Annoying World
At my shitty email writing job this morning I was chatting with a coworker who used to be a reporter. I was incredulous, "Why would you quit being a reporter to write emails?"
Her answer: 15,000 G's a year extra in salary. But it wasn't as if she was a sell-out, she needed to pay back student loans...
This reality bugs me, both on a societal and personal level. I'll be in the same position after I finish my MFA. I'd hate to have loans dictate what I spend my time doing (in a way, they already are, I'm working at the lousy job). But on a political level, we always talk about jobs, jobs, jobs, without much concern about what TYPE of jobs they are. Sure, we talk about quality, ie money, but not what type of work we do. And I would like to live a world where people make themselves useful by doing something they care about. I guess if we lived in that world, no one would work as an email clerk taking orders from customers overseas.
And structurally, I guess we're doing a valuable service, getting customers their materials in a timely fashion so they can build their projects and so on, so forth. But who wants to spend their life being a useful cog in a machine (granted, we get leisure time, so we can have families, hobbies, etc)...I really don't know. I do think humans are on this planet to do something other that be a cog in a corporation and we could live in a world that doesn't reduce people to means (in the work sphere), rather than ends.
But it's also not as if we can look back on human history and see a time where people were doing work they enjoyed or loved. That, I'm sure, is a recent development, one my grandmother muses "wasn't even something they thought about." Most of human history has been about survival - and most of the 6 billion people living on the planet today probably feel the same way. And here I am whining about how college loans are annoying because they force people to live and work in crappy, high paying jobs. Hmmm, well, that's America for you.
4 comments:
A cog, perhaps. But different people are born with and develop different apptitudes. Some people might be quite content or even need the normalcy of a 9-5 job which is neither inspiring nor miserable. you are in an odd place, but I wouldn't assume that all people who have jobs such as yours share our thoughts.
We all have our passions. It's certainly not up to the government to define what jobs are available, the work force, demand and human ingenuity define that. There's often a great deal of risk in pursuing more tangential jobs and pursuits. Many people are much more interested in having families and security then striving for a (for lack of a better term) transcendent experience. they find pleasure and happiness in things outside work.
I worked for a year booking people into kayaking trips. That means I sat in an office, talked to a variety of people (from nitwits to PhDs). I loved it, largely as a result of the enviornment i worked in and the people who inhabited it with me. If the job hadn't disappeared I might have really enjoyed it for a few years. Yet, it was answering phones and filling out paper work, a job you might consider being a cog.
It's fairly more complex then you make it out to be. Perhaps you just didn't look long enough for a job that would be more to your character in terms of work and working enviornement. The individual is responsible!
But isn't the point that my coworker friend would prefer to be a newspaper reporter, but must do this corporate job to pay off her student loans?
It would be more akin to the situation where you wouldn't be able to afford to work in the kayak office and needed to take an ibank job to pay for grad school or college - I guess this is all a comment about the cost of education.
And the kayak job, while having a mundane aspect is not really "a cog" type job. My other job this summer is in a small documentary production office, and I do lots of data entering and BS, but I love working there because I like the project and some aspects of the job, and the people I work with.
maybe she's not a very good reporter?
Maybe not. But I've had pieces anthologized in books by major publishers and stories picked up by NPR and PBS. I had a book review column in a national glossy. Sadly, writing rarely pays. The book review column, for instance, paid a whopping $400 a month for two to three pages of content. I eventually quit once they got about 6 months behind in my payments and stopped taking my phone calls. The newspaper I worked for got snatched up by a major publisher who is notorious for firing people and rehiring them at a fraction of the pay. He "restructured" our salaries and essentially gave me a healthy pay cut. The justification, for me, in trading reporting for industrial supplies was that I could make a decent living, enroll in grad school (for which they pick up the tab) and use vacations, etc., to work on long-format magazine features, which is what I enjoy best. Unfortunately, Greg and I work at a customer service factory and getting time off -- for vacation or school -- is pretty much impossible. I would say I regret selling out except at the time I didn't have much of a choice. So now I'll come up with a plan C. The balance is out there somewhere, I think. It's just a matter of finding it.
Post a Comment