Jobs

It drives me crazy to hear so much talk about jobs and how people need jobs. Just give us jobs. As the “Great Recession” drags on, and politicians continue to bloviate, I am completely up to my ears in bricks made up of “J”s, “O”s, “B”s, and “S”s. But what are jobs? They are opportunities, situations in which you trade your time, strength, and/or expertise for money. And what do you do with the money? You spend it, of course, so that other people, the ones who make the stuff you buy, can also have jobs. If you don’t spend, people won’t have jobs. So get a job so you can get money to spend so that other people can have jobs too. Oh, but don’t forget to put money aside for retirement because it’s your right, your entitlement, to someday not have to have a job, but you’ll still need money to spend so that other people can still have jobs even while you’re taking it easy. (And of course if they have jobs, they can continue paying your Social Security.)


Annie Dillard wrote an essay about visiting a primitive tribe in the Amazon. She noted that they had no word for “work”. They did work: hunting and gathering, carrying water, weaving hammocks, etc. But it was just what they did. It wasn’t work and it certainly wasn’t a job. It was just life.

I have a job. I am an English professor at a community college. It is a privilege to work indoors in heated buildings and to interact with young people, trying to help them open their minds to new ideas, to help them create knowledge for themselves. I get paid enough that I can buy things that will keep others employed. I have good health insurance, so I can do my part to support the health care industry. I get a lot of time off, though as a teacher, much of that time is spent preparing for the next class, the next semester. For all its perks, it is a job. It is a situation in which I trade my time, strength and expertise for money. And it stresses me out. I can rarely fall asleep unaided. I take sleeping pills to medicate myself for the side effects of having a job. I also suffer from depression and take medication for that. If I did not have to go to work, I could just be depressed for a while and eventually snap out of it. I am medicating myself against the realities of my life, rather than any life-threatening illness. I am medicating myself so that I am capable of having a job.

What is the alternative to jobs? Should we all go back to subsistence farming and bartering? It always seemed to me that the point of creating computers and robots was so they could do our work for us. But they don’t. They just make us do more work. We should all be enjoying the fruits of their mechanical labors and maybe we could be, if we could just decide that we already have enough, and we don’t need bigger, better, faster, more. Then we could gradually slough our work onto the machines and just enjoy what is. In Alice Walker’s story “Everyday Use”, after fending off an onslaught by one greedy daughter (who wants all the stuff she disdained growing up with because she now realizes it is valuable), the mother sits with her other daughter out in their dirt yard, sucking on snuff and “just enjoying”. If we could stop trying to have more, we wouldn’t need “jobs”. We would still work, of course, but we wouldn’t have a word for it, because it would not be something politicians promised us. It would just be what we did, along with singing, dancing, praying, reading, laughing, hiking, skating, swimming, drinking coffee, watching movies… and “just enjoying”.