George Orwell’s 1984 - Mindless People :: 1984 Essays

Occupations are important in order to be successful in life. One needs a source of income and a way to provide for one’s families. Some people work at home, some people have a schedule when one leaves at a certain time each day and return home at the same time each night. One gets comfortable in one’s work but does one take time to ask oneself why one is doing it? If an occupation does not help society or have any real purpose then is it really a useful occupation or is it just a bunch of mindless activity? Professional athletes make an insurmountable amount of money but what is the point of professional sports? Professional sports do not help make the world a better place nor does it have a purpose other than entertainment for the sports junkies on this earth. What is the purpose of movie makers and artists? How do they make the world a better place? In some ways they make a world a worse place because people get so caught up in entertainment that they forget about th e rest of the world and the ones who suffer and the corrupt governments and the deadly diseases. Why cant jobs be created to help in those areas? Instead of paying people for doing mindless jobs, one should be paying others to actually work to make this world a better place with a better economy and without suffering people. In George Orwell’s novel 1984 it offers a great view of mindless occupations. Winston, the main character talks about how boring his work is in the Ministry of Plenty. He explains how his work is to change the words and meaning in newspapers, books, letters and any other text related materials in order to make the government and the society the best that it can be. Then once he follows his orders and completely changes history with his speakwrite, he takes the original information and dumps it down a memory hole which destroys it (Orwell 37). Everything that Winston must write has to take the form of the Newspeak language which is the English language modified, and made simpler by combining words together. For example, instead of having words such as ‘excellent’ or ‘splendid’ one would use the word plusgood or doubleplusgood if you wanted something even stronger (Orwell 51). Another example is Winston’s workplace.