People in the “team building” threads in MPSIMS and the Pit seem to be under the impression you work for fun and fulfillment. While it’d be nice if you get that from work, what you’re mainly looking for is $ so you can buy shelter and food. So I ask, how did this attitude become so pervasive? (work=fulifilment vs. work=survival)
I would think it’s for the rather obvious reason that for most people in a modern, rich country, work choices aren’t a matter of survival.
I could do any number of a dozen jobs that would allow me to SURVIVE. I could, in fact, do jobs that would get me more money than I currently make. But those jobs would be significantly less enjoyable. Given an available set of jobs that all allow me to survive, does it not make sense to choose the one that maximizes by fun and fulfillment?
Rick, it’d agree if: Ditch diggers made $100k and Lawyers made $100k, but that’s clearly untrue. people go into law, not necessarily because they enjoy it, but they make MUCH more $$.
People who find money necessary for their enjoyment do that. If you don’t like what you’re doing, you’d better like what you do while you’re off the clock.
If you do like what you’re doing then you don’t need to focus on compensation.
Brings to mind the axiom: “If you like what you do, it’s NEVER ‘work.’”
One of the ideas of capitalism is that people should have freedom within the market to do whatever jobs they want, buy what they want, sell what they want, etc. The theory is that people who are better at certain work will be attracted to it – or, vice versa, those who are attracted to a certain line of work will work be better at it – and as such, they’ll have the best product for the cheapest price and beat out all competitors. The end result is that you have people doing the jobs they want, since they’re interested in the work, they innovate on their own, and the general public reaps the rewards.
Of course, if we could truly choose our profession, we’d probably choose something easy and fun – lingerie photographer or whatever. Even in an open and free system, market forces end up spreading us around as need-be, but even if we can’t get into our very favoritest profession, often we are still able to end up in a job that we’re happy in. So far as capitalism is concerned, fulfilling that is a specific and intended target of the system. And since innovation makes the ability to survive cheaper for each generation, the idea of money for survival can only continue to lose meaning.*
- Though, on the other hand, one could vote that “survival” in an economic sense will generally act like bloated software does on ever faster and larger computers. The more you give, the more that is taken, so that the net result is somewhat unchanged. Survival used to mean food and maybe shelter (possibly shared with many others). These days it includes a basic education, health care, internet access, a private dwelling, and a mode of transportation.
Your OP does not follow from your observations in the other thread. You are attempting to constrain freedom of conscience by saying that people don’t even have the right to their personal opinion about their work as long as they are getting paid.
But w/r/t the OP, it’s sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy: we have studied money for so long that we can, to a certain extent, analyze what effect certain policies and price points will have on the economy, overall or personal. We have not put so much successful effort into other aspects of happiness.
So we place so much importance on it because why worry about things you can’t control anyway?
Now, I would prefer that other aspect of happiness were as quantifyable as money, because it would lead to an easier formulation of public policy. For instance, is the extra use of green space by laying aside more land for parks better than developing it into housing or business? Right now the arguments are sort of nebulous, but if you could quantize the use of it, then you could weight the outcome better.
But that’s difficult to do because you can’t measure happiness. Whereas if all parks charged an admission, you would at least have some measure of knowledge about how much people valued parks based on supply and demand.
In those threads, I’m merely pointing out the goal of work is survival not happiness.
Your advice to them was to QUIT! and presumably find or start another job. One that is presumably in a relatively similar line of work with a similar pay scale.
If both jobs let you put food on your family, then other considerations come into play. Like whether or not management indicates that they’re idiots by ramming mandatory fun down the employees throats.
If happiness were quantifiable, an outside observer could weigh two similar jobs and say “hey, Job X pays $50K, and job Y pays $70K but is run by a bunch of fucktards, and the random stupid things they do cause $10K worth of extra stress and unhappiness, so in the balance job Y is better”.
In effect, that is what people do when weighing jobs. Survival is not the be-all end-all. It’s in our genes. Studies of monkeys will show that many will go without rewards if they think their reward is smaller than everyone elses. People are not automata, and managers who understand this do better. Unfortunately, since managers are people too, they also often make bad decisions in the name of their own vanity.
I could survive dumpster diving and sleeping in shelters. But I would be unhappy. Most of us choose jobs based on a large combination of factors. I guarantee that more people have quit their jobs because they were unhappy than because they weren’t making enough money.
because the people in the thread were SO upset that they were forced to learn about how to get along with other people, and be more effective employees/potential bosses. (this is my interpretation)
That’s an incorrect interpretation. People are upset because they are being asked to participate in activities that they believe do not teach them about how to get along with other people or to be more effective employees, and which take up their time.
No. One goal of work is survival. It’s not the only goal of work for a lot of people. If you’re making the minimum wage necessary for survival, then sure, that’s probably your only goal. But if you’re making a wage that is higher then necessary for survival, then that means that you are working for something else in addition to survival. For some people (and I would guess most people), that something else is probably some sort of personal happiness. That personal happiness may be a bigger house or better car or nicer vacations. Or it may be working in a job which isn’t annoying and fulfills them in some way. If the only goal of work was survival, then nobody would bother to earn more than a survival wage. The fact that people do try and earn more than a survival wage should indicate to you that they are using work to do something else besides merely survive.
You’ve taken a completely backward approach to capitalist analysis. You should start by asking what incentivizes people to work and then look at what people actually do in order to answer that question. Instead, you’ve started with the conclusion.
Often they just don’t understand. I remember a course a went through at one job that had us rate factors of importance in choosing a job. They had managers rater them for themselves and then rate them as they believed their employees would. For most managers money was third or lower, but they always put it at number one for their employees. They were shocked to see that everyone tends to rate money below other things. For some reason they could never connect that because money was not the most important thing to them it might not be the most important thing to their employees.
Of course people are going to make a choice that obvious, just as I’m not going to go to work at Burger King. But generally speaking, when people talk about choosing a fulfulling career, they’re almost never discussing a choice between a thankless low paying job and a very high paying job; they’re selecting between available jobs of roughly equal mixes of utility.
And in fact you WILL find examples of people ditching jobs for substantially lower paying jobs to improve their quality of life.
As Raygun points out, you’re approaching this question from a remarkably low level of understanding of economics (or at least are making it sound like you are.) People don’t choose jobs solely for money; they choose them based on the perception of whether the job will maximize their utility. A LOT of the utility is the job’s salary, but obviously, it can’t be all of it, or else everyone would also want to deliver pizzas after their day job ended so that they could make even more money. The reason most people don’t want to take on a second job is that for most people it’s just not worth it; the utility of the extra money is less than the utility of leisure time.
The same works for choices between jobs. I’ve met a lot of people who gave up truck driving for lesser-paying jobs because long haul truck driving, while it is a very lucrative job, is one that a lot of people start to hate after awhile because it’s boring and bad for your family life. They give up money but gain another form of utility.
Rick-You “caught” me in 1 regard: my major was PolSci, and my Micro class was 10+ years ago.
You’re fighting a strawman. People work to create value, either directly for themselves or indirectly by creating value for someone else who then gives you value back in the form of a salary. Team building exercises destroy value (by sabotaging morale), which means the business makes less money for more work, which means you get paid less even though you’re spending more time on work.
It’s a different perspective on what work is and what life is. There are many forms of it, but here’s my perspective. I don’t work for man, but my Father in heaven, who loves me. My work is to go where He sends me and be there for people that He wants to reach with His Love. He also sends me to places where I can learn things that He wants to teach me. The ‘real job’ work is a illusion that we were never made to be caught up in. If you serve Him faithfully, you will be productive and He will reward that, making your ‘real work’ job easier and less burdensome and showing what your true work is.
Money is what man has interposed between us and the blessings that God desires to give us. Instead of Him rewarding us with a item directly, there is a intermediate step, we expect money, which then is taxed and sometimes also tithed, so some of our blessings go to the state and a man made religious structure, and then we get to chose what we get, which will always be a worse choice then His.
In His system, the one that He wants us to recognize, through faith, God already promises His children food and shelter, and not to worry about them at all, so the work is for fulfillment.
These 2 paths are seen in the OT and NT (work for survival vs fulfillment), where Adam has to work due to his separation from God’s path (Gen 3-16-19)
And the path of reuniting with God: (Matt 6, 25-33 x)
I agree with the general sentiment here. I think an easier way to illustrate the point is to imagine a situation where survival were utterly a non-factor, such as living in a Star Trek type universe where all of our needs are covered without having to work. In such a world, I seriously doubt that we’d be at a point where no one wants to work, instead, people would use their time to pursue their dreams.
In today’s world, though, where money is necessary to survival, we can only achieve some portion of that. For those who are making less money than their desired lifestyle, the value of a job will often be weighed entirely by the salary and benefits. For these individuals, they very well may be willing to put up with a crappier, but better paying job, if it means their lifestyle off the clock is better. For many middle and upper class people, there’s a lot more range such that achieving a particular lifestyle is achievable with several jobs and, thus, they can choose the most preferable one. Similarly, they may even choose to take a lesser paying job, and thus a lesser lifestyle when not working, if it means a more desireable time one the job.
To use myself as an example, I make enough money to maintain a comfortable lifestyle, so even when faced with opportunities to make more money, when they potentially introduce more stress or less free time, I find it extremely difficult to justify it.
Mazlow deals with that. When you start a job, the money is a huge determining factor on whether you take the position. Then after you begin to work, it is all about the job. Training and general learning about how to to the job becomes important.
The working conditions become important. Whether you can get along with management and your relationship to other employees is the next thing you deal with. If you feel welcome and comfortable, you will like the job more.
Eventually you get to the point where you may be able to improve your function. You get creative about ways to do the job better .
Money does not really come into the fore , until something changes. Perhaps you find out someone not as good as you makes more. Maybe a boss wrongly chews you out. Then all of a sudden, you are thinking of money. A raise would assuage your feelings and allow you to restart your way up the pyramid.
But the fact is most people spend little time thinking about money while on the job.