On Work

Yesterday in class, during our discussion of Marxism, we drew a picture of a hopeless worker laboring day after day at a mindless job. We talked about an assembly line, as the most recognizable example of a job that’s going nowhere. It reminded me of that past Saturday, when I had worked at St. Anthony’s on the sort of cafeteria-style assembly line. It’s a soup kitchen, more or less, so the experience isn’t like working a job, and I’m not trying to equate the two, but since the memory popped into my head, I thought about whether it had been enjoyable or not. I was working the starch, scooping German potato salad that was disturbingly yellow and goopy, and the experience did get repetitive. After three hours, I was developing a blister on the inside of my right forefinger, and I had fallen into a sort of rhythm, almost a trance I guess. And that doesn’t mean that I know what it’s like to be a factory worker – that claim would be laughable. But even that little peek into such an experience was interesting because I could see myself working there every day and not feeling alienated.

Why is that the case? I think that maybe, at least for me, alienation isn’t based on simply the nature of the job. A job on an assembly line isn’t intrinsically awful. And maybe that’s where the means to the end that so many people have been talking about in their blog entries comes in, because a job must be justified by something, and maybe it’s the reward at the end of the day. But I’d like to think that that end isn’t always something like making money, getting a promotion, getting bigger and more important in the world of business or whatever. Because maybe the work itself can be tied up in the end; maybe the attitude that a worker has towards the work or what the worker thinks will come of it can determine the degree of alienation he experiences when working the job. In this situation, I didn’t feel alienated at all, because I knew where exactly each scoop of potato salad was going, and to whom, and knowing that I was helping feed someone who was hungry made me feel like I hadn’t wasted three or four hours.

I don’t expect that, when I’m older, I’ll have the luxury of volunteering and not working a true job. But I’m surprised to hear so many other students say or write that they don’t expect to enjoy their work, seeing it as only a step on the way to success. On one hand, I understand that very few of us would choose to work if we could afford not to. And that we work, more often than not, for the things we have to look forward to after the work is done. But at the same time, I feel like our society is such a workaholic one that there must be something to it that we value, and I don’t think it’s just the money. When I think back to elementary school, I remember the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Even now in high school, I feel like we’re allowed to choose our classes, encouraged to follow a path that we find interesting, with the implication that we’ll eventually follow creative writing or photography or marine biology to a career and that, in that path that we’ve chosen for ourselves, we’ll find some degree of happiness. I don’t know whether that happiness will come from a monetary reward, from the work itself, or from knowing what good that work is doing in someone else’s life, or a combination of the three, and I suspect it’ll be different for all of us. Maybe I’m an idealist, but I’ll hold onto that idea for as long as I can. For now, even if I find myself resenting writing yet another blog entry for MEH, I’ll try to remember that I chose this class for a reason, and maybe I’ll even end up writing about something I find interesting and engaging, so, even if what I’m really looking forward to is finally going to sleep when I finish this last assignment of the night, I can say I didn’t go on auto-pilot and go through the motions of doing my schoolwork, disconnected and disinterested.