For those of you working in certain modern industries, do you feel like most of your hours are spent on meaningless tasks? What do you think about the idea that industriousness is a virtue foisted onto us by some other group? Should someone like Elon Musk really be praised for working 100-hour weeks? Should we rid ourselves of the idea that industriousness is a virtue?
These are some questions posited by an article sent to me from a college friend with a degree in philosophy. My response dealt with my now-dated personal situation (2015), but my belief is still essentially the same. Please enjoy my take on the value of work and the need for jobs that simply pay the bills. The article in question is linked here and will be linked again below:
http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
Of course as someone attempting a career as a trapeze artist (I mean actor but it's the same really), I'm going to take "bullshit jobs" to mean a way to earn income until I am able to earn income doing what I love. I am in an interesting place right now. I got fired from a bullshit job (bartending) recently, so I started collecting unemployment in a very liberal state. For those who haven't had the pleasure, the system is such that, every day I am able to find work, I will lose a quarter of my weekly benefit amount. So, in looking for part-time jobs, my first consideration is whether I'll make more at working than at doing nothing (more specifically, doing non-paying work that makes me happy). One can see how this system could essentially breed more unemployment but that's not really the discussion here. I will say I have rigorously enjoyed being able to reapply my time more personally, but that is only because I know I will be returning to a more structured work schedule eventually. Granted it's not the job schedule I want to be working--let's say, on a trapeze--but I look fondly on to the time when my free days are earned instead of given. Maybe freedom can only be truly appreciated this way.
On a grander scale, our culture is a fascinating system when looking at our industriousness as an American spin on Soviet influence. For them, the highest one may hope to achieve is the honor to devote oneself to work, and work is its own reward. For us, it's good cop, bad cop. Baby boomers taught us the value of hard work, but they also introduced us to the bread and circus payoff. It is one in a sea of compromises on which this country was forged, leaving the masses fat and distracted, happy yet enslaved, and most importantly, "non-essential" (as deemed in glowing governmental terminology). Sometimes I worry that I'm too deep in the industrial complex and my proclivity toward hard work is merely a symptom of some form of economic Stockholm Syndrome, but then I remember that, for us, there are options that were never awarded to the comrades. In a country of so many choices, we are lucky enough to play to our priorities. If 15 hour work weeks are what you want (like the utopia put forth in the article), there is a way to accommodate. What I love about this country is that it's just waiting for someone to hack it. It provides the drone pellet, sure, but it also provides opportunity for one who's ready to attempt beyond it's seemingly obvious draw. Working away at something with consistency--even if that something is a nothing job which inadvertently devotes you to the fate of a cog--can lead to unexpected realizations of a new way you hadn't thought of to work the way you want.
It's fun to think of it like a video game. Let's say you have levels. They could or could not progress one to the next, but simply each has its own challenges and each has its own boss. You can navigate the entire game and jump from boss to boss and the idea is that you collect skills and items to help you upgrade yourself and play all over again with a stronger vantage point. But imagine playing that game properly 99 times and on the hundredth you get frustrated and send your avatar into a madman's sprint around the perimeter of the world engaging your weapon at nothing in particular. As you have maintained such a rigid focus thus far, such an act of defiance at game etiquette may create in you a more peripheral acknowledgment of your world, allowing you only then to notice the blip of an icon appearing on a random boulder as your cursor dances briefly over it. Upon destroying the boulder you enter a room that allows you to create your own video game.
Let me sum up. For the intelligently aware person, bullshit jobs are a necessary, temporary evil, in that they help you appreciate your real work as well as provide you a foundation that can and must be periodically shaken up. There's so much focus on the dream job as an end goal which, to me, implies an arrival, a plateau on which one may finally be content. In a constantly changing world one should see nothing with an eye toward permanence. With barrages of updates the concept of job and the concept of boss are just as temporary as the bullshit jobs that led to them, all of which I see as growing increasingly outmoded, as a startup seems to pop up more frequently than a Starbucks these days. When you see that there are almost 28 million small businesses in the US and over 22 million are self-employed with no additional payroll or employees, and that small businesses have generated over 65% of the net new jobs since 1995*, innovation and new ideas by way of self-employment (and self-discovery) are most valued. Creativity is still king.
Here is the article again: http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
What do you think of the ideas put forth? Are we wasting too much time at busy work? Is there inherent value in industriousness for its own sake?
*Statistics from 2015
Thank you for reading and, as always, more to come.
(Photos respectively c/o The Flintstones created by Hanna-Barbera; Can Stock Photo; The Legend of Zelda created by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka; Shutterstock.com)