I think it is related to evolution. It benifits the species to have people feel driven to complete tasks with a meaningful purpose. I find laying in the sun very enjoyable, as I’m sure primative man did. However, when I was unemployed, I spent my days working on restoring my victorian house, cooking meals for my roommates, etc. My only reward at the end of the day was a sense of accomplishment, which is more than I would have gotten laying in the sun.
That feeling of meaning or purpose as a instinctual motivator would have been very important in a primative society. Take the relatively modern concept of employment and money out of the equasion, which task would be more vital to human survival: repairing your home and feeding your loved ones, or filling out TPS reports? The answer is obvious.
Voyager Have you been there? I won’t name names but you have hit the nail on the head. There was much lip service about process improvement where I worked and if the shit hit the fan, they tried to inspect quality into the process rather than try to fix things. We made a low profile automotive product and liabilitry was low, so I slept at night. In the end, however, it broke my heart. I’ve watched manufacturing move south of the border and to the Pacific Rim for the past decade, I’m through with it.
Today I study civil engineering with a primary interest in environmental engineering. If the population of Bluffton grows at the rate they say it will, sewage treatment and landfill management will be of vital importance. It’s my backyard, I intend to have a say in it. :dubious:
That’s because you must not work. Most people don’t have the luxury of finding “meaningful” work and must settle for “work”. The exception, of course, is if you are the kind of person who finds meaning in accounting, law, finance or marketing. If we all had a million dollars, civilization would collapse because no one would clean up the shit.
People try to eek meaning out of their work because otherwise it’s just drudgery. The advantage of having money is that you can pursue jobs that make you happy instead of ones that can pay for your kids tuition. You can be a bartender or work in a Blockbuster videostore help the homeless or whatever seems like it would be a cool job if it didn’t pay $5 an hour.
The TPS reports obviously. For civilization to survive, we have developed corporations that can meet the needs of millions of people. The problem is that we all basically work as small cogs in a giant machine where we are removed from the results of our labors. Individually, insignificant, all the TPS reports, widget makers, and beancounters do the work that makessociety run.
I was lucky enough to work for Western Electric and AT&T at the end of the Bell System, and beyond. It wasn’t luck that made your phone always work back then - almost everyone I met really cared about quality, and in fact the guy who promoted me to manager made his name by improving quality and reducing costs in a major factory.
On the other hand, when we were trying to make computers, things weren’t quite so good. My boss was the head of quality for that division in his old job, and I sat there while someone said that quality was a smokescreen to allow them to charge more. He didn’t bat an eye. That’s when I knew we were doomed in that business. So I know where you are coming from, but there are places where people care - my current employer for one.
But it doesn’t feel like the reports are that important. People don’t like being cogs in a giant machine. It might be necessary for societal survival (though I doubt even that; most office jobs could be done using software only a few years ahead of what we have now), but tens of thousands of years of ingrained social codes and racial knowledge are hard to sublimate. People like seeing the fruits of their labor; if you can’t sit back at the end of the day and look at the thing you made or worked on or think about the individual lives you’ve influenced, that creates a void.
That’s why I, personally, find business to be the most soul-sucking field–there’s no tangible product, except for the money you make. I’d rather dig ditches or clean toilets than sit at a desk all day shuffling papers. At least manual laborers know their work has a direct influence, not just a theoretical one.
I left accounting and became a mechanic in order to achieve job satisfaction. I enjoy fixing engines, I get a great sense of acomplishment every time I do so, and at the end of the day somebody is happy because their machine is up and running again. Of course that’s just me. I just want to point out that you don’t have to be white collar worker in order to find job satisfaction.
There’s some truth to this. One of my favorite jobs of all time was working at a comic book/game store in the D/FW area. I absolutely loved that job and if I could make a decent living at it I would still be working there. There will always be people out there working at places they don’t really want to be. There are plenty of us who actually like doing what we do.
While you might find buisness to be “soul sucking”, many people don’t. And those buisnessmen and women do create tangible products, companies that can produce things. See Gates and Microsoft, Case and AOL or Grove(I think its Grove) and Intel. Heck, look at what Iacocca did for Chrysler.
As far as the OP goes, I think the desire for meaningful work comes from the desire to make the world a better place. For some people that is working for Habitat for Humanity. For some it is creating a new product. For some it is making things run smoothly. For some, I fall into this catagory, it is fixing things.(I do computer tech stuff for a living).
I also think that the desire to do meaningful work fills a need for self importance. It feels good to be needed.
I agree with Evil Captor about most workl being purely for necessity.
But I do think that it is possible for someone to do a job that they find personally fulfilling while earning some money, but admittedly this is not the case for everyone.
I count myself fortunate that having spent 13 years in Civil Engineering which I found to be the pinacle of boredom, I gave it up took a degree in physics and am about to start a PhD in a subject that I find interesting and which will hopefully lead to gainful future employment.
It was not easy and we have lost out a little financially but the gain in self worth that I have gained since then makes it all worthwhile.
I guess my point is it is possible to get out of a rut and do something you want, you just have to want it enough and be prepared to make a few sacrifices.
Voyager I am self educated in the science of quality control but the year before I left “the company with no name” I joined the ASQC and became a certified quality engineer. The same year I wasted three weeks of my life attempting to teach the “Director of Quality Assurance” (somebody’s cousin) how to fill out an X-bar & R chart. In 1987 I believed that making sure that everyone got what they were paying for was the most noble cause in industry, in 1994 the HR manager and the QC Director got together and had me committed. Quality Control, more precisley, Quality Assurance broke my heart. Everyone, please forgive my rant, I’m an ass.
Yeah, well, they wouldn’t HAVE guys like me hanging around at kid’s birthday parties if they didn’t make with the free booze all the time.
As for people who won the lottery not being content to sit around all the time – I’m sure some people who win the lottery do productive and useful things with their money, and put a lot of energy into it, just as some people who inherit vast wealth lead productive lives – like the Huxley family over in England, who were landed gentry at a time when that meant something, and yet still devoted their energies over several generations to scientific and cultural advancement.
However, there is a HUGE gap between doing what YOU want because YOU like it and find it interesting and doing whatever work you can find because you want to stay fed, clothed and sheltered. It’s very much apples and oranges.
If there was a lot of work out there that could reasonably be described as fulfilling and interesting, I’d be less harsh, but look around at any office or retail operation and look at where the majority of the jobs are. If you can tell me those are fulfilling and interesting work, I’ll say bullshit. Because it will be.
I don’t see tending to my land everyday or spinning wool on my spindle (which is what you’d have been doing pre-Industrial revolution, possibly) any more fulfilling than my current life.
Have you ever worked manual labor? Trust me, picking orders in a warehouse or pushing the button that tells an injection molding machine to spit out another batch of "$"s for a postage meter sucks far worse than any white-collar job.
It doesn’t matter what you do for a living because it is going to start to suck the 1000th time you have to do it for someone else. THe best way to ruin a perfectly good hobby is to make a career out of it.
Perhaps this last paragraph offers some insight into why you often end up in a fight with somebody when you’re just looking for information. You posed a question and got a flippant answer. You indicated you were looking for honest, genuine answers and the flippant party took that to heart and answered you accordingly…only to be met with the condemnation above by you.
[/quote]
The problem is, with workdays that use up most of our time (with lunch and commuting) and most of our energy, there’s very little of us left for our own use. That’s why most people watch TV and drink beer in the evenings – they don’t want to be awake and conscious to watch the destruction of everything they might have been as a human being, hour by hour, day by day, week by week. It’s not escapism, it’s self-medication, to avoid the pain.
[/quote]
That’s bullshit dude. I’m going to school for psychlogy right now, which I’ve decided I really cannot stand, but after I put in my hours to get a GPA, I can still enjoy myself with other people, my cycling, and my volunteer work. Yeah, you’ve got to be at work for 7-8 hours a day. You’ll likely spend two hours on the Dope anyway. Do what you can to get by or get promoted. That still leaves 16-17 hours a day for glorious, wonderful eating, sleep, family, socializing, sex, exercise, shameless consumerism, hobbies, volunteering, and whatever else it is that makes you love life. Why people assume that Ugg and Ogg and Thor and Stepped-on-by-Mammoth-The-Elder were so happy is beyond me. I actually think spending 18 hours a day freezing your ass off, trying to find food, trying not to die, and maybe even having enough kids to make up for the ones that die early on would actually suck quite a bit, and I’m happy not to be doing that, thank you very much.
How long ago was Thanksgiving, people, two weeks ago?
"The problem is, with workdays that use up most of our time (with lunch and commuting) and most of our energy, there’s very little of us left for our own use. That’s why most people watch TV and drink beer in the evenings – they don’t want to be awake and conscious to watch the destruction of everything they might have been as a human being, hour by hour, day by day, week by week. It’s not escapism, it’s self-medication, to avoid the pain.
[/quote]
"
"That’s bullshit dude. "
I agree thats BS. Quite often, the people who work hard also play hard. A lot of people who work very competitive jobs also tend to be high-energy active people. They play sports, volunteer, raise families, play in bands, run marathons in their free time. They have active social lives. I mean I worked a full time job, had an almost full-time MBA schedule in the evenings and still had time for a social life going to the gym, a long distance girlfriend and a ski house. By the same token, when I’m not working, I could spend a week doing nothing but watch tv and play videogames because I feel no pressure to do anything at all.
Lets face it, most people, if they weren’t working, wouldn’t be doing anything that exciting anyway.
I’m with you about life being better for us than our ancestors. I have a book about what it was like to keep a house in the 19th century. Your average woman hauled 400lbs of water a week in and out of the house just to keep everyone clean and fed.
That said, I wanted to point out that your average american isn’t at work 7-8 hours a day. An 8 hour work day, plus an hour lunch, plus an hour round trip commute, equals a 10 hour day. And that’s for those of us who are lucky enough to actually have an “8 hour day”. At my last job, it was more like 12. The majority of your average person’s waking hours are taken up by their job.
I also think that modern people “want” more. Yes, my great grandfather spent 18 hours a day in the field, but there wasn’t much else for him to do in out is western PA on your average day. We are surrounded by entertainment options, and images of stupid people like Paris Hilton who does nothing but party and spend money. Some people feel deprived because they don’t have as much leisure time as others. There are so many things to do and see in the modern world, we feel like we don’t have enough hours to fit them in. I found that getting rid of television in my life made me feel less deprived (once I got over it), because it was one less time consuming thing I wanted to do with my short evenings. Turns out I had plenty of free time to pursue my interests once I stopped devoting 2 hours to the networks.
Well–just as an aside–there aren’t that many jobs that need a masters in comparative literature, or any kind of literature. The career track that puts you on is college prof. The only good thing about that degree, actually, was that I had to take another foreign language, as the degree required two, in that time and place. (Oddly enough, most of the janitors I know of today are also bilingual, at least. Hmmm.)
