To me, that’s part of it – the reliance on an unspoken safety net provided by dedicating yourself to a company, trade or profession (as you say) means you can relax just a little bit, you know that you ought to be taken care of . You start to realize how hard life is, and how much effort is required, when you understand that those safety nets are illusory.
Cracked's editor: World events driven by our laughably huge underestimation of effort for everything
The concept of karma is not original to Buddhism. It comes from Hinduism.
But if you believe that people deserve everything that happens to them, then the ones who are prey must have done something to deserve it. You just have to figure out what it was that they did, and not do that. Then you don’t need to help the prey, or have compassion for them- you just need to not do what they did that made them prey. It’s even better if you can blame their condition on something you have no desire to do, because then you can tell yourself it’s easy to avoid making the mistake they made.
Of course, it’s not true. But that doesn’t stop people from believing things. Nor does it mean that believing it won’t make you feel good.
Effort doesn’t necessarily mean anything either, though. The idea that there is any necessary correlation between hard work and reward is completely false. People who do the most backbreaking work usually reap the most paltry rewards. Do you think a tomato picker works less hard than some douchebag executive who’s married to the daughter of the CEO?
It’s obviously what we call “necessary but not sufficient” for most of the population of the earth.
Disclaimer: I say that knowing it doesn’t apply to me. I’m a slacker and a sponge who’s worked for a living for exactly three years out of my 43 1/2 on this earth, and hated it and myself every minute. So my viewpoint may be affected by thos.
Really? No correlation at all, and rewards are distributed completely randomly? Statistically speaking, there’d be an r-squared of 0 between “effort” and “reward”? That’s an interesting generalization.
ETA: I think the trouble is that you’re comparing apples and oranges. Say that Jose and Pedro are both tomato pickers. Jose really puts his back into it and collects 50 tomatoes per hour, while Pedro takes frequent breaks and collects only 30 tomatoes per hour. Regardless of the douchebag who married the CEO’s daughter, between Jose and Pedro, surely one can generally count on getting more reward than the other?
If you’re interested in the douchebag world, you can compare (say) Robert Nardelli with Jack Welch, if you want to. Fair or not, the nature of the work they do is completely different.
Aside from the issue of reincarnation, Buddhism generally doesn't say that if you work hard good things will happen to you in this world. Its focus is on the mind. What Buddhism might say is that if you learn to control your mind you will become happier and in my experience at least this is generally true.I didn’t say that. Read what I actually did say. I said there is no NECESSARY correlation. No guarantees. Hard work does not ensure anything. I don’t even think it significantly inreseases the odds. Corporate execs make hundreds of times the wages of tomato pickers, and they sure as hell don’t work hundreds of times as hard. Most of them don’t work at all. We do not live in a mertitocracy, we live in a plutocracy and a corporate feudal system.
Ah . . . so you’d say, maybe, “something has corrupted the system and kept me from getting what I deserve, and that something must be [the corporate feudal system]?” 
No. I’m saying that meritocracy is impossible, utopian bullshit. The problem isn’t that anything is preventing or “corrupting” some natural order, but the delusion that they are living in a world with natural laws that don’t exist.
Eh, in practice that’s exactly what it says, IME. I’ve never yet met a practicing lay Buddhist in East Asia who acknowledges the goal of nirvana. For them, it’s all about doing meritorious deeds to get more “luck.”
But if you believe that everything is random chance and nothing you do matters, what’s the point of doing anything? Why even try?
Well good things may happen in your next life; this is not refutable one way or another. In any case I am talking about the core teachings as expressed in texts like the Dhammapada. Lay Buddhists may have their own interpretation just as lay Christians may believe that Jesus will make them rich.
What would be the point of NOT doing anything? Why does doing anything have to have a point?
I didn’t say everything was random chance, by the way. I said there were no guarantees.
This is like interpreting evolution as “random chance” (which is redundant!). I don’t think Cynic implied this. And if I’m the one misinterpreting that and he does indeed think that everything is random, he’s already explained that he didn’t say there wasn’t any correlation between effort and results; he said that there wasn’t a necessary correlation.
It was Pedro who married the boss’s daughter. Guess who ends up with more stuff?
That seems a bit redundant as well: statistically speaking, either there’s a correlation or there’s not. Sure, in an individual case there’s no guarantee that input x will yield output y, any more that there’s a guarantee that after flipping a coin “heads” three times in a row, the next flip will yield “tails.” But it’s unreasonable to call all of coin-tossing probability “bullshit” because it offers no guarantee in this individual case. :dubious: That’s not what probability – or correlation – means.
But the myth is that there IS a guarantee. The American work ethic presumes that reward is exactly proportional to effort. That is seldom the case.
She didn’t mention probability. She called it “random chance” and seemed to imply that it was completely random. Yes, effort might yield results in this specific case or that specific case. Cynic’s statement is that when you look at the entire picture, however, those at the top are often the ones putting in the least effort while those at the bottom are struggling and putting in the most effort. In fact, that does indeed suggest a correlation. A correlation precisely reverse of what most people assume to be true.
Don’t see anything about a “myth” of a “guarantee” here, just a misuse of statistical terms. Maybe you should read what you actually did say. 
:rolleyes: