We have a similar 2 km private road leading to our summer cottage, and every time I've had a change I've volunteered to rake back the gravel pushed from the trails. Nobody seems to understand that I enjoy the hard physical work, being outside in springtime (sunny or cloudy, I don't care) and saving some money because I've calculated my work compensates the need of buying about a ton or two of new gravel. As a fan of large open spaces I especially like the apparent endlessness of a 400 m stretch through a large field, watching the pewits flying around me making their weird robot like noises. The long straight road most would find discouraging makes me forget the time in an enjoyable way.

The main reason I enjoy working in summer cottage is that it gives me an experience of being rooted in a Heideggerian sense. One enjoys working for something that is his "own" or something he considers his "home".

However, regardless of how we wanted to think, nobody can love everybody or everything. Actually you can't love something you don't have. The object of love must exist for the act of love to exist in a meaningful sense. Many people refute this thought because they find it exclusive and somehow unfair.

Without something "own" there is no "me" either. I believe the psychological and philosophical pondering of life's basic meanings stem from this. We ask, what is the use of life. Why should we live? What is the deepest meaning of it all?

If you have built yourself a garden, you don't need to think about its usefulness, you probably have hard time keeping out of it and not tending it all the time.

The question of use or meaning of living rises only when you're either so uprooted you don't consider anything your own and something you work for only for loving it, or because your philosophizing happens in a hypothetical void where persons (or even called as "agents") don't have anything personal they're attached to.

Somewhere in his later books Nietzsche writes that the North European tendency for dark and pompous philosophies is probably caused by the cloudy weather and eating too much potatoes (carbohydrates make you tired and depressed.)

Similarly apparently a deep question of meaning of life might be irrelevant without a lifestyle that alienates people in a very concrete and everyday sense. Lifestyle that is based of people seeing themselves as "human beings" - somehow otherworldly entities whose personal details, histories, and relationships are only something contingent, basically unimportant or even something that prevents us from seeing each other "brothers".

Besides draining all meaning from our thoughts it makes us chronically unhappy because it makes us think we have a choice over things that we don't. I'm bald. If I had a change, I wouldn't be, but I don't. Regardless of the ingenuity of my thinking I'd have zero or negative utility of pondering of my life with head full of hair.

I've always preferred places over people, but I think this has even changed my attitude towards my parents. I don't think it is of any use to think if they've been good or bad because they're the only parents I will ever have. I could never adopt new and better parents anyway. The same goes with all the people I've known. I can't change a history so it is useless to even think of whether they were good or bad. They existed and that's it. Of course I can think of what I should do to people I coexist with now but actually that is pretty easy compared to wallowing in the rights and wrongs of the past.

Lately I've spent more time with people who studied philosophy and I've noticed that I like the analytic tradition a lot less than before because I find most of its ethics abstracting off all the relevant details and then wondering about the depth and hardness of philosophical questions about "human beings" and "the life" stripped of everything accidental.

I don't actually know if I came up with these thoughts while working with shovel and iron rake but I'd like to think so because it makes a better story.