What Is a Job, Anyway?

I heard a great quote today:

“700 years ago, the idea of a ‘job’ was totally alien to us.”

The point of the quote is this: 700 years ago everything people did they did for themselves. They made their own clothes. They made their own shelters. They gathered their own food. The fruit of their work belonged to them, and it meant something. Today…today things are different. Today, we have jobs, and jobs are…? What? What is a job, anyway?

Merriam-Webster defines “job” this way: a small miscellaneous piece of work undertaken on order at a stated rate. A small, miscellaneous piece of work? Sheesh. That sounds so…impersonal. Unfortunately, for many of us, it is.  You see, the product of the work belongs to someone else. The output and the reason for undertaking the task are determine by one person while the actual execution of the task belongs to another.  Once that task is complete, the output is handed over to another for their profit, to fulfill their business objective. Payment to perform the task belongs to the worker. That’s it.

At the beginning of the Industrial Age, people made machines to cut down on the effort required to make something. In effect, the same work could be done in less time. But instead of leaving more time for the individual, it resulted in more stuff being made. People started trading and selling their surplus stuff. Productivity was increased by machines. Eventually, somebody bought a second machine to make more stuff. Or maybe somebody decided they didn’t want to run the machine and hired a person to do it for them. Either way, there was a machine, and an owner who didn’t want to do the work.  Somebody needed to run it, so the owner paid for the labor. The first job was born.

In the process of taking on these jobs, people became accustomed to work that was divorced from the end result. The product of the work, the output of the job, became completely and utterly meaningless to the worker. This is the world of work in which we labor today. We move money around that doesn’t really exist. We provide services in support of products that often don’t really exist. We create and maintain vast virtual storehouses of information. We deal in vaporware. We deal in “stuff.”  Worse, it is stuff that exists simply to fulfill our desire to have stuff.

The story is longer, and Seth Godin tells it exceptionally well. You can find it on his blog here. My focus is on this point: we work to make money to get stuff, and most of the work we do is aimed at creating the stuff we want to buy with the money we make. We make stuff. We get paid. We use the money to buy stuff. The stuff sells. We stay in business. We make more stuff. The cycle is a circle, and it’s a pretty crazy circle at that.

I don’t advocate a return to the days of Laura Ingalls Wilder and that little house she made so famous. But the stuff…so much stuff…keeps piling up. You might switch your stuff out. You might throw your old stuff away. You might donate your old stuff. It doesn’t matter. Once the stuff is made, it exists. There is no such place as “away.” When we don’t want to look at the stuff, we bury it. That can’t be healthy, either physically or emotionally.

What I do advocate is consideration for what you do to make money and what you are doing with that money. As I’ve said before, I’m not here to judge. I am here to make observations, to share my opinion. My observation is simply that 700 years ago, a job as we know it today was an alien idea. Somehow, without these jobs and all this stuff, people survived. They thrived. We’re here 700 years later as proof. That being the case, simply take a look at what you do to make money and what you do with that money. Make sure that stuff isn’t in charge of the cycle. Make sure that you are. Doing so increases your chances of finding the kind of lasting happiness that I know we all want.