Get a Job!

I have a cohort of grandchildren just entering the ‘full time job’ stage of life and the experience has prompted me to rethink my own assumptions about work (always a good thing to do, BTW).

I grew up in the 1950s at the front end of the Baby Boom. My parents survived the Great Depression and World War II. To them, having a job, the right job, was everything. It was the gateway to family, security, and social standing. And the gateway to the right job was college, preferably the right college. 

My parents were born in the roaring twenties and, like responsible parents everywhere, they did a great job of preparing me to live their lives. They knew how they had been raised; they knew how that rearing could have been better and so they raised me as they wished they’d been raised. 

It did not occur to them, then…or ever…that I might not have chosen to be raised that way (who cares) or that being raised to ‘succeed’ in the post WWI world was not necessarily conducive to success after WWII. 

My parents’ obsession with preparing me for an economically successful life was totally understandable and even laudable. From their perspective, the alternatives were unthinkable: abject poverty (without the benefit of today’s social safety net), back breaking physical labor (‘pick and shovel work’), or mind numbing work on an assembly line. 

The only other option: Live off wealth inherited from the Ancien Regime or generated during the Belle Epoque. Nice work if you can get it but not an option for the likes of us! 

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Studying Intellectual History, it is always interesting to contrast the disparate views of contemporaneous thinkers. For example, Parmenides (5th century BCE) described the Realm of Truth (Aletheia) as “ungenerated and imperishable…whole…steadfast and complete…now, all together, one, continuous…perishing not to be heard of,” at the same time that Heraclitus was proclaiming: ‘Everything flows!’

More interesting, however, are the ideas held in common by such opponents. For example, two of the most prominent thinkers of the late 19th century, Karl Marx and his antithesis, Pope Leo XIII, both agreed on the substructural importance of human labor. For Marx, it formed the basis for class struggle and the coming dictatorship of the proletariat; for Leo, it was a vehicle for human expression and a way for us to co-create (with God).

But from our 21^st century perspective, neither argument is completely convincing. Today, we see labor less as a medium for human creativity and more as spirit killing drudgery and we struggle, not to overthrow the bourgeoisie, but to become bourgeois ourselves. Class war has been replaced by conspicuous consumption. 

On top of this, we now learn that in many spheres ‘work’ itself is rapidly becoming redundant. Already, AI can do much of what traditionally required human labor and that will only increase exponentially in the years to come. 

Incredibly, a significant segment of the population bases its opposition to AI on fears of widespread unemployment. Effectively, they are advocating ‘make work’ to keep people gainfully employed. It’s hard to imagine either Marx or Leo advocating work that is superfluous; where’s the revolutionary impetus or the expression of creativity in that?

Modern day Luddites seem to ignore the fact that we will soon be able to produce twice as many goods and services with half the human effort. But somebody needs to be able to consume these ‘new and improved’ products; wealth must be distributed or it will evaporate. HOW the fruits of AI are distributed is a matter for debate; THAT these fruits must and will be distributed is irrefutable.

Of course, the Luddites will claim, and here both Marx and the Pope might agree with them, that 1%ers will grab all the newly created wealth for themselves. They’ll try, of course, but fortunately for all of us, it’s impossible! Elon Musk can’t sell luxury Tesla’s to himself. Folks need to have the $50,000+ needed to buy one. We forget that there are $1,000 concert tickets, sporting events, and bottles of wine only because there are people who can afford to pay for them.

For far, far too long, we have equated income with work. Perhaps that was reasonable during the Age of Industry; the Cyber Age is breaking that bond. Elizabeth Warren is right: today’s wealth is the product of yesterday’s work. Her only mistake is her failure to understand that this is a good thing! My ancestors worked 60 hours/week so that my grandchildren will never have to work just to live. Ain’t life grand?

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Suffice to say, my 21^st century concept of work is very different from my parents’…or my own for most of my life. 1,000 flowers may not have bloomed (yet), but there’s more than enough variety now to fill out a nice bouquet. That said, going forward I see three viable approaches to ‘the employment question’:

1. Find something you love doing and figure out a way to get paid for doing it. Laughable in 1950, reality for many people today.

2. Work just so much as necessary so that you have the resources, but also the time and energy, to pursue your passion ‘off hours’. 

3. Apply your values and your creativity to your job and find ways to transform that job so that it becomes your passion…or at least a passion.

My parents were not unaware of passions. They had them. My father, for example, loved zoology. But it never occurred to them that those passions could be incorporated into the voluntary-involuntary servitude they called work.

A single sentence in a recent ad for a financial planning firm caught my eye: “For many advisors and their clients, retirement is the singular goal that defines a working life.” Yes, that was my father’s ‘singular goal’ (he retired at 59) and his father’s before him (65). 

Could there be a more poignant expression of existential sadness? Translation: I devoted most of my life to something that only became meaningful for me when I stopped doing it. I am transported to Sister Corina’s 2nd grade classroom: “Now let us all pray for the grace of a happy death.” Our goal in life is a stress free exit?

Sidebar: In theology there is a method called the Via Negativa. Briefly, this is the belief that it is impossible to make a declarative statement about God that is true. God is ineffable: as soon as we begin talking of God, we begin creating misinformation. According to this school, the goal of theology is to claw our way back to Ground Zero: Silence.

By analogy, we spend 40 years of our lives doing something we would not have chosen to do, continually adapting the job to minimize its most negative aspects, all with the goal of  not working at all: retirement, sweet rest, donna nobis requiem. 

They say insanity is doing something over and over and expecting different results. In that case, working without passion is insane. 40 years or 40 times 40 years, makes no difference, satisfaction eludes. There’s no use crying over spilt milk. What’s done is done. Whether things could have evolved in a better way is idle speculation. What we can do is change the idea of work that we pass on to the next generation.

We are entering an age in which work will be optional. Certainly, folks will want to be productive and industry will continue to be rewarded, handsomely – this isn’t Leninism (or even Lennon-ism) after all - but going forward, sloth will no longer be a deadly sin and no one will ever again have to work just to survive!

The task now is not to shape our lives to fit the requirements of our jobs but rather to craft our work so that it optimizes the lives we choose. “That’s your job! Go get it.”

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David Hockney’s "Large Interior, Los Angeles" is a colorful map of how lives started to change in the late '80s.

Instead of showing a boring, traditional room, Hockney uses bright, "pop" colors and weird angles to show a home that feels alive and busy. It captures that moment in history where our houses stopped being just places to sleep and started becoming personal hubs for creativity and "mental" work. It’s a perfect snapshot of the modern shift toward a life where our careers and our personal spaces are all mixed together in one big, vibrant scene.