Meaningful Work

As we grow up there are cornerstone, keystone and capstone events in  building a life. I have two sons, one who is finishing up engineering school and the other who is planning to go to college next September. Now my older son is ambitious, he has worked hard, done well and next year should have his degree in Computer Science . The future is always scary but I think he's prepared.

Now my other son is just as smart but not a scholastic star. His interests is in the arts and that sends an icy chill of anxiety down my spine -maybe because I know too many talented artists that live barely above the poverty line.  Now he's been accepted to two different colleges with very prestigious and extremely expensive degree programs.  

Last week one of the colleges hosted an open house. I had never seen my son this enthused and the trip was kind of a family bonding event. We drove whole day through a snow storm and back home in a second wave crappy weather. It wasn't a blizzard but we saw plenty of cars and trucks that slid off the highway and needed to be rescued.

We also had some time to talk about "meaningful work". It's an important part of life -like love. And like love, meaningful work is difficult to describe.  There is that physical need to make our daily bread but also a deeper need to give that work a purpose, to have it become part of a narrative we use to identify ourselves. After we're introduced to any stranger the question of "what do you do for a living?" is the first or second thing we ask out of habit.

In the past I would have a bunch of playful, vague and deflecting answers. It was a surprise to see how many people were nervous around somebody they couldn't identify. I had one neighbor, a very nosy insurance agent,  who was so rattled by my lack of a job title he actually went through the trouble of investigating me. When he was unable to find anything significant (because he didn't know where to look), he convinced himself that I was part of the witness protection program.  Of course I'm not but his misconception had a side benefit because it kept him out of my hair. He gave up on trying to sell me insurance too.  

In the minds of most people we are what we do. As my two sons try to settle on a career path they are also creating a big part of their adult identity.  Along with that identity, their career path should lead them to finical security and a sense of purpose. That not only what they do should bring in the money but shouldn't crush their souls and grind down their humanity into dust.

Unfortunately there are not enough opportunities for everybody to be the Captain of their own ship (always a shortage of ships).  For a bunch of different and conflicting reasons most of us end up as on the crew of somebody else's enterprise.  Our labors and intellectual properties are an open market commodity and though slavery has been abolished there are many creative minds working hard on how to make free people as close to slaves as possible without actually clamping on the shackles.

Even if a new world without exploitation should ever evolve what would be the nature of work and its meaning as the world continues to automate?  In Fritz Lang's movie Metropolis the future could be better when the managers and workers (the mind and heart of the city) recognize their mutual interests to help each other. Metropolis was a futuristic world of big machines and heavy industry, it was the utopia of a 1920's understanding of the world.

Kurt Vonnegut in his book Player Piano saw early on the darkening shadow of a post-industrial society back in 1952. Sometime in the near future World War Three had created a terrible labor shortage and ten years after the war the last few craftsmen have their physical skills recorded so that computer driven machinery can do the work safer, cheaper and faster. Large pools of people eke out a living where all the basic needs are met but it's a world of drab and tacky  emptiness. Maybe that's one of the cruelest things you can do to a person, make them a dependent consumer and never let them be an active contributor.

In the book Player Piano and the movie I Robot you have a rebellion of former workers replaced by the machines.  There's almost a subtext saying that even a job where you're under appreciated is still better than living a society that does not need you. Meaningful work is a necessary part of life and without it you become as socially stunted as trust fund baby that has nothing to look back on their lives except a pile of receipts from a perpetual vacation. Like slavery it's the control of the population when they are nothing but reserve labor and talent. 

 I like this because people believe this but it so not true. Ancient Egypt was never a slave society. Over and over again archaeological evidences shows the great pyramids were built with voluntary labor. Many of the stone blocks even have 4,000 year old graffiti of workers bragging about their abilities. 

 Not the best recording  -so I included a copy of the lyrics to follow along with.

Lyrics to The Day John Henry Died by the Driveby Truckers.

I watched the rain; it settled in. We disappeared for days again.
Most of us were staying in, lazy like the sky.
The letters flew across the wire filtered through a million liars.
The whole world smelled like burning tires the day John Henry died.

We knew about that big machine that ran on human hope and steam.
Bets on John were far between and mostly on the side.
We heard he put up quite a fight. His hands and feet turned snowy white.
That hammer rang out through the night the day John Henry died.

When John Henry was a little bitty baby nobody ever taught him how to read
but he knew the perfect way to hold a hammer was the way the railroad baron held the deed.

It didn't matter if he won, if he lived, or if he'd run. 
They changed the way his job was done. Labor costs were high.
That new machine was cheap as hell and only John would work as well,
so they left him laying where he fell the day John Henry died.

John Henry was a steel-driving bastard but John Henry was a bastard just the same.
An engine never thinks about his daddy and an engine never needs to write its name.

So pack your bags, we're headed west and L.A. ain't no place to rest.
You'll need some sleep to pass the test, so get some on the flight
and say your prayers John Henry Ford 'cause we don't need your work no more.
You should have known the final score the day John Henry died.

And one more song, this one by Utah Phillips. What are we at the end of a working life?