That was kind of badly phrased on my part. I suppose I meant more enjoying working hard. I do have a low opinion of folks that don’t pull their weight such that others have to work harder to make up for them. Everybody should try and do their job to some level of competency for the sake of their co-workers (if any) if nothing else.
But I don’t love it, because I don’t love my job (I also don’t dislike it). I do regard it as a job rather than a career and for me it is very transactional. I work hard as necessary and nobody has ever had any complaints about my work ethic. But the concept that hard work is it’s own reward is kinda alien to me.
I understand what you’re saying. I really don’t think there’s anything wrong with viewing work as transactional. I’ve always viewed it as horseshit that work is an intrinsic good.
My FIL keeps asking me when I’m going to become development director at my agency. I know my CEO has thought about it too. I guess the assumption is that any promotion is good, but for me, it’s not good. It’s a very social job where work-life balance is difficult and I’m already doing my dream job, and getting pretty well paid at that. I do not want to schmooze corporations. I want to write and administer grants.
Interestingly, when my boss was hired as development director, I was present for the interview, and they asked her what her goals were for the next five years. She said, “Nothing in particular.” She had no desire to constantly ladder climb. She just wanted to be happy in the role she was in. She was the most obviously qualified candidate and she’s been great. She’s about my age. I wonder how some people in older generations would think about an interview response like that.
I do think young people tend to have higher expectations in that they expect a worthwhile job to be their passion or to provide fulfillment. I fully admit to feeling that way about work, but the fact that I happen to have that is luck more than anything else.
Work is an intrinsic good. If everyone stopped working, we’d all die. The notion that work should be optional is an illusion enabled by the hard work of others in the past and present.
Everyone able to work should attempt to support themselves through work if they can’t support themselves without it. If you don’t, you are forcing someone else to work harder on your behalf, and you are taking charitable respurces from people who really need it.
The reason the baby boomers didn’t retire early is becausevthey didn’t have their own baby boomers to build up such a reserve of wealth that they could afford to. Rather than dunking on them, we should thank them for their thrift and hard work.
If work was an intrinsic good, that would mean people should work regardless of whether they needed the income because the act of work is worthwhile in itself. Work (actually money) is an instrumental good - you are either working to earn the money to live or to buy yourself luxuries or if you are lucky, because your work makes you happy (happiness is an intrinsic good)
Let me rephrase: Work is an intrinsic good for society. You can’t have a society that functions where people can choose not to work and still expect to be supported.
The fact that people need to work to survive means inculcating the value that work is an intrinsic good is a good thing. Telling people that work is nothing more than wage slavery to a ruling class is setting them up for a lifetime of disappointment and poor results if they bring their attitude to the workplace.
Muy wife’s direct report who is always complaining about work and taking time off for ‘stress’ just got passed up for a major promotion she wanted. Too much maintenance. She built a rep for herself, and now will have to work long and hard to repair it if she wants to succeed in her career.
Whoever taught her to have the attitude she has towards work did her a grave disservice.
The number one group telling people that is the employer. When employers try to keep wages down, resist any kind of work life balance, and lay people off at the first sign of trouble they are not signaling that work is good and that workers are respected. They are signaling that workers who stay loyal are suckers.
When I started in the Bell System in 1980 it was pretty much expected that you’d be a lifer. You didn’t get admitted into the Telephone Pioneers before you worked there 15 years, and it had plenty of members. But then we were told that we were responsible for our careers - which was code for don’t expect to get any loyalty from the company. At least they stopped pretending we owed them loyalty.
My son-in-law, who has never been unemployed, now switches jobs every 3 years or so, always for more money and for a higher position. It feels wrong to my Boomer instincts, but I have to admit he is smarter about it than I was. He knows work is purely transactional. It has done him well.
There were people with performance problems in 1980 also. And people who didn’t seem to get that their behavior was impeding their chances of advancement. And managers who found it easier to let things ride than stir up problems by confronting poor performers with data on how they are missing deadlines, etc. Is the problem here that this woman could not be replaced? Is she on disability and thus protected?
I’m in Canada, and this is a public sector job. It is almost impossible to fire someone. Bad employees get performance managed, shifted around to other roles and departments, and hopefully they leave because they realize they are in a dead-end job or they eventually get tired of being micromanaged and shape up. But if they decide to stick it out, they usually just get parked where they can do no damage and given work that no one cares if it doesn’t get done. One person near retirement simply played solitaire all day for the last year of her career, refusing to do much of anything at all. She was just ‘finishing her time’. She was allowed to do that.
BTW, early retirement of some employees (including my wife) is explicitly due to their being sick of carrying the load for the slackers. As an agency fills up with deadwood, the people who actually care and work have to pick up the slack. Eventually they get tired of it and retire.
And of course there have been bad employees since there was employment. Note the one above was near retirement. But it seems to be getting worse with younger employees in many places.
I think this is a function of wealth and privilege. It would never have occurred to young me that work was optional, because if I didn’t work I didn’t eat. That tends to clarify things, and teaches you that a key to a happy life is to find fulfilling work. Because you’re going to be working whether it’s fulfilling or not.
This is pre-COVID, but one of my coworkers used to be a recruiter for a large trucking company and the driver turnover rate there was over 100%. She left the trucking industry because of the constant pressure to hire new drivers. Trucking used to be one of those occupations that was pretty good for people without much in the way of a formal education in that it could afford them a decent lifestyle. I’m not super knowledgable about the trucking industry, but things started to change in the 80s and now it’s a career in the trucking industry isn’t as attractive as it once was.
I plan to retire from my school library job the end of next school year. I’ll only be 60, but I’ve reached the “too old for this shit” stage. A lot of people are missing work, which means I get pulled to sub for them instead of doing my actual job. Student behavior was already getting worse before Covid. I’ll do something part time when I retire, but my full time days will be over. Our house is paid off, and if property taxes become onerous (they’re not that high percentage wise, but our house has more than tripled in value since we bought it in 1999) we can always sell and by a house somewhere else for a lot less.
I’m very lucky in that my hobby (YouTube) turned into a paying job for me; I did it for over a decade with initial hope that it would grow into something big, which it never did, so I gave up hoping for that but carried on doing it anyway.
Then it suddenly took off and grew slowly but steadily, while I was still working an IT management job that I think was probably killing me (stupidly high demands on my time and resources and a management structure that looking back, if I was to try to describe it, you might think they were gaslighting me on every detail).
The YouTube side of stuff continued to grow; I told myself that I would not jump off and pursue it full time until I had a year’s salary saved up in the bank, and until the month-on-month income from YT was comparable to my salary for a straight run of 6 months. This milestone was passed, and I carried on in the IT job because it felt like there were some projects I wanted to complete.
Then the pandemic hit, and we were all working from home for 6 months, and in those uncertain times, when companies were starting to think about how to make workplaces safer by spacing people apart and installing dividers and implementing rotation patterns and making plans for deep cleaning of workspaces, the company I worked for decided nah, what we actually want to do is close off various parts of the office (including the IT office), and cram everyone into an even smaller space, with smaller desks and closer proximity than before the pandemic.
At that point, I decided it was the appropriate moment to do that jumping off thing and I handed in my notice and went fulltime on YouTube.
That’s why I stopped ‘working’ in my mid 50s. I mean, it is still sort of work; I spend upwards of 40 hours a week on video production etc, but I do what I want to do, and I want to do what I do, so it doesn’t feel the same as nose-to-the-grindstone work in a workplace where all they want to do is squeeze every drop of energy and capacity out of you, and pay you less, and have you thank them for it.
My case is a bit unusual, but I know a few people who, after that initial working-from-home period, realised that, without the time and cost of the commute to work, without paying for lunch at work, without all of the other costs of going to work and being at work, and with more personal time, doors had subtly opened for them that meant they didn’t need the full time job they had been slaving away at, and they found ways to not need to go back to work.
Come to think of it, my brother hasn’t worked since about 2012. He’d worked hard as a graphic designer for a publishing company, and he’d become the owner’s right-hand man. When the owner died and his daughter inherited the company, she decided she was going to eliminate health benefits (after my brother had worked with an insurance broker to come up with three plans for her to consider). She told the employees that they could just buy insurance through Obamacare and it occurred to him that he didn’t have to work for a lousy employer to do that. Between his thrifty lifestyle, the savings he’d accumulated, and a (fairly modest) inheritance from our mom, he retired at 53 and he’s been living happily unemployed ever since.
So, for him, the factors that came into play were a crappy job, poor benefits and pay, and the freedom to obtain reasonably priced health insurance without an employer plan.
It’s just reality. No more transactional than having to keep taking breaths to live.
The ‘intrinsic good’ of work is at a societal level. For any individual, work can be good, bad, or in between. If you have a spouse who can support both of you, or another source of wealth, feel free to not work. It’s not a moral failing. The moral failing comes from refusing to work while expecting others to support you.
For society to thrive, the large majority of people need to be productive and produce the things the country needs. So it is in the best interest of society, and of individuals generally, to inculcate the attitude that it’s important to find work that is as fulfilling as you can find, while also paying enough to meet your needs. That has always been considered part of the ‘good life’ that people should strive for.
You are going to be working for a living whether you want to or not, unless you are privileged. Teaching people to make the best of that for themselves and giving them the tools they need to do so is a critical part of education. Teaching them that they won’t find fulfillment in work and must find it other ways is just setting people up for misery.
Shelters and food kitchens are overflowing around here. Do they not count?
I imagine there are some jobs that are more fulfilling to certain people than others. To use an example from my agency, some people might rather earn $16/hour helping survivors of domestic violence than work as a Starbucks barista. But I don’t think most people can reasonably expect to find their life’s meaning in their work. I think that a lot of privileged young people have this expectation right off the bat, and when they realize they have to do something they don’t love, they exit the workforce.
In Cal Newport’s book So Good They Can’t Ignore You he talks about how young people think career success is about finding their passion, but it’s really more about putting the time in to become incredibly skilled at something, which earns them respect and leads to long-term fulfillment. So maybe I’m talking about a subtle difference here but I think aiming for fulfillment, much like aiming for happiness, is putting the cart before the horse.
I’m not trying to be mean but you literally sound like Scrooge. “Are there no work houses?”
As someone who works for a domestic violence shelter and sits on the county board for the homeless alliance, do you honestly, seriously think there are enough social services organizations to address the existing need? You really think this? Do you have any idea how many thousands of people have to be turned away every year at my agency alone? Are you really not aware of how woefully inadequate nonprofits are to address existing need?
That’s not 'cash welfare" like in the old days, where out of work people got a monthly check. Sure, here in America you can pretty much always get a meal, and maybe a bed if you are lucky and willing to follow all the rules-Yes, “no drugs or smoking” rules are considered reasonable by all but some of the rules, altho sorta reasonable but people dont like- like being separated from your spouse, or “no pets”.
There’s no cash involved.
I worked with the homeless as a City Commissioner. I checked out the free food- at one park the homeless had a choice of free lunches by Non-profit groups. Either a bean burrito or an american cheese sandwich, both with fruit and coffee or juice. Yum. One church handed out day old bread donated by Trader Joes. The Catholic Church handed out a monthly box with government cheese, 2# of rice, 2# of beans, tortillas and fruit. So yeah, you wouldnt starve, but hardly a foodie paradise. And a good number of people who got some of that aid did work, just at crappy jobs.
Homeless came in three categories- Those who were one paycheck away from being homeless- and lost that check. Mostly single mothers- many lived in their cars or couch surfed. They wanted jobs , and so we provided free training, “interview suits”, and (until the $ ran out) First and last month’s rent on a cheap apartment- once they got that job. It worked, very successful.
Then there were the ones that couldn’t work- mentally ill or drug addicts- fairly often both.
Then, and a very tiny #, were those that preferred that lifestyle, but they did PT day jobs for cash. We used to call those “hobos”- itinerant day workers. They were very very few.
Plenty of people with jobs end up in shelters and at food kitchens/pantries. Just because you have a job doesn’t mean you can find an apartment you can afford.
“The things the country needs must be produced, therefore, for society to thrive, enough people to produce those things need to be productive.”
Your phrasing takes it as a given that most people must work; the more accurate phrasing sets a goal in real terms, and says it must be met. If it requires most people to meet that goal, then most people must work - but if it does not require most people to meet that goal, then perhaps most people don’t need to work.