I’ve been economically obsessed lately- reading too much economic news, having too many conversations with people about economic life, scrutinizing too carefully my own finances. This year-long thrust to buy a house, which is getting more serious by the day, has got my brain so wrapped up in money that I don’t have much mental room for anything else.
Right at the point where your job is looking like it’s going to become a career, especially if that point coincides with your late twenties, everyone thinks it’s a prudent question to ask whether you’re happy about this. What a stupid question, as if happiness is an intrinsic part of employment, and you have to discover this intrinsic part if you want to have any of it. Jobs, especially wage jobs, are designed with one purpose in mind: to make money for your employers or share holders. That’s their sole purpose. Your happiness doesn’t matter one bit, except to the degree that you register enough of it to continue doing the job and to continue generating the profit for your employers or share holders.
Even if your job also accomplishes another goal, such as building a bridge or engineering a network or serving a meal to someone, that is always the least important part. If there was a way to generate the profit of the service without actually performing the service, most every employer would get rid of the service. The part of every job that is the worst is the part that is mostly closely related to making money. The part of every job that is enjoyable for the employee, or even for the boss or share holder, is only accidentally so, when viewed from its design purpose. Only if you are perverse enough to enjoy profit-making, the true functionality of what you do for a living, do you enjoy your job as such. If you enjoy anything else, you are enjoying a delusion.
Even jobs that appear to be the exception to this rule, that all jobs are for creating profits, obey the second rule: the worst part of every job is the part connected to making money. In public primary schools, the worst part is testing (any teacher will tell you this), which is the back door implementation of a market pressure on both students and teachers. The viability of a school is based on its test scores. If you replace “test scores” with “sales figures” or “quarterlies” in that sentence, the situation becomes clear. In college and university teaching, the worst part is constantly reapplying for your job every year or semester or quarter- this is a sales pitch wherein you justify your value in the market. As in primary schools, if the part you enjoy is the actual teaching, you will see nothing but structural impediments to ever doing this: advising, testing, grading, preparing for observations from department heads, getting published, etc. God help you if the part you enjoy is your research. Similarly, if the part of construction you enjoy is actually building things, you will find nothing but structural impediments to doing this: filling out daily reports, performing cost analysis, holding safety meetings, negotiating contracts, estimating, etc. In both cases, the more of these economic activities you engage in and the more adeptly you perform them, the more successful you will be- i.e. the less of the task of teaching or building you do, the better you are at your “job”, which has nothing at all to do with teaching any students or building any structures.
From now on, I will refuse to have any discussions with people about whether I’m happy doing my job unless they understand this fact.
4 comments:
absolutely agreed. i've not yet met a person who is 'happy' in his job whether it be a chosen profession or simply the way to earn enough dough to support your obsessions.
my friends are rather tired of me explaining why i think there are simply no careers but just jobs. that everyone hates their jobs to some degree.
could go more into that but i think you've hit the nail on the head.
maybe I object only to semantics, but to me it seems that estimating a jobs worth based on its enjoyment is sort of missing the point. equally so is estimating a job's worth based on its potential for material reward--which I think we agree about.
In my experience, and in my reading about eudaimonia, enjoyment, happiness, etc. are correlated far more meaningfully with the "how" and not the "what". obviously, examples of this abound--unhappy artists, incredibly happy office workers. I would argue that anyone who calls themselves happy while conducting their lives around their job--as most of us do-- is that way because of how well they feel they are expressing their "them-ness"and not because of any reward system that is particularly fulfilling.
substituting "enjoyment" for salary, as if that is a more enlightened yet still quantitative measurement of fulfillment, is the part that misses the mark. the cause-effect reward system, while fully entrenched as our economic system, is useless as a path to eudaimonia. this do not mean that eudaimonia is impossible.
In the classic Marxist definition, there is no way to express any amount of "them-ness", or what he called species-being inside wage-labor, because the fruit of your labor is constantly being taken away from both you and your fellow worker and appropriated by a few capitalists. You can make your index anything besides happiness: dignity, purposefulness, concentration, capital will thwart it, guaranteed. The thing which you are working for is a force that is constantly tearing away from you your humanity.
The problem with this heavy-handed Marxist analysis is that, the more shitty wage jobs you have, the more true it seems.
The "how" matters less than you might think, as any way of approaching your job that is not profit-oriented gets you punished, which goes beyond merely denying you a reward. Current example: that lovely French restaurant in Oakland Jojo's is closing down. McDonald's is experiencing record profits... which of those do you think was more fun to work for.
first, you sell your happiness everytime you believe that the fruit of your labor is something to attach yourself to. as a musician, this is proved to me everyday. the music that I will hopefully be paid for is ripped from me every moment. while i can't speak expertly for other trades, I would think that this is even true for more substantial, material trades: one may build something, a monument to their labor, only to have it also ripped from them.
but I argue that there are people in these trades who are happy with what they do, for reasons unconnected to both the material reward and the "fruit of their labor". where does happiness come from then? the reward system makes mcdonalds seem like an unhappy place to work, but when you're freed from that ubiquitous reward perspective your work becomes an expression of your life-energy, in flow. what i mean is that your role as a living, breathing creature expresses itself in how you spend those breaths, and not in what those breaths earn you. flourishing is a first-person narrative, and does not require reflection--be it material, monumental, etc.--to manifest.
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