Eccentric Flower:201006/Work Ethic

In the "Avengers" episode "The Murder Market," Steed is attempting to present himself to a matchmaking operation as an eligible bachelor of the titled type, the sort who live off their legacies and investments and keep expensive hobbies and such.

The proprietor of the organization asks him what he does for work. "Work?" Steed says, utterly baffled. Later he concedes, "I tried work once. Didn't fancy it. Too much like work."

There. I have followed the first rule of Basic Public Speaking; I have led with a moderately amusing anecdote. Polite chuckles from audience. Carrying on, then, to the Disclaimer:

I'm aware that it takes all kinds of people in this world. I know already that at least one of you disagrees strongly with the worldview I am about to espouse. I don't say he's wrong, and he isn't saying I'm wrong - but beyond that, we have simply had to agree that we are, as the joke goes, speaking from separate premises. You may very well have to come to the same agreement with me, so let's settle that before you read this and get indignant. What follows is my view on these matters. I present it not to sell it to you, but to explain where I am, and why I approach some things the way I do. I come to enlighten, not to proselytize.

And, if, secretly, when I think you're not looking, I roll my eyes at your approach and tell myself that you'd have to be a little crazy to ever think that was a good way to live one's life ... well, you are certainly entitled to reciprocate the sentiment. But wait till you get home.

Everybody who reaches their age of majority must work. This is the rule of the universe. If you don't follow this rule, you may be able to not suffer physical penalties, but your reputation will be damaged in the eyes of your peers. If you inherit enough money that you never need to earn any a day in your life, then you will be thought a soft, overentitled snot, a legacy baby, someone who has no idea how the world works. If you are above your age of majority and are dependent upon the largesse of another human for your existence (your spouse, your parents) you are a sponger, a leech, a bum. If you are on welfare, unemployment, or any other system of payments intended by the state to compensate in some small way for your being unable to sufficiently earn your own support, you are not just a shiftless leech, but may even be considered a blot on the face of society. And so forth.

None of this may necessarily be true. Many welfare and unemployment recipients are trying as hard as they can to find some sort, any sort of work; to be in their pit is to know a peculiar kind of desperation. Many people who are living on someone else's income are doing so with the full agreement and consent of the other party. Some are, again, doing it because they have no other choice. Most of the "idle rich" are not especially idle; true legacy money is comparatively rare and many of the people who are freed from a need to hold a day job got that way because they worked very hard for many years to achieve that condition. But none of this matters, because the stigma is so indelibly built into our lore, our history, our psyches: If you are a grown-up, damn it, you should have a job.

(Of course it was only comparatively recently in our history that this became a relatively non-gendered standard. Until not all that long ago, the above sentence would have needed to read, "If you are a grown-up male, damn it ...." But that's a completely different can of injustices and prejudices, and we'll omit that discussion until another day.)

Society expects you to go out and contribute something which someone else values enough to give you money for it. It doesn't matter what you do; it doesn't matter how you do it. The important thing is that you get paid for it. I would be willing to bet that there are plenty of people in this country who, assuming you allowed them the cloak of anonymity, would say that a streetwalker is a more respectable career choice than a sculptor on a government arts grant: The streetwalker is earning money for some value provided, whereas the artist is being propped up so he can waste time and money. If the artist were really making something of value, goes the argument, then surely someone would be willing to pay him for his work on the free market.

Again, I don't claim any of this is right (while I have no problems with prostitution as a concept, the actual working conditions for prostitutes almost always fall far short of the theory, and while commercial sales possibilities for fine art will always be somewhat limited, a world where the only valid art is the art that sells would be a considerably poorer place). I present it as an example of how strong the stigma of earn your own keep is in many - I would go so far as to say "most" - of our minds.

I paid my own way from about age eighteen on. I have never seriously been without a job since leaving high school. Furthermore, I knew I was going to get no financial support from my family (they didn't have it), so if I was going to get any sort of higher education, I was going to have to pursue it on my own dime. And I did.

In retrospect, pursuing that education was a mistake, one that left me with nothing but loans to pay. (Fortunately, between one $8000 semester at CMU and several $2000 semesters at LSU, I was able to pay off all my student debt in a comparatively short time. If I'd gone to an overpriced Ivy League college, it would have been a far more expensive bust.)

This raises the issue (and, alas, a very significant digression from our mainstream): "why go to college?" This is the first place where many people reading this (this tends to be a very highly-educated group of readers - I don't think there are any regulars here besides me who have no college degree whatsoever, or am I misguessing?) will part ways from me.

I hold that there is one and only one vital reason to go to college; and that reason is to avoid being forty years old and working at Burger King. The service industry, which is essentially unskilled labor, is the sole major growth sector in the United States economy apart from one or two very limited specialties. This is not new in my lifetime. Industry and manufacturing have been dying in this country slowly since the 1960s. Both sectors are now almost completely dead and (promises of politicians to the disgruntled blue-collars notwithstanding) it is never, never, never coming back. Not to this country.

The point is, even as a child, I knew my options: Learn something useful, presumably in college, that could get you into a specialized trade; or work at Wal-Mart. There are a whole lot of people who have either opted not to go to college, or who didn't learn anything marketable in college, who are now staring Wal-Mart in the face and not liking it much. That number will only increase.

When I was a kid, the computer and technology frontiers were still undermanned enough that if you learned computers, that was your ticket in; it was the one plausible ticket I had, and I grabbed it. It turned out I didn't need to go to college to get it - that, in fact, street experience was far more useful than anything the schools could teach me - but I had no way of knowing that at the time. These days, that ticket is no longer what it once was. These days, the competition for the specialty/professional jobs is bad enough that not only do you have to attempt to achieve absolutely unreasonable standards while you're in school, but you may still not be able to escape Wal-Mart once you're out of school. These days, even if I learned everything vital I needed to know about programming in daily practice, I'd still have to present some shiny and useless degree from a place of privilege just to get my name into the hat.

It's an employer's market, where they can pick and choose and reject at will and on caprice. The place where I work hires two percent of its applicants. There are a few professions which are so undersubscribed that if you manage to get qualified for one of those, you can write your ticket; but those professions got that way because no one wants to do them, so there's your trade-off.

I may well have been in one of the last batches of people who could afford to screw around in school, or screw around with school, and still get a non-Wal-Mart job. I got that job because I have a skill which is now becoming a Dead Art. It will support me through my lifetime, but the door has closed; as it was, I got the job because so few other people have my specialty and I happened to apply at a place that badly needed it. I am a dinosaur working in a museum. It will not happen this way again.

Which is a damned shame, because as far as I'm concerned, before you're thirty or so is the prime time for you to do a lot of your farting around and get a bunch of it out of your system. I don't expect students to be particularly conscientous or work hard, because to me the college years are as much about extracurricular exploration and socialization as they are about learning. Most of the "learning" in college is irrelevant tedium anyway. Again, taking the strict career-improvement view that I know so many of you disagree with, you could learn the things you actually needed to know in college in a comparatively short time. The rest is just practice, some of which you'll never properly get until you're on the job anyway. That should leave a fair amount of time for mating and dating and fornicating and having long walks on the beach and getting drunk with friends and reading good books and discovering the world - the important stuff.

In short: I believe the focus of college is primarily vocational, I believe so-named vocational schools get an undeserved bad rap, I believe that there is no substitute for the real-world, on-the-job component of vocational learning, and - in even shorter short - I believe in a quick course of general study so you can find out what you are qualified in/interested in, some intensive but relatively fast preparatory learning, and then a long on-the-job apprenticeship.

This is an entirely different idea of colleges than the one many (most!) of my friends hold, and I know it, and I can hear their screams of horror from here. Understand this: I am not opposed to broadening one's mind, furthering of culture, etc. I am not opposed to research, pure or applied. I am not opposed to any of the various other purposes you may impute to a college. They can even still happen at a college. But I believe that the people who pursue those things should pursue them voluntarily and the people who just want to go to school to learn a trade that will keep them from the clutches of Wal-Mart should be allowed, nay, encouraged, to do that and only that, with no social stigma.

If I want to go to school just to learn how to program computers, then I should be allowed to take nothing but classes in how to program computers, then get the hell out, and yet still have just as much of a chance of getting a job programming computers as the person who paid ten times as much money and time, and got the exact same pertinent-to-the-task-at-hand learning I did, but also got a whole lot of other crap into the bargain which may be very lovely crap, but which has absolutely nothing to do with how well they can or can't program a computer. If the world wants to hire a plumber, the world should be judging applicants purely on how well they do plumbing, not how well they write or what they know about medieval literature.

And let's face it, people: Most of the skilled jobs in the real world are much more like plumbing than literary criticism. They call for a concrete and fairly small set of skills applied in an extremely rigid way. All I'm asking is to be allowed to choose an education that fits that bill better.

I'm sorry, I'm a poor speaker, I do tend to wander. Here I've gone, off talking about education, when the subject is really supposed to be work - how we work, why we work, and so forth. It's just that it's so hard to separate education in this country from the workplace, you see.

Because we now have standardized on these ridiculous performance demands in school - because we are now raising children who go into neurotic fits (possibly justifiably!) if they don't get straight A's throughout their academic career, thus setting a standard that doesn't allow nearly enough time to go down and play in the creek, not that their parents would let them anyway ... this is our educational standard because of our work standard, and to an extent vice versa; this is our work standard because this is our educational standard. The two are hopelessly entangled.

Let me see if I can try to pull this back to work, which is the topic I'm trying to focus on.

I'm sure there are lots of people who enjoy their jobs, and I'm pleased for those people. But those people will always be in the minority. There are simply too many jobs which are not pleasant or rewarding for anyone to do; things which have to get done, but no one really likes doing them. Sure, there are going to be perverse people who like working at Wal-Mart. But there will never be enough people who do to fill all the positions with people that match; that is, there will always be more jobs at Wal-Mart than the number of people who like working at Wal-Mart. Those holes must be filled, and QED, they will be filled with people who do not enjoy their jobs. Or, put another way: If you do enjoy your job, statistics say you are rare and lucky.

None of this matters to my mind because - and here is the second major place where I may have to wave goodbye to many of you - I believe that the reason we work (apart from avoiding that damned social stigma) is to be able to pay for the stuff in life that matters - none of which involves work. I believe that work is not an intrinsically pleasant thing. Work is a bitter substance. There are any number of people who can drink coffee black and genuinely like it; there are far, far more people who need to add sugar and milk to make it palatable. What makes work palatable is the knowledge that you can use some of the money received for work to do things in life which are actually pleasant. It's more like taking your coffee black but knowing that you can go eat a lump of sugar later in the day to get the taste out of your mouth.

This isn't a very good system, and so I try to help ease the path a little by trying never to work any harder, or with more dedication, than I absolutely have to. Oh, mind you, I do believe in professional standards. I don't want a reputation for building half-assed things, or for being a slacker. The goal is to keep everyone satisfied, and meet expectations of professional conduct, while simultaneously putting forth the minimal effort possible at all times.

The way to do this is to choose your job carefully. Academia has been very fruitful for me in this way. I have also had a lot of success with civil service. There aren't many other such areas.

It's a measure of how pernicious the "work as hard as you can at all times" attitude is in this country that there aren't tens of thousands of applicants for every civil service job. It's actually seen by some as unrewarding. I don't want to sit at a gray desk in a gray building and stamp gray documents all day long, the attitude goes. To me, this misses the point: Civil servants often do not have to do anything intellectually challenging. They don't break a sweat. They go home promptly at five. Every day. They never come in on weekends. If it's not done by the end of the day, too bad; it'll have to get finished tomorrow. In short, they are not asked to work too hard, and they are paid reasonably well if not spectacularly, and they have generally excellent benefits. What's not to like? Sure, the work may be boring as hell, but that doesn't matter because work is not the point. Your real life begins when you leave the office. The stuff you do in your own time is what defines you, not the stuff you do behind a desk for eight hours every day.

At the cosmic reckoning, the adventures you had in your free time will be what counts. The time you spent in an office or in a lab or on a work site will be some eight hours a day mandatory deductible, time you will never get back - and don't forget that you're also being docked some eight hours of non-negotiable time in every twenty-four for sleep; when you combine the two that's a tax bite of a whopping 66% of your day totally lost, time yanked out of your hands and spent, like your tax dollars, in ways you did not control and do not necessarily approve of.

Given how fleeting that mere eight hours a day of Time of Your Own To Spend As You Like is, it continues to baffle me that some people are willing to spend so much more than that in a workplace without putting up much of a fight. Oh, sure, if you genuinely like your job - if you are willing and able to make your job the centerpiece of your existence - more power to you. But for the rest of us, the ones for whom the best we can say of a job is "tolerable" and "not unpleasant" - why on earth would we want to devote sixty to eighty hours a week to that?

(The counterargument is, "well, if you picked a job that you had more of a mental investment in, then you would be less likely to regard that time as wasted time, and you'd be happier to spend more time in it." This is very true. But as I've explained above, I believe that the statistics say getting a job that rewarding will always be a very uncommon occurrence. The matter is beyond control for most of us.)

My goal is to maximize that slice of My Time to more than the baseline one-third whenever possible. Scanting on sleep isn't viable in the long term (although I try whenever I can - why isn't medical technology working on enabling us to get by with less sleep? It could be the single greatest long-term improvement to mankind ever), so I do a fair bit of cheating on my workplace. I admit it readily. Nor do I feel guilty, not as long as I deliver what they pay me for. Why should my employer be particularly concerned about when or where I work, so long as I meet expectations?

Of course, for many jobs, the physical presence is part of the expectations. You can't work at home when you're a clerk at Wal-Mart. You have to actually be there. And these are the jobs where it is most important never to work so much as an iota of overtime, to be firm and insistent upon arriving not a minute earlier than you must and leaving not a moment later than you can. If you have a job like that, you undoubtedly have a vulture peering over your shoulder making sure they get exactly what they have contracted with you for. The only thing you can do is make sure that they get not a jot more than that.

Remember: I believe that work is intrinsically a bad bargain for the employee. It's a rigged game. Even under the best conditions, you will be losing a substantial chunk of your total lifetime clock doing something which is not especially important or meaningful to you - doing something which has value to someone else, but not to you. (Again, unless you actually like or are especially engaged in your job.)

I take pride in some of the things I do. I enjoy certain aspects of my job and I do take pleasure in a well-written piece of code or in finding the solution to a thorny problem. And then I remember that what I do is utterly trivial, useless to all but a very small local subset of people, beneath notice in the grand scope of the world. Most of us do unimportant things on the large scale. You may personally be vital to keeping your particular Wal-Mart running, but there's a lot of other Wal-Marts in the world, and most of the world doesn't know your Wal-Mart exists, nor does it care.

You are insignificant. I am insignificant. Most of us are insignificant. We do insignificant things. It would be nice to occasionally do significant things, but that's a lottery that is very, very hard to win. Given that we are all insignificant, the only personal goal that can be at all meaningful is to get as much joy and entertainment and happiness out of life - on a strictly local, personal scale - as we possibly can. To love. To taste. To explore. To frolic. To relax. All that.

If your job contributes to that joy and pleasure, fabulous! I am sincere when I wish you the best. If you're one of those people then you have won a lottery, in that respect. But the rest of us have no hope of getting toward joy and happiness via our workplace, so the thing to do is to minimize the impact of work upon our lives as much as we can, to maximize the time we have to get to all the good stuff.

I have been thinking about France.

I've decided that a lot of people (and other nations) don't hate France for the reasons they nominally give. Mind you, this is very farfetched speculation and you should take this section with an even bigger grain of salt than the rest of this essay, but I've decided that a large chunk of the people who hate France hate France because they are secretly envious of it.

Here's the thing: The French probably have had the most success of anyone at achieving the ideals I discuss above. They don't work too hard, as a rule. They do not define themselves by their work, as a rule. In general the French seem to be concerned with things like eating good food and wearing good clothes and getting as much joie de vivre packed into their existences as they possibly can. I endorse this.

Now, mind you, they're also smug about it, which is a much more valid reason to dislike them (I can't stand hubris). But even when I am most appalled by their "I am French and therefore superior to all lesser lifeforms" attitude, I have to admit they have a point. Many of them have, to my mind, achieved the dream!

Of course, France has many horrible problems, and some of those problems are linked to their work ethic. Some of them have a whole lot of other causes mixed in, some of which could be disconnected from the problem without affecting the work ethic (for example, the French are showing a tendency lately to xenophobia, which is an unrelated mess). Making the French work longer and harder would surely fix some problems with their country, and don't think Sarkozy doesn't know it. But on the whole the French - any who aren't immigrants stuck in hellish banlieues, anyway - judge that their lifestyle is good and not worth the risk of tampering with ... and on the whole, I judge them correct.

What gets me is that so many people, particularly Americans scarred forever by the legacies of Puritanism, actually deign to disapprove of these goals. "All the French want to do is sit around and eat and drink wine all day." Well, yes! That's exactly right! And this is an undesirable idea why, exactly?

I bring this whole section in only to show the breath of the conceptual gap here. I am an essentially lazy person, for whom the point of life is the incidental pleasures and for whom work is a necessary nuisance to be indulged as little as possible. Not only do I cop to these charges, but I refuse to consider them incriminatory at all. I believe that dislike of work is something to be proud of; I am always a little baffled when I meet someone who considers it a character fault. And yet I get that reaction so often that I'm used to it by now.

Now, I need to close today's seminar with a little confession. It is not all wine and roses here in no-work-ethic land.

Sure, I've essentially achieved my professional goals. I have a job I tolerate, sometimes even like, that doesn't ask much of me; I get to play a fair bit; I have the money to support the modest lifestyle to which I have become accustomed and even save a little for the day when the world kicks me out on my ear (knock wood); I am fairly content.

But if you look deeper into the balance sheet you'll see that I do lack some form of fulfillment. I'm not sure what exactly to call it, though I've written about it here before (several times recently). "Creative fulfillment," I'm realizing, is not quite right. But there's something that isn't being satisfied.

I'm not sure if it's a drive to Be Significant to the world; or if it's just needing to scratch that creative itch; if it's wanting popularity or genius or just a need to do something sometimes that is out of my usual course of daily activities. But it's clear there's something missing.

The problem is, again, I don't like work. And I can't find a project that doesn't seem like it turns into work somewhere along the way. I love ideas, both having them and experiencing them; but the trip from theory into practice too often looks like a journey I don't have the energy to make (more so because no one is paying me to make it).

So this is the coda that sort of undermines the whole rest of the essay (I'm very fond of closing with one of those, for some reason): You have to want to do something. It doesn't need to be what they pay you for. But if you don't want to pursue some sort of activity rabidly and in a semi-organized way, you may well find that you feel adrift.

Which is what I feel a lot of the time these days.