Stop Working--Start Engaging

I wrote what follows particularly with my sons in mind.  All three of them are often talking about how boring school work is, how much they would like to do/learn things that are interesting. One of my greatest wishes for them is that they will find occupations that will make them happy and excited to be involved.  My eldest and youngest sons often say, in a tone of resignation, how boring school is.  My middle son, who is attending high-school in Germany, never says it's boring.  It may be hard, but not boring. Trying to understand what really interests high-school students is a science in itself.  I do think, though, and this is the thrust of this essay, we will do best with our students and learners, if we succeed to convey our excitement about what we're trying to teach them.  Excitement and engagement with a subject is contagious.  But in order to convey such excitement we have to learn and know how to think about our subject matter in such a way that it truly, truly is exciting to us.

I have a secret to share… I really don't' like to work. In fact, when I have to work I drag my feet, procrastinate, think of ways to get out of it (and mostly find them). However, I like being active, doing things and being engaged with the world, with people and things around me. This is how I make money: I don't work…I do things and engage with others. I am a therapist…I listen to others. But this attitude towards work is not only there when I listen to others it also encompasses other areas of my life. Cleaning, laundry, gardening, grocery shopping, maintenance, etc. I do not think of these as work. Rather they're activities I like to engage in; doing them makes me happy! They're meaningful to me, even the repetitive ones like cleaning and laundry.  If I don't feel up to doing them I don't do them, I don't work on myself to do them. Rather I wait until I feel like doing them.

Calling something "work," for the most part, seems to me a kind of legitimation or justification even. We do it when we want to say that the activity is serious and morally right.  We don't call criminal activity "work"(even though, arguably, it increases the GNP by a lot). Nor do we call it work when a person relaxes on the beach or just sits somewhere and reads. We call those "lucky" who claim that their work is "fun" or "fulfilling." But largely we believe that work is defined precisely as not being pleasant or fun. If we don't resent going to work just a little bit at least, we're running the risk of being seen as someone who doesn't work, who is faking it.

But I don't see myself as faking anything. When I go to my job I often witness (and to some degree experience) crises, I struggle, I get exhausted and tired. But those experiences, daily experiences, don't change the way I feel about this kind of daily engagement. It makes me happy and fulfilled. It provides fuel for my soul in ways that only being engaged with something can.

One thing that definitely feels like work to me is competition. Whether it's a board-game, grades or an athletic activity, when it becomes competitive I begin to dislike it and, eventually, will not want to do it anymore. Competition has the potential to turn even the best, most fun and pleasant activities into work.

But look at the culture we live in, especially American culture. Of course, we "work out," we have homework, school work, go to work, work in the yard, work on our relationships, do couple's work, inner child work, work on our attitude, and on Sundays (for Christians the day they should definitely not work) we "wor(k)ship." We expect our children to accept that life is "hard work." And we would like them to live up to it, not back away from it, confront it and deal with it. As Max Weber observed in his Protestant Ethic, work has become the a person's way to stand justified before God. This means that our attitude towards work is driven by an obsession with God. As parents, when our children don't work, we feel guilty because we believe we haven't brought them up right and ashamed because we'd rather others don't know this…and we work hard on our children to become more obedient and...work.

Unfortunately schools are largely playing along with this.They emphasize competition, testing, career and income.  I would argue that as such schools help foster among their students a fundamental distaste for life. I know this is not a new argument, but have we begun to understand it? What are we doing to really change how school, colleges and universities have turned into worker factories? Places where workers are produced. And I mean "worker" in the widest sense of the word: whether you are a college professor or garbage collector, book-seller, nurse or musician you likely have been told that you need to work--and work hard--in order to get somewhere. What would it be like to say instead that, in order to get somewhere, a person needs to find what engages him/her or speaks to him/her. And…where is "somewhere?" The author Peter Bichsel remarks in one of his books that the first thing children learn in school is that it is no fun. I would like to add to this that it doesn't matter how much "work" the teacher puts into finding "fun learning activities." The crucial thing that makes school so distasteful to many is actually not the content. It is the demand that students learn what they're presented with rather than choosing to learn what interests them. So, it is not the case that students are generally uninterested and increasingly less willing to "work." What is the case is that they increasingly feel their unfreedom, especially in a school system that is increasingly test-score and product oriented.

So, where is this somewhere that engages us? Often it seems that we imagine it as an odd mix between "somewhere over the rainbow" and somewhere in a place with "little boxes made of ticky-tacky." Places, in other words, that are both shot through with a sense of luminescent peacefulness and mundane and ordinary shabbiness. I am sure you have seen and been in those places before.  They are the quintessential 20th/21st American suburb. You can see them driving down the high-way. You may even confuse them with a similar place you just drove through. 100, 150, maybe even 200 evenly sized plots, a quarter or half acre in size. Every house a palace. Every house uniquely built--unique means built after a handful of blueprints that were used for this particular subsection. Perhaps you even live in one. These suburbs often have networks of side-walks. But we hardly see anyone ever walking on them because everyone is working. And let's not forget about the elaborate front-porches . . . complete with whicker furniture, decorative lighting, perhaps a rocking chair. The trouble is, nobody ever sits there because everyone is working (or has worked so hard that the only "plausible" distraction is to fall asleep in front of the tv, not sitting outside). Street names end in fancy words like "Boulevard" "Court" or "Place".  These suburbs often are treeless and the same three ways of landscaping front-and back-yards are supposed to give a sense of "in nature"to those who live there.

Need I be any clearer? The life we think we work for  is an empty one. It actually carries within itself the "specter"of socialism. There is only one difference: socialism does not pretend to be anything else than what it actually is: a system that strives to meet its people's basic needs. Capitalism strives to do the same, but it promises one additional important value: freedom and happiness. Capitalism claims we're free to reach whatever we dream about. But the question is whether we can ever really reach our dreams through hard work. Perhaps reaching our dreams has very little to do with hard work. If we continue to believe that such work is free and freeing, then we essentially agree with the macabre slogan "Arbeit macht frei." Or, perhaps, we agree with the more benign but also disconcerting phrase "Work is love made visible."

So, what we're finding as we look at the structure of work in this country is that America is a deeply socialist country. Whether it is the vast sameness of life--suburbs, malls, highways, fashion--or the chronic lack of funds to repair and maintain our public infra-structure or the lines of people that queue up in front of stores on Black Friday to obtain the item they desire or the obsession with sports, weather and reality tv…we are finding ourselves, every day, in a world that can never provide the "difference" and "uniqueness" that has become an ideological staple of what America supposedly stands for and that are supposed to make us happy.

Work, and how we think about it, is an essential part of how this system is maintained.

Perhaps work is simply necessary. Might we feel better, if we stopped kidding ourselves about the nature of work? Could it be that work is what makes us most similar to every other kind of animal on this planet? An adult robin has learned (or brings with it) all the skills it needs to do exactly what its parents did: mate, build a nest, feed their off-spring until they can leave the nest and, then, repeat the same thing the year following until they're too old and will die. All robins live in the same kind of nest, they all need about the same amount of food, area around them, etc. Perhaps we're no freer than any other animal in this world.

What's different about humans, it seems, is our sense of and need for pleasure.  If animals need pleasure, they seem to experience it simply in the moment (of feeding or stretching after a nap). They don't seem to plan for it, let alone "work to get somewhere." Humans need pleasure in addition to food, shelter and clothing.  They need pleasure to experience happiness. The problem is that we're religiously bound not to admit our need for pleasure (lest we be called hedonist); and that, at the same time, our capitalist system conspires in a large scheme that promises pleasure everywhere, while at the same time milking us for work and money. This promise for pleasure is, of course, not the same as a promise of happiness.

So, it seems that the key to moving towards a life of pleasure is precisely not to do the things the system suggests we do to obtain pleasure. Instead of working towards pleasure, we work with pleasure. The only real way to do this is to stop "working" and to start engaging. This also means that the concept of a "life-work-balance" is flawed as it suggests that life begins after work (which explains why so many people feel deadened by their work). How to engage in this way is the really difficult question. Perhaps, some might say, it is easy to engage with meaningful work (such as being a teacher, therapist or even carpenter). But how about the many factory jobs, the jobs in the fast food and service industry, etc. ? Can they be meaningful? Can a person engage with them? And wouldn't it be better to do them precisely not by engaging with them but by doing them in a disengaged manner?

I can only raise these questions, not answer them.  I know that if we could get back to learning how to engage with our work, we would feel less burn-out, be more creative, treat others with more respect and, overall, experience a kind of pleasure in and through work that is life-giving and sustaining.