It’s a Saturday morning. The habit of a lifetime of employment tends to get me up most mornings sometime around the same time of morning that I wake all week long. Work changes life. I am sipping my coffee, made with great care, and savoring the morning; it will not lead me to the office. This, right here, is life being lived. What follows are words…resentful words, contentious words, discontented words, and yes – angry words. In short – ranting. You don’t have to read it; figured I’d give you an easy out and let you know in advance.
Our harvest has much to do with what we planted, and how we tended our garden.
There is so much to read about ‘work-life balance’, for and against, pro and con, is it realistic, is it worthy, is it necessary, is it valued… and I think my own musings took me along a path that opened my eyes to something relevant – a detail I don’t often see openly discussed in a comfortable way; it matters what we do for employment (work) whether work and life are out of balance in the first place. If I am working too hard, feeling under-compensated, exploited, taken for granted, and find myself compromising my own needs for my employer, then work and life are most assuredly out of balance… but…what if my passion is for the work that I do? Perhaps then the experience is quite different? If we are trying to have a discussion about work and life and balance, it’s probably important to be mindful of the nature of the work, and the nature of the life, and the needs of the individual humans discussing it relevant to their own experiences. It is a conversation with many voices.
This is my own perspective, and like so many things it may look different from some other point of view.
For me, there is nothing whatever about the work I do that is ‘important’ to me, to the world, to humanity, to the future of our survival, to our day to day health as a society, or progress as a specie. I play a role that comes down to enhancing the revenue generating potential of other human beings engaged in task completion for our employer’s agenda. I gain nothing from the greater success, myself, when my employer does. This is likely the common experience of employment for a great many people. This sort of employment is rarely physically difficult, but it is mind-numbingly tedious – and for an artist, for a writer, for a poet, for a human being, this amounts to nothing more or less than a conversion of life-force to currency that can be used to further my own ends, and to live my life more easily (it’s hard to paint if the power is turned off, or I have no funds for canvas!). It makes the concerns over ‘is the compensation sufficient’ incredibly important, very relevant, and a key deciding factor on whether any one job is worth doing, at all, whether employers like the fact that people decide on employment based on pay, or not. (I find myself surprised every time a business leader expresses reluctance to hire or promote someone who ‘is only doing it for more money’, because… why else would they?)
Seriously? Why else would I be working, if not for money?
I imagine that employment at some endeavor that is enriching, fulfilling, important to society, people, or life, or work that moves humanity forward in some fashion is less likely to feel as though one is being exploited without regard for one’s own needs in life. The closest I have come to work of that kind was being a soldier at an age when ethics and morality seemed pretty black and white to me, the world seemed simpler with clearly defined good guys and bad guys – and I was mere years from a serious brain injury; I understood myself to be ‘one of the good guys’. My understanding of my role – and my worth – was limited. The most fulfilling work I’ve ever done was in construction, working on paving jobs. Ever after I have driven those roads with wonder and delight, observing that I had a part to play in the quality of the work, and the usefulness of the outcome. It’s a very good feeling. Builders, makers, creators, discoverers, designers, inventors, explorers, doctors, teachers, healers, philosophers,… there are jobs that seem more ‘worthy’ than others, the list goes on. No one ever looked into their parents eyes as a child, earnest about the future, and said ‘Mommy, I want to be trapped in middle management supporting the revenue goals of a large faceless corporation focused on gross margin and exploiting my fellow man for corporate gains I’ll never benefit from myself!”
I feel discontent this morning, in spite of my tasty coffee; I slept restlessly dreaming of work and struggling to let it go and enjoy my time, and my life. Don’t misunderstand me – I’ve got a good job, working for a skilled boss that I respect, for a company that provides a service. The office is clean. The people are human. The environment is generally fairly humane and cheerful. It’s still someone else’s agenda, and I still resent it when the business leans into my time for more than what I have agreed to provide. We’ve built a culture that emphasizes productivity at the expense of the productive; boundary setting by the exploited is negatively reinforced and actively discouraged. The business goal in most businesses seems first and foremost to limit cost as much as possible by hiring fewer, and paying them less, with little regard for cost of living, or whether survival on those wages is even feasible. We rather glibly and without compassion argue in meetings and for publication about what one job or another is ‘worth’ – from a payroll, labor cost, and gross margin perspective, without considering at all what the job is worth from the perspective of what it will cost a human being to give up their life time to do it. People become an expense, a resource, a commodity… and we’re really not, at all. We’re living beings, with souls, needs, desires of our own – and a limited mortal life to achieve our own ends, and have our own experience. Our lives always have more value than our ‘work’ unless the work we choose to do is something we are truly invested in as a human being, have a passion for, and feel is worthy. There are choices involved – but the game is rigged, and the choice sometimes appears to be ‘work and survive, or don’t and go fuck yourself’.
Adding insult to injury in all this, the very people being exploited sometimes argue against their own benefit, refusing to even consider that perhaps their lives are worth more than they are being offered – and they got there being told all their lives that they have no additional value, by the people who would hire them when they become adults. It’s pretty ugly. Hell yes, technology has the potential to replace people in the workplace – that should be a good thing! Go HOME – live your life! Do great things – because there is greatness within you! YES – the ‘minimum wage’ should be as high as it possibly can be and the expense should come out of the profit margin! Profiting by stealing the life force of others by under-valuing them seems corrupt, immoral, and a willful theft. Standing on a bigger pile of money by paying those we employ so little that they must also get support from the government, move into horrific living conditions, or assemble communally with friends and extended family just to make ends meet seems shameful. I find these common things about work culture actually intensely offensive, myself, and I’m just going to say so. I have yet to see any data that shows a CEO is of more actual productive value than a laborer, or technician, or customer service representative – but they are certainly paid a great deal more to answer their email.
I’m frustrated by being ‘gainfully employed’ at 52. I have – no kidding, I’m serious here – better things to do with my time. Unfortunately, most of them come at a cost that requires some amount of currency just to achieve the day-to-day basics of food & water, shelter, power, electricity…so I make choices to convert some portion of my own life force, and limited mortal lifetime, to the currency I need to manage those details. What I ask in return is to be left the fuck alone by my employer on my time. Yes, I said it – and being salaried, saying so is tantamount to revolt, but it’s a boundary – and it’s my life, and I’ve only agreed to giving up 40 hours each week.
Now if I can just get my own brain to cooperate, to fight through the lifetime of ‘good worker’ programming – because my idea of ‘work-life balance’, is to ensure that my life is always the more important element of my experience, invested in with the entirety of my will and intent, living it engaged in the moment, and filled with joy, love – and growth. There are choices involved, and some of them are mine. “Now” is mine. There is nothing more important that I could do with this moment than live it, on my own terms, with my own goals in mind, meeting my own needs and having my own experience.
See what I’m saying though? Here it is, a lovely relaxed Saturday morning, and resentment over work still has its hooks in me – more than 1500 words worth!!
Moving on to living life.
Today is a good day to let that go, and enjoy the day as a human being. Today is a good day to value myself more than the dollars my efforts represent. Today is a good day to look into the eyes of other human beings, and value them as human beings too – whether they are the barista at a coffee shop, the person pumping gas at the service station, the postal worker dropping off the mail, the handy man in the community, the technical support person on the other end of the phone… each and every one of us, human, each and every one of us worth more than the job we do for the currency we need.
Evening Light 