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When Work is Life The author of My Job, My Self examines what happens when two worlds become one by Al Gini No one is neutral about the topic of work. Everyone has an opinion. The reason is simple: Work, food and sex are the most commonly shared behavioral traits of adult life. While the latter two are subject to aesthetic taste and availability, and, therefore constitute a discretionary choice, work, for 95% of us, is an entirely non-discretionary matter. Most of us must work. As adults there is nothing more that preoccupies our lives. From the approximate ages of 21 to 70, we will spend our lives working. We will not sleep as much, spend time with our families as much, eat as much or recreate and rest as much as we work. Whether we love our work or hate it, succeed in it or fail, achieve fame or infamy through it, like Sisyphus we are all condemned to push and chase that thing we call our job, our career, our work — all of our days. "Even those of us who desperately don’t want to work," said Ogden Nash, "must work in order to earn enough money so that they won’t have to work anymore." So, work we must. And maybe if we’re lucky, as Voltaire pointed out, our work will at least keep us from the jaws of three great evils — boredom, vice and poverty. * * * The paradox of work is that while many of us wind up hating it, or are simply worn down and exhausted by it, most of us start off eagerly seeking it out. We want to work. Work in this society is seen both as a means and an end in itself. As a means, work is the vehicle by which we can achieve status, stuff and success. As an end, work allows us to conform to one of our most cherished myths, the "Protestant Work Ethic." This ethic holds that work is good. And that all work, any work demonstrates integrity, responsibility and the fulfillment of duty. The social imperative here is clear — not to work means your mother thinks your a bum. In the long run, work can prove to be a boon or a burden, creative or crippling, a means to personal happiness or a prescription for despair. But no matter where a person winds up on this spectrum one thing is clear, work is one of the primary means by which adults find their identity and form their character. Simply put: where we work, how we work, what we do at work and the general ethos and culture of the workplace indelibly marks us for life. Assuredly there are other factors that enter into the equation; for example — genetic inheritance, race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religious training and family background. But even with all of these, work remains an irreducible given, the most common experience of adult life. The lessons we learn at work help formulate who we become and what we value as individuals and a species. To use Gregory Baum’s handsome phrase: "Labor is the axis of human self-making." It is in work that we become persons. Work is that which forms us, gives us a focus, offers us a vehicle for personal expression and provides us with a means for personal definition. Elia Kazan has said that the one absolute lesson he has learned in life is that our careers and our identities are inextricably bound. Indeed, they are equivalent. People are what they do, and what people do affects every aspect of who they are. For good or ill, we are known and we know ourselves by our work. The meter and measure of work serves as our mapping devise to explain and order the geography of life. Our work circumscribes what we know, and how we select and categorize the things we come to know and experience. The lessons we learn in our work and at work become the metaphors we apply to life and others, and the means by which we digest the world. As Samuel Butler said: "Every man’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself." Perhaps the easiest way to prove the point that we are affected, labeled and formed by the work we do is to consider its converse. Imagine the now all-too common scenario of a 48-year-old breadwinner who has been "reengineered," "downsized," or "five-plus-fived" out of a job. With the anchor of adulthood ripped away, with few prospects in sight, but with bills to be paid, mortgages to be met and children to be educated, the "terminatee" is often reduced to adolescent torpor. This person is forced to ask the questions: Who am I now? What have I accomplished? What can I do? Who will I become? Essayist Joseph Epstein calls being out of work "the surest path to self-loathing." People out of work, said Rollo May, "quickly become strangers to themselves." And without work, said Albert Camus, "all life goes rotten." At the level of mental health, work is a basic requirement of adult life. As adults we need work in the same way that children need to play in order to fulfill themselves as persons. Unfortunately, this thesis applies even to those of us who spend our lives laboring at "bad jobs." Jobs that Studs Terkel refers to as "too small for our spirit" and "not big enough" for us as people. Jobs that are devoid of prestige. Jobs that are physically exhausting or mindlessly repetitive. Jobs that are demeaning, degrading and trivial in nature. Even these kinds of jobs — though we are often loathe to admit it — provide us with a handle on reality, an access to services and goods and a badge of identity. * * * According to E. F. Schumacher of Small Is Beautiful fame, work should provide us with three basic essentials: the material goods and services needed for existence; a chance to use our talents and abilities; and an opportunity to overcome our natural egocentricity by working in conjunction with others. In fact, I believe that most of us only get the first of the Schumacher’s three basic benefits of work. That is, in our society — whether we are members of the blue collar, white collar or new collar class of workers — work is regarded as little more than a means to making money. One of the underlying reasons for this is that so few of us see, understand and participate in the whole purpose, process and the final product of our work. We are, to use Marx’s term, “alienated” — disconnected and distanced — from our labor. Theologian Matthew Fox argues that modern capitalism has also resulted in the lack of long-term vision in our work. That is, we have no goal, no hope, no belief in a future greater purpose of our work and its contributions to human kind. We are tied, says Fox, to the Newtonian model of the machine. Within this model we are all interchangeable parts and replaceable cogs with no other purpose than to produce and be productive. We are driven solely by the goal of personal betterment and well-being. The primary meaning of our work lies exclusively in what it allows us to get or buy. The problem, says Fox, is that we need a new vision and philosophy of work. A vision that takes into consideration other needs and issues beyond the self. A vision of work that allows us to distinguish and understand the paradox of both the drudgery and meaning of work. A vision that sees work as both a necessity and a privilege. A vision that understands the subtleties and nuances of John Gardner’s famous admonition: “The society that scorns excellence in plumbing because it is a humble activity, yet accepts shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy, and as a result neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.” At the end of the 19th century the major cry and claim of the American union movement was a simple and distinct one: "Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest and eight hours free for what we will." For brief periods in the twentieth century this goal was actually achieved. But according to Juliet B. Schor, author of The Overworked American, the 40-hour standard week is either a long forgotten memory or a still sought after dream for most American workers. Except for the excesses of the 19th Century, says Schor, as a nation we are working more now than ever before. Even the workers of Ancient Greece and Rome and the serfs of Medieval Europe worked less than we do; except for harvest time, they averaged less than twenty hours per week with 150 to 175 officially sanctioned days off. Consider the following staggering statistics about work and life on the job:
As a society, because of the advent of the double-income family, global competition, downsizing, rightsizing and reengineering, we are all working harder and longer than ever before. As a result, we have compacted time, changed time, accelerated the use of time and squeezed time in our attempts to compensate for our "poverty of time." Hallmark Cards, that almost unerring barometer of American mores, recently marketed greeting cards for absent parents to tuck under cereal boxes in the morning — "Have a super day at School" — or to place on a child’s pillow at night at night — "I wish I were there to tuck you in.” We have become a society obsessed with time, productivity and success. And yet, in a quintessential American way, being busy and being overworked conveys self-worth, even status. According to Diane Fassel in Working Ourselves to Death, workaholism is an addiction, but it is an addiction Americans praise, value and like to brag about. * * * Since 1948 the level of production in America has more than doubled. What this means is that we now produce enough goods and services to live at our 1948 standard of living (measured in market available services and goods) in less than half the time it took in 1948. Which in turn means, if we chose to, we could work a four-hour day, or work a year of six months, or every worker in America could take every other year off with pay. So why — given our "poverty of time" and the burdens of work — haven’t we traded our prosperity for leisure? Simply put, we have become addicted to the fruits of our production, i.e. consumer goods. We have traded time for consumer products and services. We have become a society of "conspicuous consumers." Herbert Marcuse pointed out that we have made a tautology out of the equation: "The goods of life are equal to the good life". We have deconstructed Aristotle’s adage "the purpose of work is the attainment of leisure" to the far more base notion "I work in order to consume and possess." In her latest book, The Overspent American, Schor contends that we now live in the most consumer-orientated society in history. Americans spend three to four times as many hours a year shopping as their counterparts in Western European countries. Once a purely utilitarian chore, shopping in America has been elevated to the status of a national obsession. Shopping has literally become a leisure activity in it own right. Going to the mall is a common Friday and Saturday night entertainment, not only for the teens who seem to live in them, but for adults as well. Shopping is also the most popular form of weekday evening "out-of-home-entertainment." Malls are everywhere. Four billion-square-feet of our total land area has been converted into shopping centers, or about 16-square-feet for every man, woman or child in America. This "squirrel cage" of "work-and-spend,” suggests Schor, has resulted in what can be referred to as "the dept and dependency syndrome." That is, the more we spend, the more we go into debt, the more we are dependent on work to pay our bills. Or, in the phraseology of a popular bumper sticker: "I owe, owe, it’s off to work I go." Czechoslovakian playwright and politician Vaclav Havel warns us of the spiritual and moral disease engendered by a consumer culture. Consumerism, he says, is a desperate substitute for living. When life becomes reduced to a hunt for consumer goods, freedom becomes trivialized to mean a chance to freely choose which washing machine or refrigerator one wants to buy. Consumer bliss, Havel pointed out, has the effect of diverting people’s attention away from the community to the self. A consumer culture makes it easy to accept the slow erosion of social, political and moral standards, because their passing is hardly noticed — we’re all too busy shopping. At the very least, what Havel is suggesting is that a lifestyle is not the same thing as a life. * * * Because work looms so large in our lives most of us don’t reflect on it importance and significance. For most of us, work is, well, work — something we have to do to maintain our lives and pay the bills. I believe, however, that work is not just a part of our existence that can be easily separated from the rest of our lives. Work is not simply about the trading of labor for dollars. Perhaps because we live in a society that markets and hawks the fruits of our labor and not the labor itself, we have forgotten or never really appreciated the fact that the business of work is not simply to produce goods, but also to help produce people. Descartes was wrong! It isn’t Cogito ergo sum, but, rather, Laboro ergo sum! We need work, and as adults we find identity and are identified by the work we do. If this is true then we must be very careful about what we choose to do for a living, for what we do is what we’ll become. To paraphrase the words of Winston Churchill — first we choose and shape our work, then it shapes us, sometimes forever.
Al Gini is a professor of philosophy at Loyola University in Chicago, a commentator on Chicago’s public radio station, WBEZ-FM, and author of My Job My Self: Work and the Creation of the Modern Individual (Routledge, 2000). To purchase My Job My Self from Politics and Prose, click here. To comment on this article, enter the Culture Clash section of the Pop Forum. Related Sites On the Pop Side Read the entire work issue
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