Читать книгу Meaningful Living Across the Lifespan - Moses N. Ikiugu - Страница 17

For much of human history the experience of a large majority of ordinary people was that life was often precarious, influenced by the fluctuations of war, famine, or the spread of diseases (Fernandez-Armesto, 2001). The advent of industrialization which brought people from agricultural communities to the urban centers in Europe and America often exposed people to new health risks or produced sordid living conditions in which life expectancy actually fell¹. For example, people employed to grind blades in the cutlery trade in Sheffield, United Kingdom often died from lung diseases when they were still in their twenties due to the dust that they inhaled while at work. Cholera, typhoid, and tuberculosis often resulted from people living in overcrowded, poorly maintained environments. Poor housing, diseases, as well as high female and childhood mortality rates created the impetus for the development of the nascent caring professions in the late 1800s: nursing, social work, midwifery, and, by the early 1900s, occupational therapy. Although the thesis in this book is that daily occupations, including work, leisure, and self-care can be used as sources of meaning in peoples’ lives, the argument that work is a source of meaning may be challenged given the poor conditions in which many of the workers still live today. In the 1900s, for many people, the building of cities offered different ways of surviving and defined an existence that was in contradiction to the philosophy of work. Large numbers of city inhabitants were involved in criminal activities, and an underworld culture of alternative values expressed in the language of that context developed. The resulting social differences between the mainstream culture and the underworld still remain important today (Linebaugh, 1991).