Most Jobs Have Become Undesirable, Notwithstanding Even the Most Impassioned Claims to the Contrary
May 16, 2007
It's a relatively common American phenomenon. People—from flight attendants to attorneys to schoolteachers and social workers to garbage collectors and electricians and cashiers and editors and sales representatives and strippers and mechanics and truck drivers—will generally say they like what they do: "I love what I do."
Most will have a reason. The flight attendants and truck drivers love to travel and to encounter a never-ending parade of new faces, a few of whom will become regular ports in life's storm. The attorneys are fond of money and thrill to each new conquest. The schoolteachers and social workers like to know that they're making an actual difference in the lives of their charges. Garbage collectors and electricians—well, we cannot live without them, and they know this. Editors love to read, and they take an almost embarrassed pride in the size of their brains. Sales representatives love to sell. A good stripper is at the height of her powers of attraction. Mechanics generally like working with their hands, and they take pride in the stains that outline their fingernails.
But let's take a closer look at each of these professions, plus one or two more, comparing pros and cons typical to each.
| TODAY’S JOBS: TAKING THE GOOD WITH THE BAD | ||
|---|---|---|
| PROS | CONS | |
| Flight attendants | Sharp outfits; the excitement of fraternizing at each new stopover; the adrenaline rush at liftoff and touchdown | Being obliged to work in a highly explosive human sardine canister designed to maximize airline profits all the while you earn the salary of a typical legal secretary; dealing with drunk passengers wearing rumpled travel clothes; having to face the prospect of being a middle-aged flight attendant; tiny bathrooms; being required to submit to regular drug tests |
| Truck drivers | The thrill of the open road; the hue and cry of compression breaking | The burden of having to digest heavy meals during long hours in the cockpit; the need to strictly regulate alcohol intake according to driving schedule |
| Attorneys | Good money; the brief sense of wholness and triumph from the successful case or signed contract | Extremely long hours, to which you are driven by the illusion of your own importance; pariah status among those who suspect whose fault it is if hardly anything in this country is fun anymore |
| Schoolteachers | Working with some particularly nice kids; the momentary joy of heading off for a long summer vacation | Having to deal with a growing pool of troubled kids in an age of poor discipline encouraged by a climate of litigious fear; low pay; the need to work year after year after year, until, by the time you're all done, you'll be old and rather jaded |
| Social workers | A feeling of making a difference in the lives of a few troubled people; that moment when a client "gets it" | Extremely low pay; having to deal with those people for whom there is no hope of any sort of redemption in this life |
| Garbage collectors | A feeling of making a difference in all of our lives; the wail of the hydraulic trash compactor pump | Dirty working conditions; low pay; the need to work year in and year out until, by the time the last bin is emptied, you'll be old and jaded, if you're still alive; the tendency toward cigarette smoking among members of the profession, perhaps to counter the smell |
| Electricians | A feeling of being one of the pillars of modernity; the illusion of total clarity after surviving the occasional near-electrocution | Dangerous working conditions; low pay; being put in the somewhat thankless position of having to support a system that almost everybody takes for granted |
| Copy editors | The pride of intelligence; the thrill you get when the author tells you that you were in fact right about some extraordinarily esoteric detail | Long hours spent, more often than not, with stuff that's better read quickly and forgotten; low pay; the constant reminders that you do what you do because you're better at interacting with cats than with humans |
| Sales reps | n/a | A feeling that you didn't make the stuff you're selling and that you could easily be replaced by someone else; depression over the decline, since the early 1980s, in alcohol consumption at lunchtime |
| Mechanics | A feeling of being indispensable; the smell of gasoline and the sound of motors coming to life | Dirty working conditions; low pay |
| Strippers | Pride in one's beauty; the rush you get from turning grown men into putty | Unwanted advances; STDs; the nagging feeling that none of this is going to last |
| Cashiers | The thrill of handling money | Low pay; a conflicted resentment toward small change; a fear that you might be replaced by self-checkout stations in a cashless society |
| Doctors | A feeling of being smart and making a difference; the knowledge that you are a good catch for some lucky man or woman; the sense of security you get from the smell of antiseptics | Having to face the growing legions of patients who, miserable in their jobs, have made themselves sick; dealing with patients who, let's face it, aren't worth saving but whom, thanks to lawyers and the pervasive human fear of the unknown, we are obligated to save |
I would love to believe that the pros outweigh the cons, and it may well have been true in another era. But there's an additional factor in all of this—one that applies pretty much across the board. The goal of maximum efficiency, the be-all and end-all of a free-market system—now bolstered by a newly professionalized and computerized core of accountants and corporate consultants—is ruining it for almost everyone. It's not good enough anymore to make a living at something. You have to do so according to a ruthless accounting that leaves little room for rest or error. Worse, payroll is generally the most expensive, inefficient aspect of any profession. Translated, this means that people are the biggest burden on any business model. It is up to those who run the show to figure out—to the very last penny—how to get the smallest number of people to work at peak efficiency for the greatest number of hours and years for the least amount of money. If they could enslave you, they would.
Perhaps some form of socialism is finally necessary. During the Great Depression, many Americans were convinced that it was. Unfortunately, the ease of annihilation in the age of heavy artillery squelched the socialist urge under the jackboots of big business in the wake of overwhelming American victory in the Second World War, after which socialism and its corollaries—communism and poetry and homosexuality—were squelched beneath the flat-top haircuts of a new generation of power-hungry narcissists. Then, for a brief period in the late 1960s, a new generation—favored with the spoils of their parents' success and a four-year hiatus from real life—tried to recapture their grandparents' idealism. And today, pockets of it still exist, but mainly as an ineffectual, cynical chorus of antiwar, vegan righteousness on the fringes of our money-driven society.
Okay, perhaps that's going a little far. But it's true that people who have a lot don't like to give it up. That's why socialism has always failed and always will fail. In any case, I have to get back to work now.
© 2010 Russell David Harper