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Plenitude of Work – January 2, 2011 And the other day, someone commented to me that unjobbing seems to be a self-absorbed luxury. I countered that a variety of motivations are at play, many not about luxury at all. Baby boomers are getting to retirement age and wanting to continue to work as a way of staying “young.” Other people are still jobless due to the recession and are looking for creative ways to pay the rent. Those with jobs find themselves working harder for less buying power. Some people worry that more economic hard times are ahead and want to be prepared by developing greater self-reliance. Still others are just plain burnt out and fed up, wondering if there’s more to life than the nine-to-five grind and are willing to trade some purchasing power and stress for a simpler and healthier lifestyle. And then there are the parents who want to stay at home with their children or elderly parents. Fogler identified the common ground among all these people when he wrote, “What we have going with our jobbing orientation is chronic national busy-ness (alias ‘business’), which has proven itself to be unhealthful for humans and our planetary home. We must look in another direction. We must put less emphasis on jobs and more on cooperation, simplicity, and serving one another. This may very well involve meaningful work, but that’s not the same as jobs.” There are many useless, mindless, nasty, unhealthy, soul- and planet-destroying jobs out there, which need to be eliminated one way or another. Meanwhile, we can follow the Buddhist path that says even the humblest job can have meaning. Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, “To practice Right Livelihood, you have to find a way to earn your living without transgressing your ideals of love and compassion. The way you support yourself can be an expression of your deepest self, or it can be a source of suffering for you and others ... Our vocation can nourish our understanding and compassion, or erode them. We should be awake to the consequences, far and near, of the way we earn our living.” (The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, Parallax Press, 1998). In a recent letter to the editor published in The Progressive, author and philosopher Wendell Berry took that a bit farther by addressing the issue of work’s quantity and quality. He said that we need to ask a variety of questions about work before – as do some unjobbers – we suggest people are doing too much of it. Questions like whether or not we chose our work or feel compelled to do it to earn money; about how much of our intelligence, skill and pride is involved in our work; if we respect the result of our work; and what are the ecological and social costs of our work. However, although there is much important work to be done that has positive ecological and social benefits, there is not enough willingness to pay for it. And expressing one’s deepest self or even worrying about the consequences of one’s work is difficult when struggling to pay the rent. That, I guess, is where simplifying comes in, and having some self-sufficiency skills. Rolf and I are fortunate to have found right livelihood, we
can manage to pay our bills, and our work is often our play, even though the
hours are long. That, I think, is the essence of unjobbing, no matter what the
original motivation.
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