TOW: The Working Life

I think back, all the time, to two books I read in environmental philosophy back in my undergraduate degree.  The first was Ishmael, which I will always love, and the second is Small Is Beautiful, which is quite possibly the most boring book on the planet, but also one of the most applicable books to modern society.

You see, Ishmael is all about the culture of agriculture and modern society.  The book asks:  how many people can live on the planet and we all can still be happy?  The answer seemed to be, that we create more people than the planet can sustain, and we starve ourselves and our families over time.  In other words, most of the problems associated with famines is our own fault.  The book is fairly complex, but the gist of it is about how differently we live from people who first walked the earth...most of us have forgotten the principles of living well, both in an environmental sense and a cultural sense.  We don't value what we have.

On the other hand, Small is Beautiful is sort of like a next step up from that, a Jane Jacobian guide to how to create the kind of communities Jacobs envisioned as creating great urban living.  It talks about the value of work, and the value of having enough in terms of work....because work should be the focus of our lives, in the sense that work should be seen as a social good.

What I have come to realize is that a large portion of the industrial, and now the information age, are unhappy with the nature of work.  And more than that, people are generally unhappy with their lives.  While some would say it's because we work too much, I would instead say it's because most of us work too little.  Throughout the day, we all do tasks that have meaning for us, some more than others, but work means an act of creation, or even simply an act that has value to us and society.

Let me interrupt this thought with a story.  I used to work at a commerical grocery bakery.  Every day, I would create buns, pastries, cookies and other good for consumption.  I loved cooking and baking, and this had value to me.  Every day, however, at the end of my shift, I would throw away approximately 20 pounds of pastries, buns, breads, sweets, and generally anything else past its due date.  Those items were not allowed to be donated, given to charity, used, given to employees (that's actually considered theft in a grocery store) or otherwise consumed.  It was waste...in grocery terms:  it was "shrink." 

Throwing perfectly good food, food that was meant for pleasure and not neccessarily for nutritional value, killed my soul.  To me, there is nothing better in modern life than being able to do something, to have something, simply because you want it.  It's a luxury not many countries or people can afford these days, and baked goods are made to produce that feeling of 'feeling good' that has been gotten over years of hard work, work that actually mattered.


I think that, sometime in the near future, someone is going to stand up and say, "Hey, the way we work isn't valuable, and we're hurting our own people and culture by continuing to create line workers out of perfectly intelligent, vivid and interesting people."  Many movies have explored this problem, many books have explored this problem, but unfortunately, the words 'outsource' and 'downsize' are still a very large part of our vocabularies. 

I think my life changed after reading those books, but even more so after I saw their basic principles applied again and again. We're becoming so efficient that we're eliminating jobs as the population increases, and some people have simply given up on looking for work.  In other words, we're no longer starving people because of the inability to monitor the amount of food we have, but we're willfully creating a society where people are going to be unemployed for at least a larger portion of their lives.  And more than that, we're outsourcing the valuable, high level thinking work to cheaper companies, while keeping on the people who can do the mundane tasks that no one would do without the benefit, the value of creating something that work should give us.