religious/spiritual/philosophical beliefs cause you to think that this ideal is a necessary element of a 'life well lived'?

For me yes. It's not about what is best for all, I just believe

leave things better than I found them. It feels right.

Originally posted by @fmf
Marx wrote: "If we chose to work for all mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all."

To what degree do your religious/spiritual/philosophical beliefs cause you to think that this ideal is a necessary element of a 'life well lived'?

Marx also wrote, 'One morning I shot an elephant in my pyjamas. How he got into my pyjamas I'll never know.'

(May have been Groucho).