The Warehouse Worker Who Became a Philosopher - The Atlantic - 0 views
-
leven years ago, Stephen West was stocking groceries at a Safeway warehouse in Seattle. He was 24, and had been working to support himself since dropping out of high school at 16. Homeless at times, he had mainly grown up in group homes and foster-care programs up and down the West Coast after being taken away from his family at 9. He learned to find solace in books.
-
He would tell himself to be grateful for the work: “It’s manual, physical labor, but it’s better than 99.9 percent of jobs that have ever existed in human history.” By the time most kids have graduated from college, he had consumed “the entire Western canon of philosophy.”
-
A notable advantage of packing boxes in a warehouse all day is that rote, solitary work can be accomplished with headphones on. “I would just queue up audio books and listen and pause and think about it and contextualize as much as I could,” he told me. “I was at work for eight hours a day. Seven hours of it would be spent reading philosophy, listening to philosophy; a couple hours interpreting it, just thinking about it. In the last hour of the day, I’d turn on a podcast.”
- ...11 more annotations...