Surfing with Sartre: An Aquatic Inquiry into a Life of Meaning

Incredible, easy to read. UC Irving philosophy professor and winner surfer. "Less work, more surfing!!" The Age of Service and Leisure has been growing with us for the last 50 years James great solution --the 20-hour work week. His favorite arguments --the moral argument of the Climate Change pending disaster --we need to commute to work less, ie, pollutes less with leisure time activity like surfing or reading (biking to your nearest surf spot). If you are not a Californian --I pity you anyway --just choose an obsession that pollutes less than your current 40 hour job. Shift to the 20-hour week doesn't require the Swamp to do anything.Gridlock can continue until someone said --change requires coffins. The 20-hour work week can be between you and your boss. It will spread in a trial-and-error fashion, we will experiment with it. Each individual, each job considered special. Pay or compensation greatly varying too. Many of today's remaining blue and white collar jobs can lose the wasteful fat and with greater effort performed in just a 20-hour work week. Some jobs the boss may consider important enough to be don e in a 20 hour work week but still with the salary of the previous 40-hour week. If some work is constantly needed --hire another 20-hour person to keep that work going. Trial and error --lets see how much dwindling work we have here --that automation and off-shoring doesn't continually eliminate.Aside --just as legislative or presidential actions can be view as experiments with the past. Not mandatory or coercive --the ambitious, our good workaholics --while perhaps driving fossil fuel engines less simply permit one more surfer to work a zero work hour week.As reason or justification for the coming 20-hour work week idea --for rich America to now continue to yield development to the rest of the world of incredible poverty. Off-shoring, and their own econ development has lifted two billion world humans from incredibly wretched poverty, in the last 40 years --while American employment has been going down.Another serious moral imperative for us --to replace The Industrial Revolution's dear old Protestant Work Ethic. Everyone will come up with their own reason to work less hours, enjoy more leisure hours --or hours away from their initial work. We aren't going to create working jobs as fast as we get rid of them. No more Industrial Age initial surge for us. The Industrial Age has made us wealthy. And the necessary natural resources are dwindling. Just as each generations poor have assumed the previous luxury of the rich --the rest of the world is now going to bring themselves up to their Age of Leisure and Service just as we now enjoy. Less work, for those that want less. STEM and others probably don't want less work --a few probably want want more --more disposable income, more job results --medical doctors, Wall Street Wannnabes.lJames does deal with other philosophical Existential problems. Many, let me say, focused around Authority. The surfing communities James has played with and studied. And John Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Hobbs, Rousseau. Voltaire, Marcus Aurelius and many others.I think this is great reading today.

Aaron James has captured the phenomenical aspects surfing and suggests how the surfer mentality provides a model for living life in the moment. This great read is fascinating for surfers and life hackers alike. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y3aGjFfXSY][ASIN:0385540736 Surfing with Sartre: An Aquatic Inquiry into a Life of Meaning]

Liked the depth, breadth and apparent frivolity of the read.

This book is a keeper, it's deep yet refreshing. It will make you think about life, what you do with it, how to work, be happy, live as a society and keep this planet for generations to come.Quite a program for something which is still very fun to read. It makes you want to join philosophy classes.If there was a 6th star, I'd have given it hands down.

I thought I would love this - watersports & existentialism or philosophy in general. I'm rather a seakayaker than a surfer but thought this would nicely combine my interest in both areas nevertheless. Helas, analogies seem farfetched, ideas few and far in between (this might have rather been a quirky article that has been stretched into a book).If the book seems very light if not shallow in terms of philosophy, I would nevertheless happily read on for beautiful descriptions of surfing/water (which I expected here) but unfortunately other than technical descriptions there is very little to convey the beauty of the sport, of water. (In terms of writing Woolf's, Murdoch's descriptions are far superior without being surfers, or MacFarlane's nature writing). Everything seems to be 'stoked' a word that annoyingly appears on every page.So shallow ripples only, both in terms of the limited vocab range and shallow philosophy, a shame.