Thoughts on Work

I just listened to a podcast of writer/philosopher Alain de Botton who wrote The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. You can listen to this 30 minute podcast here.

Here's a brief summary of the podcast:

Richard Scary’s children’s book “What Do People Do All Day?” was his inspiration.

Generally work is something we suffer through.

Freud said the 2 parts of happiness are love and work.

All kinds of jobs lie behind the more well known jobs.

We’ve become alienated from knowing how the things we use on a daily basis are made.

But it’s fascinating to know how things come to be.

When you’re a tourist you get shown things in a museum about the history of the place but you don’t get shown the factories of modern life.

The idea of what it means to be modern – the world of abundance

We’ve got unbelievable productivity – we’ve become too efficient, we have too many cars, e.g., thus people are unemployed.

Previously, there was a crisis when there was a shortage, now there’s too much.

We’ve worked too well, we’ve worked ourselves out of jobs.

Many of us are very small cogs in giant machines – this becomes dispiriting.

A feeling of alienation results and people get depressed.

Many organizations that make big profits are involved in making very small things, like cookie factories - and workers there have very specific tasks.

This is a modern condition – the very specific specialization involved in these factory jobs.

When people begin a career, they have this tension of economic value versus spiritual/meaningful value.

Heroes in our society usually make a lot of money. Too often if you don’t maximize income you are not seen as successful.

There have always been these 2 value systems in the history of religion - a choice to be made between worldly success and love/spiritual enlightenment.

This is a fundamental tension in human life.

Our work is supposed to make us happy – yet this is a modern notion.

Through most of history work was a punishment, something you had to do.

But attitudes about work have changed right around the same time attitudes about love changed. (arranged marriage versus marriage for love)

With this change work should have the qualities of play. You should love what you do in work.

We all know people who have found work and love that is truly meaningful and almost perfect, but this is a very small % of population.

We’d probably all be a lot happier if we realized that truly engaging work and love is rare, maybe seen in only about 5% of the population.

Some manual work is a chance to express yourself – a carpenter, e.g.

We have portraits of exceptional people around us that we feel are the norm.

We are always excited to think that we could be one in a million, but what about those who are not the 1 in a million?

Many of us don’t know what we want to do, especially young people.

Many of us know what we don’t want to do, but not what we do want to do.

Many career counselors are under such pressure to find jobs for people.

To really work out what someone should do with his/her life is a monumental task for a career counselor.

The one resource we’ve really wasted is human talent b/c we don’t know how to match people with their proper occupations.

What is it to be ambitious?

The respect for ambition is heroic in our society and people come under suspicion for not being ambitious.

Many ambitious people in business are not successful in other aspects of their lives – family, spirituality, etc.

Ambition is a very personal journey.

In high school many of our kids are directed in the wrong way, making very big decisions. Many times these decisions are made in a hurry.

Right now (at age 40) I’m interested in architecture but at 16 I wasn’t interested in it.

The minute we walk into a party we are asked, “What do you do?” That is our identity and if we don’t say the right thing, we are shunned from conversation.

What if we asked people we meet at a party things like, “What do you dream of?” “What do you hope to do?”

The business card title is not truly the real identity of the person.

Religion had division between Catholics and Protestants. Catholics believed that the most important job was to be the Pope. Protestants say all jobs can be valuable; it doesn’t matter what you do, but how you do it.

That message takes a lot of anxiety away.

We ask ourselves, what will be the point of my work in 100 years?

Work is an attempt to do something that outlasts time. Humans have a need to do something that outlasts us.

The wonderful thing about work is that it keeps us busy and focused on tangible day-to-day goals – keeps up from focusing on anxiety and the big questions of life.

Work is to be celebrated for giving us focus, for giving us something to do even if no one cares in 100 years, that’s ok, it served its purpose for us on a daily basis.

Education system is a mish-mash of vocational and liberal arts – we are often unclear of what young people want. The most determined can make their own path, but many drop out.

Until you are 18 you have to jump through the education hoops, but suddenly the world opens up when young people enter college – there’s no right or wrong choice, it just depends on your temperament and personality.

There is a tremendous hunger for guidance in these issues. There’s a lot of loneliness in people’s questions.

Artists and writers can give people confirmation of their thoughts & questions – to make them feel less lonely. That in itself is a kind of solution.

But there’s no magical solution to these difficult questions, yet it’s comforting to put words to feelings.

The Importance of Play

Here are 3 paragraphs from a recent New York Times article called “Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?” By PAUL TOUGH

To read the whole article, go here.

Kindergarten:

“Kindergarten has ceased to be a garden of delight and has become a place of stress and distress,” warned a report released in March by a research group called the Alliance for Childhood, which is advised by some of the country’s most esteemed progressive-education scholars. There is now too much testing and too little free time, the report argues, and kids are being forced to try to read before they are ready. The solution, according to the report’s authors, is a return to ample doses of “unstructured play” in kindergarten. If kids are allowed to develop at their own paces, they will be happier and healthier and less stressed out. And there will still be plenty of time later on to learn how to read.

Check out The Alliance for Childhood and their recent report called Crisis in the Kindergarten. I once visited a Waldorf kindergarten and was so impressed at the simplicity of their kindergarten routines. The children were self-motivated, engaged, busy, exploring and happy. None of them were supposed to learn to read by the end of the year. Their day wasn’t divided into separate chunks of time for learning different subjects. They were baking, singing, chatting, playing make believe and fort building all day long. It was so soothing and refreshing and it felt so unhurried and developmentally appropriate.

Rewards and punishments:

In the past, when psychologists (or parents or teachers or priests) tried to improve children’s self-control, they used the principles of behaviorism, reinforcing good and bad behaviors with rewards and punishments. The message to kids was that terrible things would happen if they didn’t control their impulses, and the role of adults, whether parents or preschool teachers, was to train children by praising them for their positive self-control (“Look at how well Cindy is sitting!”) and criticizing them for their lapses. And in most American pre-kindergartens and kindergartens, behaviorism, in some form, is still the dominant method. But Bodrova and Leong say that those “external reinforcement systems” create “other-directed regulation” — good behavior done not from some internal sense of control but for the approval of others, to avoid punishment and win praise and treats. And that, they say, is a kind of regulation that is not particularly valuable or lasting. Children learn only how to be obedient, how to follow orders, not how to understand and regulate their own impulses.

Alfie Kohn writes and lectures on rewards and punishments for both teachers and parents. Check out his books Punished by Rewards and Unconditional Parenting. I feel like there is too much rewarding done in classrooms across America. Children need to do something for the sake of doing it, not because they will get an extrinsic reward for completing a task. Only then will true motivation take place. Please, let’s stop the carrot and stick mentality! It’s so superficial and insulting to a student’s intelligence and ability.

Play vs. Work:

Today, play is seen by most teachers and education scholars as a break from hard work or a reward for positive behaviors, not a place to work on cognitive skills. But in Tools of the Mind classrooms, that distinction disappears: work looks a lot like play, and play is treated more like work. When I asked Duckworth about this, she said it went to the heart of what was new and potentially important about the program. “We often think about play as relaxing and doing what you want to do,” she explained. “Maybe it’s an American thing: We work really hard, and then we go on vacation and have fun. But in fact, very few truly pleasurable moments come from complete hedonism. What Tools does — and maybe what we all need to do — is to blur the line a bit between what is work and what is play. Just because something is effortful and difficult and involves some amount of constraint doesn’t mean it can’t be fun.”

Yes, why can’t play and work be fun? If school were more like summer camp and enrichment programs then students would have fun and enjoy working on their goals. Why do we separate school from fun? Why do most children remember field trips, friends and extra-curriculars fondly when they reminisce about school instead of remembering the subject matter they were supposed to have learned? We need to find students’ passions to help them learn what is engaging and give them a reason to work toward a goal. We need to stop telling them what their goals should be, but instead help them explore what it is that is both fun and work at the same time. Isn’t that the adult mantra -- love what you do, do what you love?