In his wonderful collection of aphorisms, The Bed of Procrustes, Nassim Nicholas Taleb succinctly captures why we dream about giving up work for our passions instead of translating our passions into paid labor, why, if we restrict ourselves to the primary colors, we avoid dreaming in a combination of yellow and blue. But before turning to Taleb, I should note that if one first learns, as I did, that yellow and blue make green from the Glad sandwich bag advertising slogan, is it any wonder that the boundaries around permissible happiness are erected at the outer limits of one’s dream job? As a child when I dreamed of happiness it was most often as a multimillionaire athlete- instead of enjoying sports for sports sake I fantasized it into a profession. As a college student my friends and I gave serious consideration to opening a tavern together- it wasn’t enough to sit around drinking and enjoying one another’s company. And as an adult I imagine waking up to find my name on the New York Times bestseller list- writing for pleasure could only ever be masochistic because the only possible pleasure would be the pain of not getting published. So, pace what I said above in paragraph 1 and the start of paragraph 2 about what we’re really dreaming of, perhaps the truth is that while we’d all like to imagine that if we won the lottery we’d quit our jobs and devote ourselves full time to whatever our own version is of e.g. photographing the indigenous wildlife, we’re all much more likely to end up becoming someone’s boss. Which makes Taleb’s take on what it means to be alive all the more damning: “You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else’s narrative.”
If Taleb is correct, as I believe he is, then “the dignity of work” is one of the greatest lies ever told, and there can only ever be “the dignity of leisure.” As members of the unhappiest profession (per official Forbes magazine rankings), lawyers know this. See Shepherd’s description of how a bunch of lawyers reacted to one of his motivational speeches on the “Five P’s”, as quoted in Johns Hopkins Magazine: “Nobody threw any tomatoes.” In the magazine Shepherd’s line is described as a joke, and perhaps it is; I have yet to figure out a way to tell my wife something serious without first joking about it (in what I’m sure she would describe as a painfully unfunny fashion.) Shepherd’s speech to the lawyers about the importance of passion reminds me of the time I was at a Jewish gathering in celebration of the holiday Tu B’Shevat, the “new year” celebration for trees. Several folks had been asked to prepare short readings for the celebration, and one individual, who happened to be Israeli, began a nice story about a tree that was used to make a cradle for a baby, which sounded nice, but was then used to make a boat for a miracle worker who could calm the seas with a word, at which point everyone started to get a little antsy. When the story continued and the tree was being used to make a crucifix the entire room erupted in a single voice: “That’s a story about Jesus!!” No one threw tomatoes at the reader, who, by way of explanation, had only read the first paragraph of the story before deciding it was a perfect tale to tell at Tu B’Shevat, but, needless to say, we didn’t get to hear how the story ended. Just so, I’m surprised Shepherd made it through all “Five P’s” without the lawyers exclaiming in unison, “Hey, this story’s about happiness!”, and heading for the door.
But it’s not just the lawyers who are unhappy. A recent Gallup poll found that amongst the global workforce, only 13% of workers like their jobs. ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-leadership/wp/2013/10/10/only-13-percent-of-people-worldwide-actually-like-going-to-work/ ) 63% are described as “not engaged,” while the remaining 24% are “actively disengaged,” which is a polite way of describing the difference between those who dislike their jobs and those who hate them. When I read the dust jacket for Taleb’s book I found the description of his central project, unmasking “modern civilizations’s hubristic side effects- modifying humans to satisfy technology, blaming reality for not fitting economic models, inventing diseases to sell drugs, defining intelligence as what can be tested in a classroom, and convincing people that employment is not slavery” (emphasis added) a touch hyperbolic. In America, after all, we are not even 150 years removed from the war that ended slavery qua slavery. But as I read more about the Gallup poll it occurred to me that it just might be my status as an American that was blinding me to the truth of Taleb’s assertion that “There is no intermediate state between ice and water but there is one between life and death: employment.” The poll found that the United States, along with Canada, had the highest proportion of workers who reported liking their jobs, at 29%. That figure, 29%, is uncomfortably close to the 30.4% of Americans who hold a Bachelor’s degree. ( http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/education/census-finds-bachelors-degrees-at-record-level.html?_r=0 ) And because I live and work among the happy 30%, I have no real notion of what it’s like to be a wage slave, my teenage summer gigs at McDonald’s and my quarter-life crisis nadir during a two-week stint stocking the shelves at a liquor store notwithstanding. No real notion that Taleb is waving the truth in front of a nose that I don’t even realize I’ve stuck up in the air.
The 13% of global workers who like their jobs is a figure just close enough to another number to give me pause. As defined by Wikipedia, Stockholm Syndrome is “a psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings towards their captors, sometimes to the point of defending them.” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome ) And just how many hostages experience this “phenomenon?” Again per Wikipedia: “The FBI’s Hostage Barricade Database System shows that roughly 8% of victims show evidence of Stockholm Syndrome.” And almost exactly half-way between 13% and 8% we find 10.9%, which is the exact percentage of Americans with advanced degrees, who, I humbly submit, are the pool from which the very happy, the 8%, are drawn. Subtracting the lawyers, who are incapable of happiness, should easily get us down from 10.9 to 8%.
To be crystal clear, I am suggesting that the happiest of the happy, those who don’t just like their jobs, but those who actually love them, are suffering from a form of Stockholm Syndrome, one in which they (or we, given my advanced degree and overall job satisfaction, which easily meets the 13%’s “engaged” criteria ) have so aligned themselves with their captors that they take “What’s good for IBM is what’s good for America” as an article of faith. In his novel The Pale King, David Foster Wallace captures exactly how this happens in a passage describing “the soldier personality, the type that believes in order and power and respects authority and aligns themselves with power and authority and the side of order and the way the whole thing has got to work if the system’s going to run smoothly.” If you’re a soldier, you will, assuredly, “want to line yourself up with the real power. Have the wind at your back. Tell them listen: Spit with the wind, it goes a whole lot further.” And if you’re a soldier with an advanced degree, you’re already this close to being one of the 8%. To put a twist on a phrase from Slavoj Zizek: Enjoy your syndrome! Or, to translate it into motivational self help-speak: Find your passion!
No comments:
Post a Comment