About two months ago I began looking for new volunteer jobs. I wanted positions that would offer a personal challenge as well as being socially useful. I find my semi-retirement to be somewhat boring, a first-world problem I know, but one which requires a solution. Golf, lawn bowls or card games are not that solution. So I have been searching volunteer sites and from the hundreds of jobs that I looked at, two popped out at me.

At the present I am in the beginning phase, getting to know the ropes, being mentored and discovering how I might harness those talents that I have to best effect. I applied for a research job with a radio station that offers a reading service to those people who cannot access printed material, such as newspapers, magazines and so forth. I have also successfully auditioned for a reader position at the same place which I think is an exciting prospect.

My other volunteer position is with a maritime museum in Darling Harbour, ostensibly as a guide on board their floating display. There is a steep learning curve as the details about each vessel need to be studied. I will also need to develop my own patter, which should not be too difficult.

Lately also I have been reading Karl Marx. No I am not a Marxist but, since Marx is still relevant in many academic circles (he seems to be a lens for viewing social structures and conditions), I wanted to become more familiar with his theory. Not being an economist either, I find a lot of material hard-going and dry, but push on, I do.

One aspect that I find compelling is Marx's take on alienation. He argued that the modern worker, set as he or she is in a workplace in which he is merely a wage earner, divorced by the intrinsic processes of his work from the product he is making, becomes alienated from his job. It becomes mere drudgery, eight or more hours a day.

I was lucky enough to have a job as a teacher that engaged me intellectually and socially. Moreover, it had a noble purpose. But so many jobs lack that kind of motivating raison d'etre and are essentially just a pay packet. I am thinking especially of white collar jobs - people stuck in offices and cubicles, selling products or entering data or maybe doing very little at all. And blue collar ones where people clean up after others. And what for, I wonder? To make the money to pay the bills and consume products? To visit the shopping cathedrals and come face to face with the alienated, bored workers on the other side of the counter?