Reframing Work #1: Ditching Drudgery and the Conventional View of “Work”

This is the first in a two-part series about work, what “work” can mean – and what it should mean. Stay tuned for the second part on Thursday (you might want to grab the Aliventures RSS feed, or pop your email address in on the right) and come back next Monday for some exciting goodies…

What do you think of when I say “work”?

I asked this on Twitter, and had this response, which I felt moved and saddened and unsurprised by – because it’s one that so many people will have:

Work = selling my soul for money. Being forced to be away from people and places I love. (@ydnab40)

Some others managed to be a bit more positive, but the same general feeling was still there:

Generally a groan, followed by determined sighing. But once I actually get going it’s fine. (SamaelTB)

Work is what you do so you can afford to do fun stuff but it’s also what prevents you from doing the fun stuff. (icecolbeveridge)

Work and play can be essentially the same thing, but work means Serious Faces. (williehewes)

For most of us, “work” pretty much equals “our job”. Work is where we go: the office, the shop, the factory. Work is a portion of the day – a large portion.

Our attitude at work is why we laugh (wryly) at Drew Carey’s:

Oh, you hate your job? Why didn’t you say so? There’s a support group for that. It’s called everybody, and they meet at the bar.

We’re Being Conditioned

The education system conditions us into this view of work – through the way school is structured, through popular wisdom (“you have to go to university if you want a good job”) and through careers advice.

School itself is, sadly, a fairly effective preparation for the world of employment.

• You’re forced to work with people who you didn’t choose to be with
• You have set hours and days for school
• You have a uniform, or at the very least, a dress code
• If you finish your work early during a lesson, you may have to sit bored for the rest of it
• Breaks, such as lunch, are at scheduled times

I suspect that few of us would say we loved school. We may have been bullied (which can also happen in the workplace); we may have been bored rigid; we may have found that the teaching style was a poor fit for our learning style. Much of our time was probably not spent in a way that interested or engaged us.

We developed other interests outside the confines of the classroom: perhaps sports, art and crafts, music, creative writing, computer programming. (All of these may have been touched on in school, but it’s rare to be able to pursue a passion deeply during the school day, or, for that matter, the work day.)

Worse, as we grew older and were given careers advice, there were very few voices mentioning alternatives to employment. Sure, we could take the path to being a doctor, a lawyer, a lorry driver, a journalist … but did any of those involve following our passions?

The cost of university was justified because it was a preparation for the world of work. We were pushed towards the milkround of graduate jobs. Friends started on the 9-5, Mon-Fri route, and we joined them.

Maybe we hated our jobs from the start. Maybe we started off keen, but grew indifferent and jaded over the months or years. Even so, we can’t always see a way out…

Work as a Necessary Evil?

For a lot of us, work falls pretty much into the category of “necessary evil”. We get a job because we need to pay the rent. We need to pay the rent because society has told us to move out of our parents’ basement, and because squatting and communes are just a bit too ‘70s.

Work pretty much means money. We don’t expect work to be fulfilling or exciting: we just expect to get paid at the end of the month.

When I graduated from university, I spent the summer looking for a job. Until that point, my life had been pretty clearly mapped out. School, exams, university.

I studied English literature at university, because I loved the subject. Beyond “published novelist”, I had no idea what career I might enjoy. In the end, I spent a muddled, miserable summer trying to find a job, kicking my heels around my parents’ house, bickering with my younger siblings. I wanted to move to London so I could be nearer my boyfriend.

I knew, from when I applied for my tech support job, that it wasn’t going to be a great fit. I knew it’d be boring for me, and it wouldn’t use most of my skills. But they offered me £19k, and it meant I could live in London.

Unsurprisingly, as soon as the initial novelty wore off, I started asking myself “Is this it?” Some rather unpleasant realisations sunk in:

• My optimistic idea that I’d have “a few hours” each day to spend writing my novel didn’t match up with how much energy and time the work day took up.
• Within a month, I’d learnt pretty much everything there was to learn about the job … and there was no real possibilities of promotion
• There was a sense of emptiness in the work and the culture of the work. I felt as though I had to squash my personality, my uniqueness, into a tiny little ball of dutiful corporate drone. (And this was working in a small company with a casual dress code and some very bright colleagues: I can’t imagine what it must be like at a big conglomerate.)

Coincidentally – or not – at about this same time, I read an article by Steve Pavlina, 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job. It made me feel pretty depressed.

I didn’t think I had a choice: I was convinced I had to stay in my job. I was tied to a six-month contract on a tiny box-room in a Victorian terrace. I’d got some savings, but I didn’t want to spend them. But I found it hard to shake off the sense that this was all pointless.

Is Your Life One of Quiet Desperation?

If you count the commute, being stuck in or near the office during your lunch hour, and occasional overtime and worries about the job outside your actual working hours … you’re probably spending half your waking life engaged in “work”.

And it might seem like there’s no way out. You’ve got rent to pay, or a mortgage, or dependants. Your parents or friends would think you were mad if you quit your job. You have plenty of things you’re passionate about outside your paid employment, but they’re not making you any money, or not anything like enough to live on.

This might resonate with you:

Have you ever noticed how many of us seem to live “lives of quiet desperation”, as Henry David Thoreau puts it? We feel trapped by forces beyond our control, trapped in a mindless job, for the sake of money, status or recognition. We complain that we never seem to have the time for what’s really important to us, because our jobs take so much energy and focus that we hardly have anything left over. We plod along day to day; sometimes we even dread getting out of bed in the morning.

(What is a Wage-Slave? from Why Work?)

Here’s the Good News…

You’re not trapped.

There are alternatives. (Always.)

The worst case scenario isn’t that bad.

You can live a more meaningful, more fulfilled life.

All I want you to do, today, is to start believing that. Whatever your situation is, there are options. It can be very hard to admit to yourself that they’re there – you may find that you have to take off the blinkers of society and media conditioning in order to see them – but you do have choices.

On Thursday, I’ll be exploring alternative meanings of “work”, and how you can spend your time, energy and attention on something much more meaningful to you than drudgery.

In the meantime, if anything in this article has struck a chord with you, I’d love to answer questions, offer support or simply hear your experiences. Just leave a comment, drop me an email, or use the contact form.