The war on work
I write a lot at Get Rich Slowly about Financial Independence, by which I essentially mean early retirement (or semi-retirement). That is, accumulating enough money that I no longer have to work. To me, escape from work has always seemed like the ultimate goal.
This is probably because my father held out retirement as a sort of Promised Land. He worked hard — if not always effectively — and he always made retirement and the end of work seem like the goal of life. And the sooner one reached retirement, the better.
But whenever I write about early retirement or Financial Independence, I get e-mail and comments from readers who never want to stop working. They love their jobs. Others write to say that we’re not supposed like the work that we do, but we’re supposed to do it anyhow. It builds character, and helps us pay the bills.
I’ve never found these arguments convincing. To me, early retirement has remained the goal.
Dirty Jobs
Last week, Eileen e-mailed a link to a video with a one-line explanation. “This video is WEIRD and COOL and speaks to many GRS ideas like working and satisfaction,” she wrote. Yesterday, I finally had a chance to watch it. This video made me pause to reconsider my notion of work:
I didn’t know what to think at first. Mike Rowe, the host of Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs and the voice of Deadliest Catch, starts by relating an anecdote about castrating lambs with his teeth. “What does this have to do with Get Rich Slowly?” I wondered — but because his story was so compelling, I kept watching for all 20 minutes, 34 seconds. Turns out there is a connection.
It takes about half the presentation for Rowe to make his point, but eventually he does. “People with dirty jobs are happier than you think,” he says. “As a group, they’re the happiest people I know.” And his work on Dirty Jobs has led him to realize that there are a lot of misconceptions about work in the United States.
Example: Rowe notes that a lot of people say that you ought to “follow your passion”, and that if you do then things will work out. But that’s not always the case. Millions of people chase their dreams but never reach them. Meanwhile, millions more do work they’re not passionate about, but which brings them fulfillment (and sometimes riches) anyhow.
We hear these messages over and over and over again so that we, too, come to believe that work is something to be fought against. It’s something to be avoided or escaped. Work has been marginalized. It’s looked down upon. In essence, there’s a war on work.
The War on Work
“We’ve declared war on work. As a society. All of us,” Rowe says. “We didn’t set out to do it […] but we’ve done it. And we’ve waged this war on at least four fronts.” The war on work is being fought:
- In Hollywood. “The way we portray working people on TV — it’s laughable,” Rowe says. “We turn them into heroes, or we turn them into punch-lines.” Television and movies don’t do a good job of making work complex and three-dimensional.
- On Madison Avenue. The central message of so many commercials is, “your life would be better if you could work a little less, if you didn’t have to work so hard, if you could get home a little earlier, if you could retire a little faster, if you could punch out a little sooner.”
- In Washington. Lawmakers use work as a political tool, exploiting our notions of work for their own gain. And the policies they implement shape the way we view work.
- In Silicon Valley. New technology changes the way we think about work, and changes the way we actually do our work. Not all of these changes are bad, Rowe says, but overall technological advancement contributes to the war on work.
“The collective effect of all of that has been this marginalization of lots and lots of jobs,” Rowe says. “Somebody needs to be out there talking about the forgotten benefits [of work].” He believes that what’s needed is a PR campaign for work.
Rowe says that the war on work has casualties, just like any other war. For one, the U.S. infrastructure is a shambles. To make matters worse, trade school enrollment is dropping fast, meaning we won’t have enough workers to rebuild that infrastructure. In order for this to change, we have to stop marginalizing work and start talking about the benefits.
The Forgotten Benefits of Work
I’m disappointed that Rowe’s presentation ends before he can explore this topic further. I’d like to know more about what he thinks are the hidden benefits of work. After thinking about it most of the day, I have a short list of my own:
- Work gives us meaning. I know plenty of people who hate their jobs. I’ve had shitty jobs too — jobs I’ve hated and wanted desperately to leave. But almost without exception, the folks I know who are happiest are those who work hard, even if they don’t have jobs they love. And those who are unhappiest? They’re the ones without jobs for one reason or another. Does the unhappiness lead to the lack of work? Or does the lack of work make people unhappy? I’m not sure, but they seem to be connected.
- Work gives us money. For most people, their career will be the single largest source of income they have in their life. Your health is your most important asset, but your career is a close second. Your career is your cash machine, which is why I stress the importance of networking and learning how to negotiate your salary. Without work, you probably don’t have the resources for anything else either.
- Work builds relationships. Again, for most people, their jobs are their primary social activity. I’m not saying this is good or bad, but it’s true. When you spend 40 hours a week with a group of people, you come to know them. In many cases, your co-workers become your friends. And work also teaches you how to build other relationships, especially through networking.
- Work builds skills. And, of course, work teaches us to do stuff. I wasn’t born knowing how to write. Sure, I learned some theoretical stuff about writing in all of the classes I’ve taken, but most of what I know (which still isn’t much) is a result of tens of thousands of hours of actual writing. By doing the work, I’ve built the skills. The same is true of any work we do.
Though I found Rowe’s presentation entertaining and thought-provoking, I don’t agree with him completely. (I rarely agree with anyone completely.) For one, I still think that you ought to follow your passions, if it’s feasible. Yes, people can get into trouble if they’re slavish to this advice, but I truly believe that work you love can be tremendously fulfilling.
Still, I may have to re-evaluate my dogged pursuit of Financial Independence. I’ve already been shifting my aim from an ideal of early retirement to one of simply semi-retirement (in which I’d continue to work in some fashion). Maybe work isn’t the enemy. Maybe there are reasons to keep doing something I love.
What do you think about work? Is it marginalized in our society? Do you think there’s a war on work? If so, what should we do about it? What sorts of benefits does work provide? Do you love your work, or do you hope to retire as soon as possible? Or both?
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There are 129 comments to "The war on work".
I ‘m not sure I agree that work has been devalued. I think we have a work ethic that encourages people to work for the sake of work, and I’ve lived that to some degree. At the same time, this idea of working hard as the savior has made us hate work. So work is supposed to be both incredibly important and full of suffering at the same time.
I think often the people with the ‘dirty’ jobs are happiest because they don’t obsess about work. In a way, the best job I had was doing manual labor for a landscaping company. If you spend the day digging ditches, you1e happy when the day is over. You feel accomplished that you did a day’s work, but then you don’t give it another thought. You think about your family, or you think about grabbing a beer from the fridge and watching the game. There’s no blackberry to check, and even if there were you wouldn’t check it.
In other words, I think if you have a blue collar job, you don’t as much of a tendency to tie your whole happiness and state of mind to what’s going with your work. And maybe that’s good.
I have never thought of work as the enemy but I do still aspire to retire someday. But for me, retirement isn’t about quitting work. It is about have the OPTION to quit work if I want to. Or go part time. Or change my work to something that pays less but that I want to try out. It is about having choices. Giving myself flexibility. No matter how much I may love my job, I may not always be able to work full time for some reason (my health, a loved one’s health, ageism etc. etc.).
I am always a little taken aback by people who say they never want to quit working. It is like they have this vision of retirement as just sitting around watching TV until you die. Don’t these people see ever wanting to do ANYTHING else in their lives? Try a new career? Go part-time so they have time to devote to a volunteer cause they are passionate about? Visit a location they have always wanted to go to and spend more than a week there?
And, as far as pursuing your passion…well, that is all well and good but I don’t think that it has to be the end all be all. I worked in advertising for 11 years. Was it my passion? Nope…in fact by the end of that portion of my career there were aspects of it that I just loathed. However, I met a lot of amazing people and got to do a lot of things that I would not have been able to do in another field. Even if you are in a field that you are passionate about there are going to be things about it that you don’t like – a co-worker or a specific task that needs to be completed. Your job is like most things in life…it is mostly what you make of it.
As with everything, I believe there is a balance that one must find. If you work in a job you hate, waiting for the end of the day, the end of the week, the vacation, and retirement, you are not living, you are surviving: You are in the future and wasting the present, which is where life is…
No matter what one does for a living, whether it is short-term or long-term, if there is life balance and attention to the present moment, one is enabled to LIVE the day, not just survive it.
I got my dream job (the one I had been dreaming of since I was a kid) when I was 23. I’ve been there ever since.
A few thoughts on it:
1) All is not always sunshine and roses, even at your dream job. Dream jobs occasionally come with crazy bosses, for example. My mum used to say “if you like 80% of your job, that’s enough. You’ll never love 100% of it”.
2) We (royal we) have set ourselves up on a strange treadmill. We spend elementary school preparing for high school, high school competing to get into a “good” university, university trying to get a “good” job when we graduate, then many of our working years trying to get to our “dream” job. What happens when you get your dream job at 23? I really found myself quite confused and lost without having something to be continually chasing after.
3) You are not your work. Even if you’re working at your dream job, you have to take time to develop yourself away from it. Building from point #2, I actually had to deliberately force myself to do things outside of work.
It was initially a confusing sell for me. So many blogs (like, for example GRS and TSD), advocate spending your time building your skills, and always striving towards the next big thing. I had to do the opposite- train myself to enjoy my free time, without any real purpose, other than enjoyment. In my case, I took up cycling, yoga, and cooking. It’s still a work in progress though.
4) It can be remarkably isolating. Your dream job is not everybody else’s dream job. When your colleagues are gathered around the water cooler complaining, it can be tough to be the one that says “actually, I kinda like it.” or “yeah, it’s kinda rough right now, but I think it’s worth it overall”. Or one of the (seemingly) few people on these blogs who DOESN’T see retirement or entrepreneurship as the ultimate goal.
5) Even people in their “dream jobs” need and appreciate time off from those jobs. One of the reasons I’ve worked so hard on sorting out our finances is so that we have choices. I appreciate my job all the more when I’m not burned out and sick of it. I buy a few extra weeks vacation every year (unpaid time, in short) so that I can come back to work rested, refreshed, and ready to go again. Meanwhile, getting our finances in order means that my husband can have the means and choices available to him to chase HIS dream job.
Sorry…I apparently have a lot to say about this topic today…
Another thing to consider is that what you are passionate about or what you consider your dream job today can change dramatically. Our lives are not static – circumstances change. I said above that my work in advertising was not my passion. However, when I graduated from college getting a job in advertising was my idea of a dream job. It was fun and exciting for awhile. Then I decided I wanted to have kids. Working in an ad agency is a grind – I routinely worked 10 – 12 hour days with a lot of stress (and don’t get me started on the issue of why people in advertising are so stressed out and pressured when they really shouldn’t be – I realize it is not medicine or some other equally important and stressful job. But the reality is that advertising is a high pressure field). I could not work those kinds of hours every week and have small children at home. So, my life changed and my idea of a dream job changed.
This is, for me, why flexibility is key. Hard to be flexible when you are tied down by financial issues…
Don’t usually nitpick the grammar and spelling on a website, but thought I’d point out something the spell checker missed:
“accumulating enough money that I know longer have to work.”
I’m pretty sure that’s supposed to be “I no longer have to work”
I believe the ultimate goal in life is not necessarily retirement, but complete control over one’s actions. For me at least, my unhappiness at work stems mostly from tasks I “have to do” while I actually enjoy the moments where I’m free to work on something I choose to do. I want to feel like I’m controlling my own destiny.
I think the view on work has shifted in the United States. I was talking to someone last week that was complaining about their job, and I know I complained plenty about my job when I was working. During our discussion, I thought about my friend’s father that worked in a steel mill. He NEVER complained about work. It was something you did, and you accepted it. It wasn’t a requirement that work emotionally and intellectually fulfilled you. It was a means to provide for your family. I think people are looking for their job to fulfill so many aspects of their life, and also provide a fantastic income. That isn’t going to happen for everyone, even when following your passion.
Financial independence doesn’t necessarily exclude work or even work for pay. It means being able to do what you want rather than what you have to do for money. In YMoYL the authors talk about how FI can make the job more pleasant because you’re more willing to take risks or do what you want because walking away isn’t a bad option anymore. That can lead to being a better worker.
I did finish a rant on following your dream career last night, but it’s queued up for our blog sometime in October. Really most people aren’t passionate enough about one thing to give up everything to do it. Some are, and some aren’t.
@Jennifer B (#6)
Oh, good grief. That’s terrible! I’m not sure how I even made that error. It always amazes me how I can make the stupidest mistakes sometimes. 🙂
Fortunately, you folks are pretty good about letting me know when I have a blatant spelling or grammar mistake. I appreciate it.
That was one of the best motivational speeches I think I’ve ever seen. Wow, Mike Rowe is a great public speaker.
My opinion is that we need to be constantly reminding ourselves that we should appreciate the jobs we have and learn to value the things that are fun about them. All jobs have aspects that are grueling and stressful, but if they are more good than bad, then that’s good enough for me.
We need to get rid of entitlement. It wasn’t that long ago when people worked until the day they died. People didn’t retire, they wore out. So, let’s work AND enjoy life at the same time. We shouldn’t wait until retirement to pursue things we enjoy.
Sometimes it’s hard to fit the fun in with a hectic life, but if scheduling it in once in a while is the only way to get it done, then it’s better than nothing.
Thanks for the great article.
What a thought-provoking post. Like some of your readers, I have thought that pursuing one’s passion as a career is the pinnacle of success (especially if you get paid well to do so). This can be a limiting belief if you start to tell yourself that you cannot be satisfied doing work that is NOT your passion. The idea of doing tough work AND being satisfied even if it’s not your passion opens up a lot of possibilities. For one thing, you could do hard work outside of your passion – AND work on your passion during non-work hours – and be very happy.
This reminds me of a time in my life when I was doing a lot of hard jobs that were DEFINITELY NOT my passion (waiting tables, painting houses, etc.) I was poor, but my time was my own, and I was very happy.
I want the freedom to not have to be in a job I don’t like. I’ve had jobs where I was frustrated, where my talents were not appreciated, where I had to wear things I hated to work and had a couple of bosses who were really verbally abusive and just bizarre, and my co-workers and I had to pretend it was normal. They were dysfunctional jobs!
I have my own business now, and I work hard.
It’s a lot of stuff I enjoy, like marketing houses and renting out properties to people.
There’s also bad parts, like having to tell people their house isn’t worth what they think it is or that they are not qualified to rent the apt they want.
My main goal is not to stop working but to have enough financial security that I will not have to take another job I hate and to keep doing what I enjoy. When I get older and wish to slow down I may downsize my business but I don’t have the goal of sitting on a tropical island somewhere doing nothing.
I think the war on work has less to do with not working and has more to do with having meaningful work.
One thing you have to ask yourself is why do we work. Let’s remove the “passion” part of the equation and look strictly at the monetary aspect. We work to live and provide for ourselves and our family. None of us wake up with the option to choose not to work unless you come from a family of wealth.
So understanding that work comes from necessity then it would seem that if we have to work, let’s atleast find work doing something we enjoy since we’re going to spend more than half our lives doing it. It’s your life and you should be chasing your dreams and your passions.
Looking at the overall state of the economy people want to work but they also want meaning and sustainability with what they do. They want to have time to spend with their family and on the activities that they enjoy while creating value to the world. And if you can find work that does that. Work that JD has created for himself like here at GRS. Then you truly don’t have to work another day in your life because you’ve found your meaning and have created value while taking care of yourself all at the same time.
I definitely fantasize about having a blue-collar job, something that I can create or change at the end of the day instead of the rather abstract consulting work that I do. I also think that I am coming from a position of privilege (read: choice) in this, in that I have the experience and education to exercise the option to not have a blue-collar job.
I really think that JD, you hit it on the head for me when you mentioned building a skill. I can absolutely build skills in my current area, but those skills are so abstract and useful to such a limited audience, there is not much inherent satisfaction. When I succeed in my current career I feel a sense of achievement.
When I do things with my hands, when I improve on a more everyday skill like cooking, writing, or sewing — skills that translate to most people, I feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment.
I think that achievement is sort-of like the pretty but hollow stepsister of accomplishment, and the idea of feeling accomplished as a result of my actual job/career is what is really enticing about what Mike Rowe is saying
What a magnificent post, JD. I think it’s absolutely true that we have waged a war on work. Some of the commenters above me made some excellent points: #8 said “He NEVER complained about work. It was something you did, and you accepted it.” And Sandy in # 11 said “We need to get rid of entitlement.”
Victor Hugo wrote in Les Miserables “Work is the law of life, and to reject it as boredom is to submit to it as torment.” As Ami says in #12, I think many of us fantasize about finding our “dream job” and let that dream turn us sour about anything that doesn’t match.
I moved to Japan 2 months ago and have encountered a completely different attitude towards work here. There is no concept of “work-life balance”; “work” takes priority, and that’s the end of it. Work is how you earn money and contribute to the community and form your identity. People have no qualms about staying until 7 or 8 o’clock. Most of the time, I think this is insane. But observing them, reading this post and listening to Mike Rowe make me wonder if perhaps I’ve got it wrong. As an American, maybe I’ve gone too far to the other extreme, expecting to do only what makes me happy.
People say my generation, the Millenials, are afflicted with a gross sense of entitlement. Maybe they’re right.
The best advice I ever got:
“Do what you are good at for a living so you can afford to do what you love”
I don’t love my job. But I am very, very good at it, and I make a very good living doing it.
That good living allows me to do the things I love.
The goal of retirement I think is too simple. The goal should be the ability and independence to do what you want, instead of doing it because you must.
Put yourself in a financial position where if you were to get laid off tomorrow, you would shrug your shoulders and move on to do something else you want to do.
Infrastructure is failing because people don’t want to work? Really? So if you wanted to repair all the bridges in the US and put out some job adverts, you wouldn’t get thousands of replies, then?
Russel Honore, Work is a Blessing: This I Believe: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101267379
Work is wonderful and fulfilling and good in so many ways. But I watch myself constantly that work does not become my life or who I am. My father did that, and he spent the last five years of his life, those years when he was no longer strong enough to work, miserable. He would walk around telling anyone who would listen how awful retirement was. The real issue was that he never had any sense of accomplishment or achievement outside of his job. As one of his seven children, I can’t tell you how heart wrenching it was that his family was not enough on its own toward the end (I’m not spending my life wounded, and I understand he probably had issues with depression, etc that drove much of his behavior, but the point remains).
My job is a good thing. But it is not my entire life nor is it my entire sense of accomplishment, achievement, or fulfillment.
Everyday Tips (@8) – good point; I agree. And I think it’s culturally expected that we complain about our work. And it’s dangerous for me to complain, or to listen to coworkers’ complaints, too much, because the complaints become self-fulfilling. I like my job better when I just try to do it well, and avoid the bitching. I also like Sandi’s comments (@11).
Nicole (@9) – I strongly agree with your last paragraph! I often feel like I’m in some defensive underclass of people, The Ones Without a Guiding Passion. The whole “follow your bliss” thing used to tie me in knots, because I couldn’t figure out what my One True Passion was. And the way the “follow your bliss” people talk, it’s like you can’t possibly be happy in life until you’ve identified your One True Passion and chased after it. How can you have a fulfilling career if it’s not your Passion? But as Ami (@12) said, that’s a very limiting belief.
I now understand that I don’t have one passion, I have 20 strong likes. I get to employ some of them at work, and I get to do good work, and that’s satisfying.
I think our society has devalued general labor and the importance it has as a “cog in the wheel”. We have taken the stand that everyone has a right to attend college and turned it into everyone should attend college. Some trades I would contend don’t warrent a college education and we desperately need people to do them. But this has been frowned upon to the younger population as a less than desirable career. Funny thing is some of the wealthiest people I know are not college educated but highly skilled through years of experience in general labor fields, such as brick masonary. And they love what they do. Then I see some of my “college educated” friends who are stuck in jobs they hate, and make less today than they did 10 years ago. I think this is directly attributable to the notion that Government has shaped our view on work. We need some deprogramming!
@20 There just aren’t that many positions available for sleeping in and reading novels (my passions…)
And you’re right, life is a lot better if you can be happy doing many things rather than only ever trying out one specific thing. If you can find employment doing it, great, but there’s something to be said for flexibility and variety and quiet happiness. Not that there’s anything wrong with passion, but nobody wants to burn out either. The best kind of marriage is domestic bliss punctuated by short bouts of passion. (And it’s more socially acceptable to change partners or have multiple partners in the job market than in the marriage market.)
Does anybody else have the lumberjack song stuck in their head right now? “I never wanted to be a weather forecaster, I wanted to be a lumberjack!” (Or how about the For Now song from Avenue Q. “Maybe you’ll never find your purpose…Lots of people don’t…” “But then- I don’t know why I’m even alive!” “Well, who does, really?…Everyone’s a little bit unsatisfied…Everyone goes ’round a little empty inside…”)
A thought provoking article. Work is without question one of the necessities of life. We work and exchange our labor for the fruits of other people’s labor.
Shortly after I graduated from college, I set a goal to retire at 50. I missed that goal by 4 months! I spent a year in retirement and that turned out to be the most boring year of my life. I hadn’t planned what to do and so just drifted from travel to projects to staring at the TV.
I went back to work. When I worked previously, I had worked in my own businesses and for others. In these situations I managed people for over 25 years. Now, I am an individual contributor, responsible only for me and I love it. I also do some hobby blogging on the side.
I will never stop working as long as I am healthy. And, I consider myself to be retired.
I think there is a war against hard work. I believe a lot of young people over the past 10-15 years that grew up working with their fathers, grandfathers, and uncles in a skilled trade like carpentry, concrete, plumbing, house building, etc. have abandoned the family trade to get into high tech jobs or other non-labor related careers.
I was definitely happiest when working construction jobs – there’s a feeling of accomplishment on site, and then the whole evening was available for personal growth.
But, we need to recognize that most of the folks in the jobs Rowe is talking about will HAVE to retire at some point. The body can only take so much physical work before it begins to break down. That’s why I shifted to grad school and white-collar career, to make sure I can work long enough to support myself.
The reason retirement was the big dream at the end of the road for many was because they were tired. Remember that when you’re fantasizing about packing it all in for a labor intensive gig.
Ive not read all the responses. I think for many people, retirement means working if and when you choose, rather than because you have to. Personally, im not financially independent and never will be even in retirement, but that seems to be the general consensus. That said, I have a brother whose a Salmon fisherman on the alaska coast. He’s forty nine. If you asked him, he would tell you that it’s what he does and he loves it.
I think the point is that once you reach Financial Independence, working becomes a choice rather than an obligation. Retirement is not freedom FROM work, but rather freedom TO work (if you so desire.)
I’m with #13. When you work at a job you loathe, it doesn’t matter what you are actually doing from 9-5. It’s the attitude of the workplace that makes a huge difference.
That being said, I was taught that work = paycheck, and nothing more. I think that leads to a dismal attitude, and that it will be almost impossible to come in to work every morning.
I’m going to say, to me at least, there is a stigma involved with “work” and I blame media. Also I have a feeling it’s only going to get worse before it gets better. We see on TV, the internet, magazines and newspapers millions of stories of people who “made it” with a get rich quick scheme or a lucky break (right place right time syndrome). We see athletes, actors, and musicians with enormous decadent homes living these completely indulgent, above the law lifestyles. We are constantly blasted with images of these people who seem to be doing what they want and getting paid by the buckets for doing so. And we wonder why can’t that be me? Add to that the internet which has kicked open the door to fifteen minutes of fame in a way no one ever imagined! We just really seem to feel that million dollar homes, luxury vehicles, and designer bags should be staples in one’s life and because they are so prevalent in the media and society around us, we assume they should be easy to obtain.
I remember when I read “The Millionaire Next Door” and he mentioned that perhaps there should be a TV show on these people in answer to the show “Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous” and I completely agree. We live in such a distorted world that creates such a conflict with the idealized and the realistic it’s not surprising so many people are so unhappy.
Both of my grandfathers worked (and invested) until they physically couldn’t and it wasn’t in a regretful bitter fashion. They had to work and working gave them a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. Both of them fled Castro’s Cuba to come here so they could work for themselves in jobs of their choice. They saw it as a priviledge they excercised to their dying day. I think of them often when I get tired of working. Yeah, the kinds of jobs I’ve had aren’t flashy. They don’t get me designer bags and clothes free from the labels. They don’t pack me off in jets to exotic locations. But they let me live a pretty satisfying existence with my children, allow me to fund their future college educations, and will allow me to slow down and work less as I get older and less physically able. The work I do is not an ethically divisive job, allows opportunities for recognition and accomplishments, gives me the chance to constantly learn, and gives me access to a whole lot of people. Personally, I don’t really need much more.
I followed my passion, which was languages, and I went to grad school to become a linguist. It didn’t work out because this interest of mine did not translate into work that I liked or was good at. Then I went to library school. This was a professional degree with hands-on field work and training. I got a job that I love, but which I leave at work when it’s time to go home. Then I wrote a novel about a linguist, a fiction of work, which has taken more energy and focus than most of my at-the-office tasks. I do not want to make a living writing; I am happy to do my library job and then go home and write. “Work” does not equal “Job”. I have both and both are satisfying.
The Bible right from the start says that God created work for us. First in Genesis 1:26…
By being made in His image we like to work too.
Further on, in Genesis 2:15…
There is never any mention of “retirement” in the Bible. In fact, after Adam and Eve sinned, God says is Genesis 3:17…
(emphasis mine).
NIV Bible passages courtesy of Biblegateway.com.
I think America underwent a shift in the understanding of work around the time when Social Security came into being. Early settlers and pioneers understood work and the fulfillment that came from it, but industrialization and technology have definitely had a negative impact of our understanding of work.
It is called work no fun for a reason, something someone told me along the way. I generally enjoy my career and the work that goes along with it, but I spend too many horus at work and too much time working (my boss and my clients expect me to repond to e-mails 24 hours a day, on weekends and on vacation). My schedule has gotten more demanding during the recession since we have been doing more with less. We did finally hire a couple of new people which over time will help.
I’m not sure what I would do without my career and the mental stimulation that goes along with it, I’m sure I would figure out something but I very much enjoy what I do and prefer to be busy.
I do think that work – specifically “labor” – is undervalued in America, both literally and figuratively. In the most general sense – amongst people with college degrees and non-labor intensive jobs – the idea of working as a tradesman or otherwise performing manual labor is anathema. These jobs are often seen as menial – despite the fact that they usually require a tremendous amount of training, effort, skill and artistry.
However, I think much of the “fault” for this lies with the people who made careers of these jobs and raised their children to strive for and expect more. Everyone hopes their children will “do better” than them in life, and for children that were raised by skilled laborers, that usually means not having to work so hard, or so much – and by “work”, I mean in the physical sense.
While there is a tremendous amount of pride amongst most who work hard (again, physically) for a living, there are few people in those professions who would be delighted to hear that their child hopes to grow up to be a plumber, or an electrician, or someone who works on the assembly line for General Motors. They want “more” than that for them, and that sends a pretty strong message to their children about what kind of work is of value and what kind of work is not.
I think along the lines of Leslie #2 and Melissa #13 (love Melissa’s want for “freedom to not have a job I don’t like”). The option to leave the working world and retire is what I am looking for. The option to follow my passion without having to worry about the money being generated except as a nice-to-have. In numerous positions throughout my career, I have had to force myself to get out of bed each morning, not knowing what awaited me when I walked in the door but fearing the worst. There were always benefits such as the people I work with and the feeling of accomplishment upon completion of a job well done. But I sure would like the option to not work if I did not have to. aka – retirement!
I love what I do, but have been doing it for the past 32 years, 26 of them in my current position. I have about 8 years to go to retirement, and now that the kids are grown, want to do something else. It isn’t really feasible to leave at this point, and actually, we don’t want to do so. I am taking graduate classes now in a related field, so that when we retire, I can take small contracts around the country, and we can go live different places and explore different areas without going much into our retirement funds. Work, travel, frugality — sounds like the best kind of life to me!
Interesting that I’m finishing up Atlus Shrugged right now. I got a “This is John Galt speaking…” vibe from this entire article.
“There is no such thing as a lousy job — only lousy men who don’t care to do it.”
this was a very thought provoking article for me. i am currently unemployed and looking. my situation has caused me to re-evaluate the very concepts you are talking about. i don’t want to be that schlep that works at a job i hate for thirty years just to get the retirement benefits. i would rather do the things i want to do now, rather than wait for a retirement that may or may not come. i have always believed, up until now, that work is something you are not supposed to like but do because you have to. fortunately for me, i don’t have a big family to support and i can use this hiatus to think about and go after what i really want to do for work. if you can find a way to get paid for doing something you love and would do anyway, is it really “work?” i refuse to believe that sitting at a cubicle for decades and then retiring is the way life is supposed to go.
at the same time, we are currently living with my parents and our dogs are being boarded, so we are willing to take jobs doing things we don’t like in order to get a place to live and have our family back together again. fortunately, we were have been preparing to be unemployed for quite a while and have eliminated non-mortgage debt. that gives us a little more freedom.
great post!
I think that JD’s four benefits are all equally available in retirement:
MEANING: Perhaps if I’d been a brain surgeon I might have found more meaning in what I did, but really, defining myself through my job would not have provided much meaning for me. It’s only since I’ve retired that I’ve been able to pursue most completely the real meaning of my life. I’m more myself, more able to “know myself” as the philosophers encourage us to do, and I’m more aware of what is important in life (surprise — it doesn’t seem to be meeting meaningless deadlines!).
MONEY: true, my investments don’t earn me as much as working did, but as long as there is “enough” money, I don’t think work wins over non work.
RELATIONSHIPS: my primary relationship and all of my other social ties have only been strengthened by not having to put work first. Perhaps there are people who manage to not put work first, but it is hard in the current state of work demands, especially in jobs that don’t have set time limits. My social life does include some people I met at work, but it also expands far beyond that world and thus is much richer.
SKILLS: Retirement means time to build skills in any area, not just those that are associated with a particular job.
I remember my first real thinking about work years ago when I was reading John Grisham’s The Firm. In it, there is a piece from the main character where he talks about how his life will go. Paraphrasing, it goes something like I’ll work 100 hours a week for 10 or 15 years and then retire a rich man.
I thought about this section quite a bit. First of all, 100 hours a week sounds miserable no matter what you’re doing, except perhaps breathing. Second, he must hate being a lawyer, his chosen profession for those of you who didn’t read the book. I thought there is a second option…how about you do something you love and you do it forever. Then, the race to stop doing what you’re doing never needs to occur. I don’t follow that advice of course. I know I should.
As someone who was a manager at a Fortune 100 company, the biggest problem I had with my employees was finding enough *meaningful* work for them to do. At the end of the day, most of the people that worked for me felt like they had accomplished nothing, as our group was caught up in the bureaucracy and inertia that comes with working for any large organization.
I think what it really comes down to is this: no one wants to be stuck in a job they can’t quit (for whatever reason — mortgage, student loans, family obligations, etc) which does not give them some sort of feeling of accomplishment or satisfaction at the end of the day. And I think that describes a lot of America that works in cubicles and offices, and why in general people tend to want to leave the office early, retire early, etc.
I’m also getting an Ayn Rand vibe from the comments more than the article, and frankly it seems myopic. Yes, the trades have been devalued throughout the years, but don’t blame that on the government. Corporations have continuously eroded consumer rights and consumer information (by buying up media until even the news is owned and operated by partisan interests) through the decades, while keeping downward pressure on low to middle-class wages and trying to force out unions – the same unions whose members, blue-collar workers in the thousands, fought and stood up for their rights.
It seems that many people have their rose-colored glasses on when they look back at the ‘simpler’ lives our ancestors led – well, they didn’t necessarily prefer to spend their lives working 10 hours a day 6 days a week in a mine or factory, or cleaning, cooking, and taking care of children 7 days a week, instead of a 9 to 5 office job, and many would have chosen otherwise if they could. It’s our luxury that we can choose, but with that choice comes more indecision about what is best, what will fulfill us the most, which I think leads to this navel-gazing.
The article itself was interesting, but some of the comments scare me in that they seem to assume that less choice in work was good, or that people didn’t want time off or healthcare when the default was blue-collar jobs. Read some history, where do you think powerful unions like the Teamsters and UAW started from? From blue-collar workers who wanted to ensure they got the right to a regulated work week, wages, healthcare, etc. and who had to organize to stand up against the owners of industry.
I’ve loved reading the comments, they have been as thought provoking as the original post.
I do what I do because I was good at it when I started my career. I dont like what I do, though, and because of that I havent kept up on the latest and greatest theories, practices, and technology. Now, I just sort of cruise along, working just hard enough to keep my job. I peruse the want ads on a weekly basis, looking for something I *want* to do that pays close to what I make now.
I also fantasize about a blue collar job, where I can work outside and develop real skills. I saw a job for a lineman(electrical worker) that paid $36/hour yesterday and immediately wondered why no one told me about these sorts of jobs when I was a teen. I grew up thinking the only options were college and a desk job or working at the grocery store stocking shelves.
Finally, last thought, is that work is the enemy because it keeps you from doing what you love. I dont know how many times I have sat at work feeling like I’m wasting my time. I work in IT, so like another poster above said, the skills I acquire are very abstract and not something I use in everyday situations, so there is no fulfillment at the end of the day.
@41 Great comment! There never was a rosy back-in-the-day. Like the Daily Show pointed out, back-in-the-day you were a kid, and being a kid everything seems a lot simpler.
I’d also like to add that I never heard my grandfathers complain about work, mainly because they were dead long before I was born. Not saying that heart attacks at prime age are work related, but…
And back-in-the-day a lot of women weren’t allowed to work, especially if they were married. It’s hard to complain about something you’re not allowed to do. And my grandma did occasionally complain about her job… apparently picking out detached fingers from piles of sawdust in the shop room was not one of the more pleasant aspects of her nursing job.
“Yes, the trades have been devalued throughout the years, but don’t blame that on the government. Corporations have continuously eroded consumer rights and consumer information (by buying up media until even the news is owned and operated by partisan interests)…”
How can you not blame that on the government? You said it yourself that the media and news were bought up and are now owned and operated by partisan interests.
I think there’s been a war on work waged by managers – they want to think that their employees are all replaceable, unskilled, and lazy/needing to be constantly micromanaged and harangued, because that makes the supervisors and managers feel like their own work is more important.
I’ve had a number of jobs that were automated out of existence – but the automated version is not better. It’s not even always cheaper. And it hardly ever makes the customers happier (just try using any company’s “voice recognition” call router and see how you feel – phone receptionist was the first job I ever lost to a machine and, since I moved to another job inside the company, I got to also spend the next six months listening to customers complain about our new system.) But it does make the remaining workers more nervous and easier to boss around.
There is no concept of “work-life balance”; “work” takes priority, and that’s the end of it. Work is how you earn money and contribute to the community and form your identity. People have no qualms about staying until 7 or 8 o’clock. Most of the time, I think this is insane. But observing them, reading this post and listening to Mike Rowe make me wonder if perhaps I’ve got it wrong. As an American, maybe I’ve gone too far to the other extreme, expecting to do only what makes me happy.
We actually aren’t tipping the other way in the United States, if you look at the numbers. In the past few years, there have been an increasing number of editorial news items about the laziness and the so-called entitlement attitude that is coming alive in our workplaces, but this is nothing new. Every generation feels that those that come after it do not work as hard and have things too easy. It is so cliche at this point that I sometimes have trouble believing that they can even publish these items and still pretend that they are sharing some kind of “news.”
The truth is that the United States has some of the lowest paid vacation time of any developed nation; we also spend some of the longest hours in the office. We are also included on the list of countries without laws about how much time off workers are entitled to. We have trusted employers to determine what they give their employees and while some employers treat their employees very well, this has still left us behind other countries. Even workers Japan, which was discussed in the quoted example, have more time off (again, on average) than workers in the United States.
In my opinion, one of the reasons that we seem to be increasingly hearing stories about the laziness of various categories of workers is because people are starting to get a little tired of the demands placed on them by employers. When I was working in my corporate jobs, I wasn’t asked to come in early and stay late every so often; it was part of the office culture that you were there by eight and you stayed until eight or sometimes even later. The office stayed open on all holidays with the exception of Thanksgiving and Christmas, and I mean literally, Thanksgiving day and Christmas day. If you requested to use some of your vacation time, you had to ask repeatedly for approval; otherwise they would ignore you and hope you’d forget about it. Sick days translated to working from home days. This was not unique to one job. It wasn’t even unique to one industry; everyone I know deals with this sort of thing to varying degrees.
The United States is a country that was founded in large part by Purtians, who believed that no matter how hard you worked, it wasn’t hard enough. Hard work is part of the whole being American thing, but so is believing that we are, at our core, lazy people who need to be treated quite harshly lest we run amok. And, at least in my opinion, this is hurting us.
If you look around, there are a lot of people trying to very hard not to think about their lives. Whether they are overspending or losing hours watching reality television, I think a lot of people have just had it and are looking for any way they can to fill the void. Maybe if we stopped acting like we are lazy, good-for-nothing people who need to be kept in line, and started acting like we can trust ourselves to do what needs to be done, these things would start improving. It’s like when you try to diet and tell yourself that you aren’t allowed to eat certain things, you only want those things more. However, if you think about eating in a way that makes you feel best and healthiest, without demonizing the act of having a slice of chocolate cake, you find that you eat a lot more salads and a lot less cake.
Some food for thought 🙂
Work is not my enemy, but since I am on disability (don’t plan to stay on it forever) I do view it differently than it did a few years ago. My physical health is a factor now. Retirement with financial stability would be grand, but I’m only 31.
Growing up yes, I didn’t hear my elders complain about the work they had to do. My mother started working when she was 13 in convalescent hospitals and my dad was a sharecropper in the south (picking cotton daily since he was a small kid). They didn’t complain per se, but it was something that they would occasionally “throw” in our faces (ie. look how good you have it). They didn’t have a choice.
My friend’s dad worked in the mill his entire life. He took his sons there on a tour one day as lesson on what NOT to do with your life. They saw men in their 40s with broken bodies, fatigued, a few with missing fingers, deep permanent scars and so on. He insisted that they go to college so that the highlight of their job/career isn’t spending an afternoon in the emergency room wondering if you will ever have use of a body part again from a work related accident. After work there was no energy for personal interests that involved physical activity. It was all about home, shower, beer, dinner, a little TV and sleep.
About the infrastructure, Lindsay at #18 said it best. Like, give me a break! Though its not a glamor job, you will always find people everywhere that want to work, period.
Really good article. Thank you for reminding us that work is actually a good thing! We will likely spend 40 years doing it, 5 days per week…we’d certainly be happier if we looked forward to it than always trying to get out of it.
Thanks again.
I believe that working is very important to a fulfilling life and it should be something that we can take pride in. But at the same time I don’t believe that it should be something that takes over the majority of our lives. I work at home because I would resent any job that kept me away from my family for long hours.
I also think that anyone who has the desire for financial freedom should pursue that dream. My grandpa had the dream of early retirement because his parents died young and he achieved that. He spent many years working part time in business ventures with his children so he still did work but it was for enjoyment. He was also able to spend many decades living as a ‘snowbird’ spending many months in the southern part of the country enjoying sports and relaxation. He almost made it to 90 so he really had a full and happy life, spending most of it doing what he wanted to do.
Of all of the retired people that I have known, the happiest ones are those who either take on a part time job that they enjoy or who take up some sort of volunteer work that they feel is important. Those who don’t do anything often are unhappy with retirement.
Our economy shed over 8 million jobs in this recession and a lot of them are not coming back. There is a LOT of pain out there. People who desperately need and want jobs to keep from falling off a cliff, and they don’t really care if they are personally fulfilled or not!
Great post. I want to be able to choose where, when, and how long I’m going to work or if I even want to. I guess work is not the enemy but HAVING to work is (at least for me).
You have an amazing strength re writing about complicated topics in a balanced way, J.D. This is a fine piece of writing on a highly important topic. And I ain’t no flatterer.
Amy Dacycion (I probably have the spelling of the name wrong) is one of my heroes. She taught me more about how to save money than anyone else (she wrote the “Tightwad Gazette” books) at a time when I very much wanted to learn a lot about that topic. I remember her writing an article about a trip she took to the beach. She was bored after one day and came home to paint the barn, which she found to be a lot more fun.
I love the beach. But there is no question that the happiest days of my life have been days when I have knocked myself out on some project and done an outstanding job. That feeling of self-fulfillment just cannot be topped.
Financial freedom is wonderful. And work is wonderful. They are both great joys of life. They should not be seen as being in conflict. Financial freedom just gives you more choice over what kind of work you will be doing. And in today’s world, where you could be handed The Boss from Hell next week, that’s something we all need.
Dylan turns 70 in May. He’s still working it hard. I have a funny hunch that he obtained financial freedom a long, long time ago.
Rob
I think the biggest problem with “work” is that most people are entirely replaceable, and they know it. From the top down, with the CEOs to the everyday lunch-box workers, everyone is entirely replaceable. And from that, there arises a tension that everybody is only as good as their last performance and that there are an abundance of rules that must be followed to stay in good standing.
It’s tough to be emotionally invested in something where you know that you are on the chopping block at all times. If you are self-employed or retired, it’s easier to be emotionally invested with your daily activities, but you may be much more isolated in your ups and downs, and it may be difficult to maintain perspective.
The important thing for workers, it seems to me, is to focus on making yourself very expensive to replace. If you bring a lot to the table, and you take less in salary than you bring to the business, then you are an asset. But how many people want to ask themselves how valuable their skills really are, relative to their salary? How many people out there could do your job equally well, and do it for substantially less salary? Taking less vacation? Requiring fewer benefits? Working later nights?
Think of all of the goods and services you buy each month and whether you’d even notice if someone different was behind the counter, or if you’d care? That’s what I think bothers people. We are a society of bean counters, and sometimes people are just beans (not unique snowflakes).
I like reading GRS, but if there were a better blog out there on the same subject(s), I’d probably stop reading GRS because there is only so much time in the day.
I save for retirement, but don’t worry too much about actually getting there, because I like to be part of the daily grind and having deadlines and stuff to get done. I like being an asset, or at least doing my best to be an asset. The only way I’d likely want to retire is if I were physically unable to work anymore. In short, I like having challenges to overcome and think that the beauty is in the details — the details of my work, the details of my conversations, and the details of my relationships.
And as the saying goes, “if you want something done, give it to a busy person.”
For me it’s about getting up in the morning, going to bed at night and in between doing what I want to do. Could be work, could be travel, time with family, etc. I am not really hell bent on trying to not do things (i.e work) as much as I am more geared toward doing what I want to do and when I want to do it.
Even if you retire (don’t need to work for financial reasons) You need to be active in some other way. Work / Job builds so many things, a daily routine, friendships, drive etc. Once you leave that you need to fill that void with others things, hobbies, new interest, etc. or I thing there will be a big gap left in your life.
This is my favorite site to read due to the fact JD shows both sides of the argument. He’s also very unbiased in defining those sides.
I’m one of those people who opted to work a blue collar job instead of going to a university. Was it a bad decision considering I did well in school? I do make less money but I like my job.
I just enjoy going to my job, making the best choices I can with the money I make, then do what I love to do. Which for me is hiking and photography. I’m only young yet but I work a blue collar job and have the time to do what I am passionate about. Why would I want anything else?
Personally physical work is a lot more entertaining for me. I do however manage my money as best as I can and oddly enough am in better shape than some of my friends who do have much higher paying jobs.
A side note on the subject is some blue collar workers have their own stereotypes for the managers or bosses. A large majority of the guys (and girls) who I work with view all the managers as lazy and greedy.
In some cases it’s true but for the most part is a misunderstanding of what another person’s job is like. The managers not only have to worry about their jobs but what the whole corporation is doing as a whole.
The idea of doing your own job plus making sure 100+ others do theirs as well is way too much of a headache for me. Sometimes my other blue collar coworkers have a hard time realizing other people deserve to make the extra money.
My grandfather used to say that we retire at the wrong end of life–by old age, we’re already “broken to the yoke.” According to my mother, that is–my grandfather died in his mid-50s after working very hard all his life and I never knew him.
I’m where JD has been. Can’t wait to retire, in spite of all attempts to find “meaningful” work. Too bad I probably won’t be able to retire, since I’m coming up behind the Boomers. I’m beginning to think that retirement is a historical anomaly that a couple of late 20th Century generations will enjoy.
The realization I’ve had about work is that there is nothing in the world I want to do for 40 hours a week. I always feel that my job is stealing time from my actual life. I am not interested in sitting on my butt, watching TV, or playing golf. I would like to learn, create, contribute, participate, etc. I have a lot of interests, skills, projects to pursue but have this annoying need to earn money. I resent that all the things I enjoy and even the basic needs of life–cooking a meal or getting a night’s sleep–are crowded by work.
I am baffled by people who say they will never stop working and would be “bored” in retirement. Huh? What could be more boring than doing what somebody else tells you to do, on their schedule, 5 days a week?
The reason we get paid for our work is because no one would do it for free. It’s that simple, isn’t it?
JD, if you want more of Mike Rowe’s thoughts on this subject, visit his web site www dot mikeroweworks dot com.
He also incorporated several ideas from his talk into a -Dirty Jobs- episode earlier this year entitled “The Dirty Truth.”
Admittedly, I have not read the other comments, so I’m sorry if others have brought this up, but…
What, exactly, is meant by “retirement”? I know this varies from person to person, but when a friend of mine envisions retirement, for example, he pictures endless trips and games of golf. (And, for the record, there’s nothing wrong with this if you can afford to do it and you enjoy it). What is my, and my husband’s, idea of retirement? If we could retire today (not going to happen – we’re 30 and 32, but it’s a nice dream…), we would spend our time raising our children, tend to vegetable and flower gardens, make soap, sew, cook, etc. While we enjoy each of these things, they are decidedly work (we would also spend a lot of time enjoying family, reading and doing other things less like work) . So does that mean that whenever the day comes that he and I no longer have to punch the clock, we consider ourselves “semi-retired”? Personally, I just see it as being self-employed, hearkening back to a sort-of pioneer, fend for yourself way of life. We don’t want anything fancy, and we certainly don’t shun hard work. We just want to be able to call the shots of what we do all the time, not just between the hours of 5 p.m. and 8 a.m. We are currently living a very simple life (especially in comparison to some of our friends) in order to save so that we can reach this state of ‘self-employment’ as early as possible.
So where does that fall into the grand scheme of this conversation? Would people have an easier time with the concept of “retirement” if it were less about being employed or not, and more about having real power to choose how you spend your time? Because I can tell you one thing – if we had the right amount of money in our accounts, there’s no way in hell I’d show up at this office for even one more day. I like my job well enough, but I’d give it up in a heartbeat.
If you’re at a job you hate then you need to find another type of job, because a job that you hate is going to make your life miserable. I know because I’m at a job that I hate right now.
The people who say work isn’t fun, shouldn’t be enjoyable are people who seem miserable and want others to be miserable because they can’t escape. I’m trying to stay positive despite the fact that I hate my job.
I think we should aim to find jobs we like, to be financial independent,if you never want to retire that’s fine, but diff things make diff people happy. I would like to be financially independent and choose to work if I want to.
I’m going to college because I don’t want to stay at the job I hate for the rest of my life. I mean, really customer service for $8.50/hour, I don’t want to stay at this job forever, this is a job where customers yell at you and you have to put up with it.
It seems to me that most people escape jobs they hate when they get the chance to do so. As for following your passion, it depends if you can make a living from it,if you can then more power to you.
I also believe that retirement is whatever you want to make it out to be,if you want to watch tv shows all week, then go ahead, if you want to be active then go ahead and do that.
The problem with work is that you’re so expendable to your managers,they micromanage you to death,office politics, etc…Is it any wonder that people escape corporate america when they have the chance to do so?
I’m all for financial independence and for retirement, and for finding work that a person likes. I’m tired of working for minimum wage, and I want a better life for myself.
EDIT: Btw I don’t hate work, I would like to find a job that I liked, look it doesn’t have to pay $100k a year, we’re a childless couple, so our money goes farther than most peoples, but I don’t want to stay at a job that I’m miserable. I know not every moment needs to be exciting but I’m tired of having a job that I hate.
Hi J.D.,
I have a 16 yr old with his first job, so I’m going to have him read what you wrote about the hidden benefits of work.
And I had a thought about work that comes from my 77 yr old father.
He retired this year after a long career as a psychiatrist. He misses work. What he misses is that in our culture, having a job makes you visible. When you retire you lose visibility and meaning in this culture.
Working is definitely a different topic for everyone. Some people want to work for the rest of their lives, and some don’t. My grandparents retired around the same time, and they love it; they jet set all the time whenever they want. I have always thought about retiring, but I think I’ll get pretty bored, especially since I’m in the technology field. I think it depends on your passion, and what you plan on doing. If you want to travel a lot, you’ll probably want to retire so you have the time to do it. Then again, if you love your job, you’ll want to do it forever. Now I’m wondering if I really DO want to retire.
This article really has generated some great thought-provoking discussion. Bravo everyone!
While reading all of them, Jimmy Buffet’s song, “It’s My Job” kept running through my head. In his own quirky & rythmic style, he lauds the fact that no matter what we do for a living, if we perform that job with integrity & pride of excellence, at the end of the day, we can then feel a genuine sense of worth about what we do. The only times that hasn’t held true for me is when I’ve had a supervisor or co-worker who believes their job is to make everyone around them miserable. Funny, I’ve never seen that in writing for anyone’s job description, but there sure are a lot of people who live it.
What I do for a living isn’t nearly as important as who I work with or for.
I like work.
And people give me the hardest time about that, “why don’t you enjoy your time off more!,” “there’s something wrong with you…, you aren’t well-balanced!”.
I get kudos at work that I never get at home. No one gives me a raise for doing a really great job for taking out the trash.
There is a support structure and teamwork at the office.
The office provides free coffee and a sense of comraderie.
Pay checks come every two weeks — health insurance, dental and disability too.
Some of the people at work I like, a lot of them I avoid (I’m lucky enough to have a door.)
I’m very lucky to have a job. And someday, with JD and the gang’s help, I’ll be very lucky to work anywhere I want, anytime I want. Yeah!
Someone remind me but don’t you die faster if you don’t have work?
So even in retirement you need to be doing something that challenges your brain or it just stops working. Right? I can’t find where I read about this study. But just having hobbies didn’t cut it. You had to be around other people as well doing stuff.
These ideas are interesting to me because I have just decided to turn away from 10 years of education and experience in corporate culture to build a career in a field that links plants and wellness. But that new field means, effectively, working with plants, dirt and people at their most vulnerable and often, unattractive. I walked through wet mud drenched in horse urine this very morning. Yet I am drawn to it with strength that was lacking in my original corporate inspiration.
The questions of stigma of work are interesting to me too. I have found a way to make money and time to pursue the things I truly wanted to do by working in the sex industry. And in fact, I didn’t mind the job either. But imagine the stigma and uproar if I were to share that with most people in my life. Some studies showing that 95% of prostitutes want to leave their work are, apparently, a big reason to eliminate the sex trade altogether (methodologically flawed studies at that – representative numbers are lower). Yet interestingly enough, all the tons of people on early retirement sites hating their perfectly respectable jobs don’t make anyone think that 9 to 5 needs to be erased as an option in life…
And my personal position echoes many others: I want to do the work I like and be financially independent enough to have the time and money for non-work pursuits and not having to do jobs I hate.
Haven’t read through the comments because I’m, err, at work…
But, Mike Rowe did follow up his TED speech with a website: http://www.mikeroweworks.com/
I am in some agreement, because I recently had an epiphany.
There are so many people who pursue a career in acting, and some manage to make a living out of it, and a minute fraction of them become stars. Nothing wrong with that, but the people in the movie business who go to bed with a full belly every day are the film crews, and they work _all the time_, not only when they are cast. The work is as exacting as that of the actors, if not more so, and highly skilled.
Yet schools teach drama classes, but not stage lighting classes.
Work makes the world go ’round.
We all want houses to live in. They exist because *workers* built them. We want cars to drive and roads to drive them on. People did a lot of work to make those things. We want food to eat and clothes to wear. People made and grew these things for us.
All the things that we have and all the benefits of our modern lifestyle are the result of many, many years of work done by lots productive of people.
Escaping work means no longer contributing to society. I think this is fine, if you’ve already done enough contribution that you’ve covered your consumption for a lifetime. There’s a balance there — we all consume food, clothing, shelter, etc, (blog posts). We have to produce in equal quantities to this consumption so that we are not a net burden on society. If you can do all your producing to cover a lifetime of consumption by the time you’re 50, then great, more power to you, feel free to retire, you’ve quite literally earned it. Still, you could keep doing some sort of work and make the world a little bit of a better place even after “retirement”, if you’re inclined.
I have done plenty of work that wasn’t for a “job”. Lots of it isn’t fun. I’ve climbed into the cobweb-filled crawlspace under a house to work on plumbing. It’s not fun, but at the end of the day, you have working plumbing. I’ve hacked at a stump in the dirt until my hands were blistered. It’s not fun either, but at the end of the day, you have a space for a garden. I’ve hoisted cast iron cylinder heads onto a an engine block with bleeding hands and aching back, but at the end of the day the car ran.
I could do without this work, and without all the things it produces, but eventually I’d end up a hunter-gather living in a cave. I’d rather push my standard of living in the opposite direction, even if that means sometimes my back is sore or my hands are dirty.
You don’t do work to enjoy the process, you do work to enjoy the product. This differentiates it from recreation, where the doesn’t have to be a product, just an enjoyable activity. If you can enjoy the process of work, then great, but that’s not really why you do it.
I’ll stop working the day I die. There are too many ways I can improve the world around me in the meantime, even if sometimes they’re uncomfortable. Also, I realize some people are reading ‘work’ in the article as ’employment’, and I’m interpreting it differently. This is because I think that the two are equivalent, except that employment is more structured and specialized than doing useful work in general.
I have had a lot of blue collar jobs, and trained in two complementary trade skills. I did this so that in my 30s I could use my trade to pay for my enterprise ideas.
It’s not exactly semi-retired; I want to start a couple ‘low-impact’ businesses, both combining my trade skills and passion.
I believe that media, technology and advertising are influencing a poor white collar work ethic. The amount of whining I hear from friends and family is more than I hear from my mates in the trades. Maybe white collar workers need to harden up a little. 🙂
Loved the article, JD.
My job is perfectly fine, I feel lucky to be where I am and feel appreciated. Is it my passion? No, but then, I don’t have a passion, so this is a good way for me to be productive and fund my life. I work from 9 to 5 and don’t think about my job when I’m not there. Once I feel like I’ve got my retirement savings taken care of, I plan to see what else out there I might enjoy more, but I have no illusions that there is a dream job that will be fun every day.
Financial independence- the wherewithal to choose one’s activities regardless of whether they make money or not – is an admirable and healthy goal. Early retirement I think is just one option for what can be done if you achieve financial independence. And so very many of those whom I see retire take a few months off and then get restless and start looking for “work”. Paid work, volunteer work, doesn’t matter really. Just work.
Which makes sense to me. We need to be productive, to contribute to our communities and to feel like we did something useful and worthwhile each day. It’s a basic human need. If we don’t find a way to fill that need, through paid work or otherwise, we go a bit crazy- depressed, restless, anxious, etc.
I don’t know if I’d say that we have a war on work, although some sectors certainly seem to be painting rather black and white pictures of it. I do think we at least have an identity crisis about work. What does it mean for us? Why do we do it? What can we expect from it? What is good/bad work? What role does it play in our lives, our time, our identity? Should it be years of meaningless drudgery resulting in a brief period of workless happiness followed by death? Or a personal journey following a passion that we believe in with fervor and commit to wholeheartedly regardless of the consequences? And why does it have to be either extreme, especially when most of life is lived somewhere in the middle?
To be happy I think we need to see the purpose of and find satisfaction in our work- and I think being aware of and invested in the purpose of our work helps a great deal in finding that satisfaction. There can be great meaning in menial work, if you can see where it fits into the bigger picture. And even if it doesn’t seem to have a greater purpose, at the end of the day if you’ve done it- if you’ve dug the ditch or cleaned the whatever- there’s a concrete result, and that’s a potential source of satisfaction. If you’re willing to take that satisfaction and not minimize it.
Check this out for more on this idea:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/neuronarrative/201009/sick-your-job-follow-your-effect
I’m still figuring this out for myself. Thanks for sharing your own developing beliefs.
@ Tyler, #69: Sometimes you annoy me, but other times you are just too awesome for words. Very well said sir.
I don’t know that there’s a “war on work” per se. I would say that mainstream media have increasingly glorified the trivial and scandalous, but just as politicians don’t come up with ideas on how to spend tax dollars on their own (they get their ideas from voters!), media types don’t pursue programming that people don’t buy.
If fewer people watched “The Real Housewives of Poughkeepsie” and more people watched “Dirty Jobs” it might make a difference, sure. But ultimately … you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink, as the old-timers used to say.
Oh, and Carla #47 and Lindsay #18 are missing a big point. It’s not that infrastructure jobs don’t have plenty of applicants. It’s that those applicants overwhelmingly don’t have the skills that are needed.
There’s more to building a road or a bridge than just showing up with a hard hat on. I’m well educated, physically fit, and pretty smart, but I wouldn’t be able to do one of those jobs.
p.s. yes, excellent comment from Tyler K!
Absolutely, Chacha. There is already a shortage of skilled labor in the United States and it’s bound to get worse. This is the product of long-term undervaluing of the trades and skilled-labor, as well as the ongoing retirement of baby-boomers – 40% of whom have made careers as skilled laborers.
Butchers, electricians, welders, and many more professions in this arena are in need of people to do these jobs, but there simply aren’t enough people with the required skill set and training.
Work has been not been de-valued, but our free time has increased in value!
As it should be.
I haven’t read all the comments but I truly believe that the rise of large corporations has changed our definition of work… and thus has killed the notion of “work” for a lot of people. A corporate job doesn’t necessarily equate work… after all, in many cases all you have to do is show up and meet the bare minimum requirements. This gets demoralizing after a while. But somehow our society has come to recognized supposedly “higher-skilled,” corporate jobs as the only kind of meaningful work there is. That makes a lot of people resentful.
I cannot speak for anyone else, but I know that the bureaucracy and “cog-in-the-wheel” type of many workplaces with 1,000+ employees makes me want to run screaming for the hills… and I believe each coming generation will (rightfully) get less and less tolerant of it. I don’t believe that people want to be lazy or entitled, but there definitely is something inherently unnatural about working for large companies like this.
As I get older, I realize that I appreciate “hands-on” types of work or activities more and more. The time goes by faster when you’re doing it and there are more tangible results… something that is lacking in most corporate jobs these days. So, I get the appeal to labor-type jobs.
This conversation reminds me of Dan Pink’s book “Drive”. Great animated lecture inspired by the book available here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
Takeaways (for me) is that a job should foster Autonomy, allow one to develop Mastery, and provide a sense of Purpose. These are essential.
Excellent post JD and thanks to Eileen for sharing the video. Wow!
I’m one the people who wants to reach financial independence as soon as possible, but I’ll probably still work. My ideal life would be hanging with friends and family as often as possible, volunteering at least a few days a week, and blogging. That’s what I’m aiming for by 52. 🙂
Excellent conversation, folks. I was going to go through and mark “great comments”, but then I realized they’re all great. Thanks.
Well, JD, I’m glad someone finally said it in a way that you could hear what people have been saying to you all along: early retirement isn’t the be-all, end-all for everyone. In fact, most of the people I know who retired early did so in order to spend MORE time “working.” My mom started a B&B; my friends started an organic garlic farm. Endless travel and mai tais on the beach? What a drag!
Best post EVER! And Tyler K @#69, you’ve hit the nail on the head. (Again).
PS. Not sure where you got your info on trade schools falling attendance – the vo-tech type of schools here are absolutely bursting at the seams.
Having my own air conditioning business, when I install a new system is when I’m happiest.
I’m dirty, sweaty and tired. I come home, clean and organize the truck, take a shower than I’m off to the golf course to drink a few beers, watching the golfers come in on 18.
remember you have to wait til you’re 59 1/2 to tap that 401k… age of “retirement” encouraged by the government much?
I work in IT and I much prefer the physical days of reorganizing a server rack to days full of showing some corporate paperpusher how to customize his Blackberry. When you can stand back and look at your work, when you can see how much you were able to accomplish, you finally feel necessary. I think the problem is, as some have mentioned above, people just don’t feel all that necessary in their jobs. If we’re not necessary, what’s the point?
Retirement is false; believing in retirement is saying the ends justify the means, it’s saying that if one works hard enough and long enough they get to achieve some sort of not-work in which they can lay around all day. I don’t know about any of you, but after I spend a day just laying around I feel pathetic. I think the means should be able to justify itself. Why are you alive if your life is spent doing something you hate as a gamble for an end that may or may not come? Do everything you want right now because you may not get another chance.
My school aged kids understand the notion of financial independence (greater freedom of choice in what one does) but are totally perplexed by “retirement.” FI is a much better goal and they seem to “get” the notion that they want to start now at working their way to that goal.
My grandmother took early retirement at 60 because her mother pushed back her own retirement twice and died before she retired. My grandmother referred to it as my great-grandmother “never let the rocking chair catch up to her” and didn’t want the same to happen to her.
However, she found out that she really wasn’t made for retirement. My grandfather, who has retired 4 times now, is the same way. My grandmother wound up becoming a Jehovah’s Witness because it gave her a reason to wake up and get dressed each morning.
Thank you to Ami #12 and Shalom #20. I’m in the middle of re-evaluating my career and every piece of advice I read seems to be follow your passion, and I sometimes feel like I’m the only person on the planet that doesn’t have a “driving passion.” Honestly, I like my job and find a great sense of fulfillment, but I don’t consider it my life’s meaning. I often think of finding the “dream job” that encompasses my “life’s passion” like marrying Prince Charming – your marriage will be full of great communication, warmth, love, respect, physical intimacy, and you won’t ever want to leave each other for a minute. In real life, even great marriages aren’t like that. Yet we build up the ideal job as one that we just can’t wait to get out of bed for in the morning, we’d gladly work 100 hour weeks for, just because of the pure passion and joy we get – how unrealistic is that?
I think part of this movement has to do with the role of work in one’s life. Once it was just a mundane portion of your life, like cooking, cleaning, sleeping, etc. and now we’ve elevated it to be so much more. Like another commenter said about being retired just marginalizes you – you lose your identity to society (and maybe to yourself) without a job.
In a strange way, this makes me think of knitting.
There’s a lot of talk among some fiber hobbyists about two categories of knitter: Process knitters and product knitters.
Process knitters embrace the act of creating a garment. They love planning, picking out patterns, testing different yarns, etc., and are sometimes almost sad when they project is finished.
Product knitters suffer through the planning phase, and get their true satisfaction out of the finished product. They love seeing the final work in their hands.
Maybe there are process and product workers, too. Maybe some folks enjoy the process most of all – the actual 9-to-5, participate in daily activities side of it. Others are product workers, who get the most satisfaction out of the things they create during their workday, or simply out of the paycheck they take home.
If that’s the case, then retirement will definitely mean different things for each group. The process folks probably wouldn’t be happy if they simply stopped working, and the product folks might be miserable unless they were able to move to something that put them more in touch with the fruits of their labors.
Great post. Great comments. And a very important topic.
If you took happiness surveys of millions of blue collar workers vs. millions of white collar workers, I’m guessing that the blue collar workers would come out ahead significantly in overall happiness. There is something to be said for losing yourself in the work, the lack of mental stress, the physical exertion, and the sense of accomplishment at the end of the day in being able to see or actually measure the work that you did. You just don’t get any of that in white collar work environments.
Another factor here is that a large percentage of blue collar workers have added security provided from being part of a union and also having actual pension plans to work towards. White collar have to live with the fear that they could be fired at any time for absolutely no reason, and without that security or a pension to keep us committed, our loyalty has gone out the window.
War on work? No. War on employers who have waged war on the lifeblood of their organization – the employee? Yes.
After I retired I didn’t have to work (for money) so I found a volunteer job that fulfills me more than any high-paying job with benefits ever did. It isn’t all roses but I am doing a valuable thing and I believe in it. I know there are people in the community who do and those who don’t value my work but I am not concerned with anything but the good I know I do.
@91 Really? My blue collar relatives are generally stressed out and miserable. Granted, most of them work in the auto industry (and the ones that don’t are overworked in construction)… but I’m not sure where this rosy picture everybody has about blue collar work is coming from. I certainly don’t see it in my family.
Yes, my FIL probably enjoyed the daily work of being a carpenter more than he enjoys being an accountant. But he broke his back and couldn’t be a carpenter anymore. Back problems won’t keep him from accounting. And he is much happier being financially stable. There’s a reason he wanted his kids to have white collar jobs.
Sara (@89), that’s funny – my friends and I have often talked about how there’s no such thing as Job Charming. (Or House Charming, or Spouse Charming, for that matter.) But as long as “follow your passion” is the prevailing job advice, many people are going to be unhappy in good, rewarding jobs simply because the job isn’t absolutely perfect.
Tyler K- a lot of your comments contain content on why its impossible to achieve anything in life. I have a problem with this because you just seem to be a very discouraging person in your comments. If my perception is wrong then I do apologize but that is what I get when I read your posts.
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I also think that people shouldn’t define themselves by a job. Even if its a job that you like, because we are more than our jobs, we are complete human beings full of experiences, talents, compassion, etc.
That’s why even if I find a job that I like, I won’t be one of those people who says they don’t want to stop working.Sometimes you don’t have a choice, life happens, disability happens, accidents happen, what then? It helps to have a plan like a retirement fund.
I really think that its important to define yourself outside of work. To have hobbies, interests, friends, relationships, etc.
In the end you don’t take your job & your money with you, but you take your character, your experiences, how you lived your life with you, your talents, what you learned, your journey in life, etc.
And that’s something that no one can take away from you. Your job, boss, co-workers can’t take that away when you retire from a job or if a person gets fired or whatnot.
Sometimes I think its dangerous when people say they never want to retire because what are they going to do when they can’t work either by chance or by choice? Do these people even know who they are without a job?
Also there are so many ways to contribute to the world, a person who was a dr. or a nurse can find a way to be compassionate and care for others without having to work in the health care field.
Maybe this person volunteers for a charity, or helps run a nonprofit as a senior, etc. There are so many other ways to contribute the talents that we used at work. People don’t have to be depressed once they leave work.
I may be young, but I don’t understand why people have this strange attachment to work. I guess I also don’t want to have an attachment to anything that a boss could take away from me.
btw..I wanted to post this quote by Ava Gardner
I don’t understand people who like to work and talk about it like it was some sort of —- duty. Doing nothing feels like floating on warm water to me. Delightful, perfect.
EDIT: I’m not anti-work, but I did want to point out that not everyone enjoys working and we should do more for ourselves than define ourselves through our jobs even if we have jobs that we like.
Thanks for your post. I’m nearing retirement and I’ve been thinking a lot about how to have a sense of purpose when I leave the world of paid work.
Even if you love your job/work and plan to stay in it til they drag you away there are plenty of reasons to have the option of leaving it.
Most importantly, you may not have a choice. Economies change, bosses and jobs change, health changes, priorities change. If you have enough to live on, you can roll with these punches. If not, a layoff in your mid-50s can throw you into poverty for the rest of your life.
That said, I learned a long time ago that doing your best at whatever work you have is way more satisfying than watching a clock and yearning for the end of the day.
I can see why physical jobs sometimes feel more rewarding than office jobs. The point is obvious – building something, painting something, fixing something, growing something. It is easy to see why what you are doing needs to be done. And it is easy to see if it has been done well. Though, like several of the other posters, I suspect that those of us working in offices are romanticizing a bit.
Days spent at unorganised meetings, writing reports that aren’t read, etc. can leave a person with less of a sense of purpose. I’ve seen it happen in small organizations as well as large. Still, the best thing to do in that situation is to focus on the ultimate goal and do your best – even if no one else is.
I definitely believe there is a war on work. Having spent most of my career working for large corporations, I have witnessed companies indiscriminately cut many talented employees. Instead of looking at the people in the positions, beancounters eliminate positions like they are merely Xs and Os. Happy, valuable people who work their way from entry level to middle management positions get punished when their jobs are the first to go with any sign of financial weakness. Meanwhile, less talented and unmotivated rank and file workers linger in low-level positions fostering a less-productive work environment.
Anyone who has read the book Atlas Shrugged knows that we are living out that story.
@Jaime:
I know I’m cynical sometimes but it’s strange that you mention it today, when everyone else seemed to like my comment, which was essentially about the value of hard work. Even someone else who said they often don’t like my cynical attitude liked my comment today. I’m sorry if I’ve offended you in the past, but I have no idea how I’ve offended you today.
I think once you ‘declare’ war on anything you are already well on your way to losing. You are standing in a place of fear and by ‘going to war’ you effectively make that person, issue etc your enemy and feelings of dislike/hatred or superiority take over your mind view. From there, communication shuts down in your ‘battle’ to win, usually at any cost. You don’t see any other point than your own and fight with all you have to ‘win’. That kind of singlemindedness can’t be good, even if what you are trying to ‘fight’ towards is something you look upon as a good thing. Such a narrow point of view makes it difficult to see the issue from any other perspective.
Maybe is it time to look at why you are ‘fighting’ so hard to retire early. What it is about work (or working as you get closer to retirement age) that has you running so scared, or, what makes you think you are too good to continue working?
Tyler, I’m sorry I snapped at you. Yes your comments have bothered me in the past, and I’ve wanted to address you before, but the moment I was writing it, I was having a very bad day and just snapped at you.
I’m sorry for snapping at you but I do wish you could see life isn’t all that bad. However judging from today’s post, I do think that you can be a positive person.
I don’t think you’re a bad person or anything like that, and I do think you do have the ability to be positive. I guess I wish I could see more of those type of posts coming from you. And judging from what you wrote today, it seems you have a lot to offer to people. So I think that’s why people liked your post today.
@Emma-most companies don’t care about their employees,that’s why many seek to retire early. People aren’t running from anything except thankless jobs. That’s why popular books like “escape from cubicle nation” get published. People are tired of being a cog in a machine.
Most people quit talking to you after you leave the company. Companies don’t care, we’re all replaceable. I don’t blame people who declare a war on work, etc. All that matters is the bottom line to corporate america.
I can tell you that as a teacher I have seen the work ethic of students (and parents) in decline over the past 11 years; many of my 6th graders had no chores or responsibilities in the household at all, not even keeping their rooms neat. Parents do a HUGE disservice to their kids when they do this.
I agree that if work is fulfilling and productive (however one defines those terms), that I would be more likely to continue to want to work or “semi-retire.” Makes it seem a little more realistic to think that I might have some income in those years instead of having to have a huge wad of cash to last me for the rest of my life!
I actually think of this often and made reference to my desire to take part in physical labor (since all of my work is mental) in a recent post about doing my own auto repair on Debt Free Adventure dot com.
On a similar note, I have long been considering taking an apprenticeship as a carpenter, and believe I would enjoy working for a tree service much more than I enjoy working as an IT technician.
Speechless with regard to the video. Thank you for sharing.
Great post on the meaning of “real” work.
Too many folks these days consider some type of manual labor to be demeaning and lower class. Lower class if may be, but work has dignity. Manual work has value beyond just making a paycheck. Working at a trade, knowing how to make “stuff” with your hands, gives one real do-it-yourself skills and confidence in the personal arena, the knowledge or willingness to get dirty and do an oil change yourself, or frame up a wall or put in a toilet.
I keep thinking that all this fits into Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Csikszentmihalyi the professor from U of Chicago who wrote it, has been studying states of “flow,” when daily activities bring optimum states of satisfaction.
If we don’t have something to work toward that is meaningful, the author says, then we don’t have a way of organizing our own consciousness, and fall into despair.
Great discussion, I’ve really enjoyed most of the comments, even the Tyler/Jamie interchange. That last paragraph on post 100 is negative in sentiment. Doesn’t bother me, I’ve felt that way before too. Except the person writing it is accusing another of negativity. And the apology? Another chance to take pot shots. I read “I sorry I critized you but sometimes you deserve it!” Whee!…projection is fun when you see it right there in print.
@103 Lisa– I’ve been waiting for whoever has the two copies of the Csikszentmihalyi book to hurry up and return it– I’ve recalled it. It is very interesting how flow is used to keep people playing video games. That reward system is similar to the debt snowball, though the feeling of pleasantness is probably not applicable.
It’s interesting, because almost no-one at work complains ABOUT WORK. We complain about pay, and a few people in a chronically over-worked department complain (less than they should, in my opinion) about hours, but no-one complains about the work. I work in a white-collar job, but it’s still intensely creative, and I definitely do get a sense of accomplishment from it.
I’m fortunate enough to earn around the magic $75,000 per year that usually is enough to cover all of my needs and most of my wants and provide some savings for retirement.
It’s interesting that people fear work because my wife could “retire” right now and we could live off my salary. Instead she has chosen to work, partially for financial freedom (in case I was to lose my job,) but also for the fulfillment and positive experiences it can provide.
As far as retirement goes, I think it’s stated correctly that the financial goal is to be ABLE to retire. This, again, is about choices and freedom. When you’re free of debt and have a good (and growing) savings pool, you have the cash to do the things you want to do, be that travel, boating on the weekends, or whatever else you consider valuable in your free time.
Having enough money to retire is the ultimate in financial freedom. Once you have enough cash that you never NEED to work, you are in the enviable economic position of being able to spend your time doing whatever you want. At that point, if you are in a fulfilling job, then you keep doing it. The money then is gravy, and can also provide some freedom from worries that some stock market crash is going to destroy your savings.
Just as #29 mentioned…..someone should do a tv series on “The Millionaire Next Door”. Sounds like a great idea to me.
It would finally be a reality show worth watching.
And just to show how we are all different…I normally like Tyler’s comments… He often shows “the other side” to popular opinion.
It is my opinion that he’s not a negative person. Hardly. He likes living where he does (not far from the beach in CA if I remember right) and he doesn’t mind his job and he makes a lot of money (I believe–at least as I define it). That much I’ve gleaned from his posts. 😉
@JKC #79 Great minds think alike. I am reading Drive right now. In fact, I sent the video to Dan Pink and JD at the same time.
@Dink #86 I love your comment. I have read all the comments and I like yours the best!
I’ve discussed the idea of work, and why we work, twice on my own site recently. In “What do we want to be? A few thoughts on labor,” I pointed out (among other things) that we want our kids to give the RIGHT answers when we say “What do you want to be when you grow up?” You know: Doctor, architect, lawyer. If a kid says, “I wanna drive a garbage truck” we laugh and think it’s cute. But secretly we hope he doesn’t ever have to drive a garbage truck, even though it’s a vital job and pays well.
And in “If life is the currency, I’m already rich,” I noted that it’s precisely because I’m NOT chasing wealth that I’ve been able to craft a life that works for me.
To some extent I can say these things because I’ve gotten paid to do what I wanted to do (write) for much of my adult life. But when I was doing other jobs — such as cleaning houses, working in a glass factory, picking tomatoes, or typesetting and proofreading — I didn’t feel shame or self-loathing. I was bringing home a salary. At one point I was supporting myself and a baby with no help from anyone or any government agency. It was hard. But it was simply necessary.
Now when people hear about/read these stories they act like I’m some kind of hero. That’s true only if everyone else who gets up and goes to work and brings home a paycheck is a hero, too. Some jobs are harder than others. Some jobs, frankly, stink. Like, say, driving a garbage truck. But they all have to be done.
If it’s kosher to post URLs, here are the links to those two pieces:
http://www.donnafreedman.com/2010/09/05/what-do-we-want-to-be-a-few-thoughts-on-labor/
http://www.donnafreedman.com/2010/09/16/if-life-is-the-currency-im-already-rich/
Atlas Shrugged is my favorite novel/handbook. I ended up being a stay at home Mom and have found fulfillment years after reading it the first time. My husband is my John Galt and he appreciates me and my children appreciate me far more than any employer ever did (well except one). I take my job quite seriously and am very grateful for it and I do it very well. I also know that I could be happy working for a bank, something where I don’t have to take my work home. Once the kids get older I may just have time for that.
Maybe we’ve swung the balance too far towards not working and made that glamourous. I have to think high unemployment and ridiculous corporate greed has something to do with that. Seems in the not to recent past working 50-60 hours weekly was some badge of honor….not to me, but I’ve heard others speak of it. Everyone shared in the excess, but now only the C-suite is doing so, therefore the rank and file are re-evaluating their attitude toward work.
Somewhere in the middle is working and taking pride in that work. I really think that is what we’ve lost as a society. I get a certain satisfaction out of some aspects of work, not only at my day job, but doing other tasks like building furniture or even something as simple as mowing the lawn. I’d love to see America get that back, I think the positive effects would flow through to a lot of other problems we face.
EDIT – I identify a lot with comment #42 from Brenton. Maybe it’s the “grass is greener” syndrome creeping into my head, but I wish someone would have told me when I was 16, 17 that there were blue-collar jobs out there that paid that well. Like other commenters, I sometimes fantasize about working with my hands rather than sitting at a desk all day.
I think that society’s idea of what work should be often conflicts with what the individuals idea of work should be. Each person should work to find the right fit. It’s just not the work that’s important but the whole package and I’m not talking about benefit packages. If the fits right you probably don’t mind working. In fact, you might like a majority of what you do.
Financial freedom for me is about having the possibility to choose if you want to work or not and on the quantity of the work.
In my full-time job, which is mostly about analyzing companies, I have noticed that the richest business owners are the ones that are most busy. But mostly in a good way. They are full of ideas and eager to get on with the next big thing.
Even though this could be a generalization, I think that it shows that being financially free offer you possibilities to enjoy your life in a different way than if you have to fight for the money every month. And above all I think that the confidence of knowing that they will survive in all situations adds up to the well-being of these persons.
@Kevin M. – me too. I think I’d be a great electrician. 🙂 But I’m also a really good secretary, and it’s safe, mostly easy work, so I’m not complaining. Except on the days when I don’t get out of my chair enough and then I feel like I’m wrapped up in rubber bands.
I do think that many people would benefit from a mind shift. I know a lot of folks who *expect* to hate their jobs. And, glory be, they do! They go in with that attitude, and no matter how much fun they have with their work pals or how generous their boss is, it’s still “oh my job sucks.” I’ve done it myself.
People can build their whole persona around how much they want to be doing something else, but in their free time, what do they do? NOT work on projects that might lead them away from the hated job.
@Jem 46: Hear hear!!
My Grandpa always said, “There is a lot of money in muck”.
Lots of people out there who do not want to do the dirty jobs and will pay big money for it to be done.
@ Jaime – I hear what you are saying about many companies not seeming to care about their employees and people being replaceable; I worked for a large multinational company that was like that. As much as I didn’t like the work, I was there for a purpose, to earn as much as I could before going on maternity leave permanently (at least from that company). I found that by taking my own emotions out of the equation, it gave me the opportunity to see that the job really was – just a job that I was in at that time, not good, not bad, just a job. The conditions weren’t great and I felt quite under appreciated before I realised that it was my emotional loyalty to this company that these feelings stemmed from. I spoke out against someone who was not treating those under his supervision ethically (including myself), and received a response that let me know that we just had to put up with it, as management would not address the issue (the person in question was a person friend of the EO). At first I was greatly upset by this, until I realised that I just needed to see me as they did – a person easily replaced. This changed my perspective on the company completely – I was not a person to them, I did not feel part of a community within the organisation, I did not feel valued as an employee, so why was I giving them my loyalty? I stayed in the position for the duration of my pregnancy and then left, knowing that I wouldn’t be back and happy in my decision. At the time I didn’t much like the work, but I did like the regular income, so it was a trade off. Work was no longer my enemy, nor were my employers, they were a multinational that worked the way they did to make maximum profit. This didn’t fit for me, so I didn’t continue there after I no longer had a need for that position.
You say in your post that people want to ‘escape from cubicle nation’; this still sounds like running away. If so many people are unhappy, which they are, why do we continue to be treated this way in the work place? Companies treat their employers as they do because they can, and because they are often ignorant to exactly how their company runs. We as a workforce in general, have given up our power to our employers, allowing them to dictate the terms of employment. But without employees, these companies would be nowhere… so I ask the question, if so many people in a workplace feel the conditions are so bad, why are they not speaking up and communicating their needs/concerns to their employers? The bosses often don’t know how conditions are for the people doing the day to day running of a business as they never get to see it. They are often quite distant from the operations, either physically (management is in a seperate building etc) or psychologically (they are busy with their own jobs that they never go near or ignore the operations area). Employees should be asking or even demanding that their employers see first hand the operations from all areas so they can see for themselves how their company functions – the good, the bad and the ugly. It is hard for anyone to ignore issues if they are forced to face them head on. This appearance of ignorance from management stems from a lack of open communication and awareness, which makes employees feel resentment etc. If employees do not speak out though, I am not sure we should be feeling resentment, dislike etc, as we are allowing these working conditions to perpetuate by not speaking out about them.
War doesn’t solve anything – it just makes something/someone your enemy and you make judgement against it/them. Once you have done that, you have closed down any opportunity to resolve the problems you face. I feel that it is only when you look at something with openness and without judgement that you can start to see others points of view and start to communicate and begin the process of working things out for the betterment of the organisation as a whole (or any other situation you are in).
from an article in the Tulsa World in 2007:
“Downward arc: Skilled jobs go unfilled: Welder shortage hampers firms”
……… Wells and his type are becoming more of a minority every day in the United States. The nation’s welder shortage is reaching a proportion that is slowing down projects and yet heating up salaries for those who choose the oft-neglected trade.
The American Welding Society estimates that the industry is losing thousands of skilled welders every year. The deficit could leave more than 400,000 potential jobs unfilled by 2014, the AWS reports.
“The younger generation doesn’t want to get dirty,” said Mickey McPhetridge, steel-shop supervisor at HydroHoist International Inc. “They’re all into computers and air conditioning.” ………
Read more from this Tulsa World article at http://www.tulsaworld.com/business/article.aspx?articleID=070607_238_E1_spanc12208
To me it’s not the work that bothers me, it’s the relentlessness of it.
If I had been more knowledgeable about all this in my younger years I would have planned better for my future so that I could afford to back off a little when I got overwhelmed (like when my son had one of his 16 surgeries) or to just change course without having to worry about the whole thing crashing down on me.
It’s that whole “balance” thing.
I’m glad to see young people here who have caught on to this so that maybe they have more options than I have provided for myself.
This is sort of tangentially related, but what you said about jobs being social made me think of something:
I make a point of keeping my personal life separate from my professional one. Many of the choices I make in my personal life are societally unpopular (read: I live an alternative lifestyle), and aside from gender I am not part of a protected class. Therefore, when everyone else is meeting up for a drink after work or to go to a party together, I don’t join them. Aside from concern over backlash and discrimination, I feel it’s unprofessional and inappropriate. I also generally make a point not to hire or work for friends–and not to “make friends” with my coworkers, employees, and bosses. I prefer to keep the professional relationships strictly that.
I think it’s getting me into trouble career-wise. I’m afraid that I limit my networking capabilities. All the good networkers I know are just friends with everyone–at least in part because they make people feel like they are not just meeting people to evaluate “how can you be of use to me?”
I want to maintain a professional decorum at work without my staff blasting my personal information around the crew, but I want to be warm and welcoming, because the best managers are the ones people like AS A PERSON. How do I find a balance?
At a party recently, I was speaking with my wife’s freind who is a carpenter. I was telling him how much I wish I had a job where I built things with my own hands, sweat a little, and at the end of the project, could have the satisfaction of knowing I built something out of nothing. He then told me how much he wished he had a job like mine where he sat in front of a computer all day, in a temperature regulated office, where there was little chance of him putting a nail through his thumb and where his back would not hurt from hunching and bending all day.
I thought that this was very interesting and that there are good and bad things about all jobs. Maybe we could reorganize our work culture to have more jobs that provided both experiences, but I will have to leave that up to smarter guys than me to figure out. In the mean time, I need to put my jacket on because the office AC still thinks its summer.
Much to explore here, and excellent comments. Who isn’t ambivalent about work? No one has brought up Karl Marx – he who articulated how work (employment) is when we sell our time, literally our life, for money; how we can become alienated when we are many times removed from the results of our labor. I think this is often as true in a modern office as it was in a factory.
The other thought that came to me is the old parable about a fisherman sitting idly by a creek in the sun, with a pail full of caught fish nearby. A businessman on vacation sees him there and says, “Why aren’t you working harder and still fishing?” The fishman asks, “Why would I want to do that?” and the passerby tells him, “Well, if you worked harder and caught more fish you could sell them to other people, and then you’d have money and could invest and become rich!”
They go back and forth for awhile and the businessman explains that once you’re rich you can kick back and relax, spend your time the way you like — and the fisherman replies, “But that’s what I’m doing NOW!”
In the age-old tension between time and money, I initially valued money. The older I get, the more I value time. My job is okay; like most, it has good and bad aspects. But you can bet I’d love to stop working…or to have the CHOICE to choose work that is most rewarding, even if it pays less.
I adore this video. I strive hard to put my mind in the place that trade school is competely acceptable for my kids instead of what will be a humongous government loan to pay off at the end of college when they graduate (circa 2025).
@Emma-that was a great reply, it can be really hard to not take things personally, but I do see your point, that was a really good response, you write very well =)
@Brigitte – That’s a fascinating question! I’m a little uncomfortable getting too personal with business associates myself.
Generally speaking, I find that if I don’t want to give out information about me, the best thing to do is to ask people about themselves. I think most people love to talk about themselves, and think you’re a great conversationalist when you let them do so! =)
@Mark @Rose – This is where I think the problem lies. Notice that the folks Mike works with are often just working amount a small group of people or alone. They are not caught up in an enormous corporate bureaucracy. When the worker loses individuality, meaning is lost as well.
Remember, America isn’t a manufacturing economy anymore. Our jobs are more cerebral. It’s only natural that we should seek happiness working at a desk and using our minds to do the majority of work. Mental jobs are hard to leave at the office when you go home at day’s end.
Working on an assembly line is a physical job that starts when you get there and you leave it behind you when you go home. That kind of simplicity is likely to draw a lot less griping.
Every step away from financial independence requires another step to get back to where you were.If you spend twenty bucks foolishly, you’ve got to make twenty more and not spend it just to get back to where you were before, not having made any progress.
Every step back just increases the length of your journey. All of this can be overcome, but it’s not an easy road.
Thank you Mike Rowe. Dirty Jobs is an incredibly entertaining and heartfelt tribute to hard labor. We need to consider to make PR about hard work.