Wise Words? Worthy Work

 In the tradition of life on earth, no one exists without sacrifice.

Animals, for all the beauty truth and purity that the help bring into the world, certainly live very challenging lives. Each waking moment is a search, a quest for the next essential item. Everything in the world around them is either a resource or a competitor. Earth itself is only so large as what they can interact with and what visibly impacts them.

Despite all our attempts to separate ourselves from the animal world, with clothes cars and capitalism all presenting a stark contrast to the utilitarian harmony of nature, human beings for the most part still live under these same conditions. There may be more abstractions and middle men between ourselves and our basic needs, but really most adults wake up in the morning and go to work not because they feel any sort of purpose in the work they do or the people they interact with, but because it pays money; and money is the catalyst for all the cheap convenient crap capitalism proudly waves above its head as "human progress" as well as the same physical demands that spur all of the animal kingdom into action. 

Now this is not to say that every single human being hates their job. I have talked to people who enjoy what they do every day I know they exist, however a poll from Gartner claims that of the people they surveyed only 13 percent claimed they enjoyed their job and 46 percent were able to admit openly that they did not like their job (link). Considering how much of our lives we spend working this severe spread of unhappiness must be taken seriously. Clearly adults are working too much, and often at something which does not fulfill them.

Even children are not exempt from these sorts of responsibilities. From 4th grade onward I was aware of which jobs made more money, which classes in school led to more profitable jobs (these were always very rigid subjects with very binary criterion for correctness such as math and some sciences but not even the fun ones), and which students in my class were doing the best in which subjects. We even had leader boards for who could complete multiplication tables the fastest. This intense focus on STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) classes has I led to a pervasive attitude that there is only one kind of intelligence: the ability to critically problem solve an abstract problem using memorized techniques and information. Any other kind of intelligence besides that: from the unique abilities required to work with your hands on machinery or the ability to bring an artistic vision to reality through the challenges of a chosen medium, are skills which are seen as secondary and not worth cultivating in public education. I went to a high school with no shop class where art classes were openly regarded as a joke, and though that may not reflect every high school it had a profound effect on the career decisions people made at this one. I can say personally that I had no business going into an intense STEM field and I now find myself trying to fill the gaps in a writing education in my spare time and it is not easy. Its my belief that the narrow range of classes which are encouraged at schools has led to a job market flooded with people who are not interested in what they're doing and only want to work as little as they can without being fired.

So why are humans waking up to go to jobs they hate and why are we continually forcing kids away from things like art music and physical activity and squeezing them in a box to perform extremely difficult subjects using deliberately antiquated methods? (all of my programming tests were on paper and pencil)

I'm so fucking glad you asked. 

The simple answer is fear

Fear is a remarkably powerful emotion. It could actually be argued that it is the most powerful emotion, even above love. After all, plenty of good relationships be they friendly or romantic comes to a sudden and unexpected halt because one party does not understand some aspect of the others life and fear of that unknown makes trust hard to come by.

I already discussed above how fear is related to the common struggle of the every day working human. They wake up and go to work not because their job is meaningful but because they need the money. They are not amassing wealth in a way which best fits their skills and aptitudes, they are jumping through hoops to ensure that they have food to eat and a place to sleep. 

So what has caused our society to motivate people through fear like this? Well I dont claim to know anything, but based on my personal experience it seems quite likely that the fear of the working human travels further up the food chain than some would let on or admit. To test this theory or to see if there may be some other solution, lets look at why these jobs could exist outside of them being fulfilling for people.

The obvious if optimistic answer is that they perform some important function. And while that may be true for certain jobs which have been getting harder and harder to perform as the coronavirus pandemic combined with and exacerbated by the misinformation pandemic cripples essential jobs such as doctors and nurses, it doesn't account for the whole picture. To use my own personal experience again, I have been working pretty steadily since the age of 14 and I am now in my early 20s, and I have yet to find a job which is essential or meaningful to me. And trust me, whether I was a caddy or a bus boy or a programmer, I knew the world would not stop and no people would suffer if I didn't go into work that day. So why do these jobs which I and many others work exist? Jobs outside of meaning or true function?

Well based on the amount of them I worked, I would have to say it was for one reason. To make someone else money, often someone who demonstrated in the time I worked for them clear ineptitudes in several functions core to their job. I worked for a caddy master who was terribly rude to both employees and members, struggled to talk to restaurant managers who were terrible at communicating to people, listened to business analysts explain to me a user interface design I knew was unintutive or insanely difficult to achieve on a programming level relative to the functionality it achieved, the list goes on.

The question for me, then and now, is why these people? What makes them different from others who show more qualifications and aptitudes who are passed over for the same positions and promotions? 

Well, simply put, other people are less afraid of them for one reason or another. Someone in job of hiring looks at them and sees something which puts them at ease that this person can be trusted, often on a level which is more personal than professional. Some of these decisions can be made on the basis of race, skin color, or gender which are the obviously appalling decision making factors people are trying to deempahsize now but I would argue that the problem goes further than that. I think in many ways the college degree has come to stand not as proof that someone has a bedrock of skill in a field or even that they're able to set a goal and work for it, but that they are willing to absorb content they know is meaningless and at least create the illusion to those around them that they understand this material. That this is a person who is willing to play by the rules and not say anything too smart when they're surrounded by people who obviously could not care less about the job they're being paid to do. 

So where does it end? How do we stop this problem if you're willing to agree with me that it exists? Well I think the answer is remarkably simple and we can achieve it without really turning away from the benefits of the pop culture we live in. I think a lot of these problems would be solved if we treated housing and food like the universal human rights that they are. Its the fact that having a job determined who can eat and who can't that motivates people into this fear based thinking, so maybe if we didn't need to work to eat we could eat first and then think about what we want to do. Because the last point I'll make, why I think this is all so important, is because I have never witnessed good work being done by someone who did not enjoy their job. We focus so much when we talk about reducing the impact of capitalism on our planet on removing things people really like and really treasure like travel and goods but we dont stop to think at all about how much less cluttered our planet could be if we simply cut out all the middle men and set them free to do as they pleased. Even if thats just drink beer and watch tv at least they're not gonna be holding others down like they are now. 

TLDR, this shit shouldn't have to be so hard. We've created a productive society, now lets see if we can actually create an effective one. 

Dont let the man tell you what to do,

Sam