WHAT’S SO GREAT ABOUT WORKING 9-5?
I don’t mind coming to work,
but that eight hour wait to go home is a bitch.
Anonymous
I have always believed that everyone needs a job. When I hear dire reports on diminishing jobs I think, “How will these people support themselves?”
I think there is nothing like steady job with benefits to give your life a solid foundation. Old values are so comfortable that I for one feel guilty when I chuck them in the wastebasket. I want to meet the parent who doesn’t say to his college graduate, ”When do you start work?”
I figured out that a job didn’t mean happiness in the sixties and I can still remember how frightened I was to dare to forge ahead doing what I loved instead of reporting to an office five grueling days a week. I decided I wanted to write stories about interesting people and I did just that. I mailed them out to magazines every day. Some were accepted and some were not. I did a bit of baby sitting, tried my hand at dog walking, but always, I came back to the typewriter (what we used in those days) and did what I loved best: write. My parents thought I had committed a sin. I couldn’t have embarrassed them more if I had stood nude on a busy corner with a sign saying “Available.” And I agreed with them. I felt I was being immoral to love designing my days to suit only myself.
If you think that attitude went the way of vinyl records, you are wrong. When my friends Richard and Susan got married five years ago, Richard’s parents were horrified. “You don’t have a JOB,” they said. “ How can you support a wife?”
I know in my head that there are many ways to support yourself that don’t involve a long commute and a desk in one office for forty years. I know hundreds of people who support themselves with a series of part time jobs or do low level work to feed themselves while they do what they love in the evening. Henry has a degree in nuclear engineering and he is working at a coffee house so he can write his book. Sean quit his teaching job because he couldn’t stand being confined in a classroom with 30 unwilling students. Now he gardens for a living. Paul cooks gourmet meals for busy work people and delivers them ready to eat at dinner time. None of them are rich and all of them are happy….but if one of them were my kid, I would nag them to death. “What will you do when the money runs out?” I’d say.
I see unhappy men my age who spent so much time working for someone else that they didn’t prepare for a life where they could do what they loved instead of what earned a steady wage. My friend Tony retired from the business community when he was 65. He decided that he had enough savings set aside that he could afford to pursue a life in the arts. He became a successful playwright and in his spare time, (which he has now) he sings with his church choir. He takes time to go on hiking trails with his wife and he is a happy man. Yet, when his son was out of a job, he was beside himself with worry. “How will he take care of his wife and three children?” he said.
It want until I reminded him of how happy he was that he realized he was sentencing his son to the same frustration that he had endured for forty years. It is another one of those cases of telling you “do what I say, don’t do what I do.” All of us are concerned for our children’s future. We all know that the proverb ‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’ can sentence our children to a life of thankless drudgery. But we also know that food and shelter take money and no one wants to think of their children living in poverty. That wasn’t part of the dream we had for them.
I know that no job ends when you leave the office. I see young people on their computers in coffee shops and on the bus. The work day never seems to end. People these days don’t want to work in one place for one person for forty years just to get a gold watch and a pension. Fulfillment. Growth. Experimenting. That is what your generation is about these days and I think it is wonderful. Now that I am of a certain age, I want in on the excitement you have every day. Why not?
There are so many things I want to do before I die. I want to run outside draped in a shower curtain and sing to the stars. I want to climb a flag pole sprayed with glitter singing “wish on a star.” I want to wear flowers in my hair and do cartwheels on the pier. If you join me, I will break dance in the middle of the freeway.
The difference is no one sends me on a guilt trip or says, “Why don’t you get a job?”
My parents are dead.
