Our Work Defines Who We Are

Middle of the day and the men are idling about, gathering on corners, sitting on stoops, watching the cars go by. Have you ever been in a neighborhood like that? I’m talking about those places where joblessness is mired in double digits and so the men - yes, especially the men - go out of the house without destination and just stand there. Stand noplace.

There is an awfulness to it, a wrongness that travels your spine. Maybe they are low-tech leftovers in a high-tech world. Maybe they can’t find jobs that pay enough to be worthwhile. Maybe they have no salable skills. Maybe they simply, long ago, gave up.

Those men come to mind in the wake of a long Labor Day weekend and a study quoted last week in The Wall Street Journal. The study, recently presented at the Academy of Management in Cincinnati, found that, of 900 managers surveyed, nearly 40 percent would junk their jobs if they could afford to. In a similar survey conducted in 1955, only 14 percent of respondents said they would quit if they could.

Apparently, we’ve grown a tad disenchanted with the workplace these last 41 years. Does the phrase “going postal” mean anything to you?

If there’s common ground between the experience of the chronically unemployed and a group of managers yearning to breathe free, it is this: Work is one of the ways we define ourselves. The absence of work is another. I’ll bet many of those disgruntled managers would change their song in a heartbeat if they could stand awhile in the aimless shoes of men not working.

One is so many things in life, an individual self fragmented and parceled out to eager hands. Three hours a day a parent, one hour a day a cook, four hours a month a volunteer - and 40, 50, 60 hours a week, a worker. Small wonder that part of the self looms so large.

Notice that the icebreaker at the cocktail party isn’t “What’s your political affiliation?” or “What’s your favorite TV show?” It’s “What do you do?” - a question asked with the unconscious suggestion that you are your job title.

Yes, I understand that a junior assistant to the vice president in charge of procurement might be reluctant to buy into the I-am-my-work philosophy. And I’ve seen too many happy retirees to make the blanket statement that life without work is empty for all.

But imagine doing nothing - always. And not on a white-sand beach in the tropics, but in some graffiti-strewn corner of hell where each day of inactivity sucks a little more self out of you. Imagine doing nothing and therefore (the calculus is inescapable) being nothing. One simply hangs on, hangs out, hangs. And life goes whizzing by.

I am appalled sometimes at the casualness with which we demonize those people, how easily we imagine them all to be sluggards and ne’er-do-wells enjoying a stressless life. No, laziness is not unknown among the unemployed and poor. It’s no stranger to the wealthy and working, either.

But can anyone imagine that all of those people actually enjoy the malaise of nothingness? Given a chance to catch up, to pay their way, to gain some skills, to reconsider surrender, wouldn’t most grab it gratefully?

Because work is not just about being self-sustaining. It’s about being, period. Fatigue born of productivity feels good. Coins earned honestly have a different jingle in your pocket.

That’s the thing about work everybody used to know. It’s the thing the workplace may have beaten out of those disaffected managers who would walk away if they could. The thing would-be social reformers sometimes neglect to say.

We prod the poor with punishments, forgetting sometimes that the most powerful inducement toward work is reward. Meaning not just money, but satisfaction - the sense of purpose that comes with having someplace to be.

I am reminded of a story I recently read about a former welfare mother who found a job. She explained that her son would soon be starting school and she knew other kids would ask him, “What does your mother do?”

You know what made her proud? Knowing he would be able to answer.

xxxx