ihatemyjob

So much of the work we do is tied to money.

The questions we ask ourselves first usually have to do with dollars. How much will the job pay? What is the hourly rate? What are the benefits? Is health care included? What is the co-pay? What is the maximum pay out? When can I expect a raise? What are the prospects for advancement? What are my expenses?

These are not bad questions, but they all take as a baseline the issue of how much money can be made and how to get it as fast as possible. What if instead we asked questions that were more personal and more directed toward the nature of the work itself and our role in performing it?

Here are a few of the kinds of questions I’ve been considering lately in my own work:

What is the purpose of this work? Can I do the work well and does the work have value if done well? Who benefits if I do this work? Is anyone harmed by the work? Does the work make use of my skills, knowledge, and personal experience, or is all that irrelevant to the work? Am I valued by my employer? Do I respect my employer? Do we share common goals and ideals? Do I respect and like my co-workers and the other people I come in contact with day to day? Is there something I’d rather be doing than this? If so, how badly would I rather be doing this other thing? On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being totally dissatisfied and frustrated, am I closer to 2 or 9?

Most of us ask the first set of questions and, if we are honest, are mildly disappointed or else satisfied only moderately. That is because money is not real. Money is symbolic, representing and reflecting the stored economic value of a given culture. So if you love to shelve books and talk to people about them but your culture doesn’t much value that, your money questions will leave you frustrated but your work might make you pretty happy. If you hate selling securities but are good at it and are doing it at the height of an investment bubble, your first set of questions will yield positive answers and yet you will feel pretty miserable.

I’ve personally been on both sides of that (though not in those specific jobs), and I can vouch for the fact that happy and poor is way better than affluent and miserable.  Happy and affluent must be really great, and, at least in theory, I think it is totally possible, if not easy.

Imagine if everyone made their work decisions using the second set of questions as a guide and pretty much ignored the first? You might think that everyone would then make so little money that we’d have mass starvation on our hands, but another, more positive outcome is that, over time, society’s values would change. 

If ever there was a time in history when we needed to see society’s values change, this is it!

When we ask ourselves how we can be of use, we almost always end up contributing the things we are uniquely good at, and or the things that are most needed. By contrast, so many of the jobs created today by the corporate world fail the second test completely. Many of the worst paying jobs (for instance in call centers and in sales) are also the most prevalent, and many of these jobs not only don’t add value to society, they actually do quantifiable harm to others, their only ‘redeeming’ quality being that when done well, they enrich the stockholders in the corporation and the CEOs who run the corporation. But the rest of us? Not so much.
As we watch our economy melt down I think we are at a place where we have a unique opportunity to each ask ourselves the second set of questions as vigorously as possible and, finding the answers, start from a new set of values entirely. Just because there are few good paying jobs doesn’t mean there isn’t lots of work to be done.

The real question is, how can each of us be of use?

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