The Machine

(This is a long one. If you're just looking for a freebie without the blabbering, scroll down for a link to a free audio file of The Four-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss.)

Work. Career. Job. Employment. How do I talk about this 400 pound gorilla without sounding like...well, a nut? Oh wait, I am a nut. So, it'll just be the usual blabbering.

Thankfully, I have the fortune of doing "meaningful work" in the nonprofit field with an organization that provides free services to an often underserved and overlooked population. I've worked for other stellar organizations (Habitat for Humanity, for instance) that provided transformative, amazing services but had severe management issues, which made for a horrible work environment when not interacting with clients or volunteers. So far, it seems that those crazy days are behind me, praise Allah. (Remember children, there is a thin line between helping and controlling. There are folks with serious issues in the helping professions.)

To sweeten the deal, I'm a grant writer, so I get the double pleasure of being paid to do what I enjoy. Overall, I have a pretty stellar gig. I get paid to write, my writing helps people, and the organization I work for has a great culture and is a genuine pleasure to be a part of (finally! Oh, how I paid my dues to get to this place).

But...(you knew that was coming, right?) I'm not a fan of our current national structures around work. My employer provides a kinder 37.5 hour work week, a lovely contrast from the martyrdom of past employers who scoffed if we weren't clocking 60 hours or more a week. Yet I don't know how we got here. Well, I know it has something to do with the Puritans and the Industrial Revolution. But I'm still not sure why we're going along with the 8-5 (um, what happened to Dolly's 9-5 tune?) when we don't really produce that much as a nation. China makes all our crap. Why exactly do we need to be chained to a place of employment as if we're all still factory workers, trying to fill quotas?

When I worked in service jobs, my time was consumed helping customers and tackling various tasks. Most often, I actually worked most of my shift. But in the white collar world of sitting in front of a glowing rectangle, the 8 to 9 hour days just don't apply. An old professor of mine used to tell me that if I ever found myself working more than 8 hours a day, I wasn't working efficiently. Since I was sharpened in laboratory environments, I was trained on timers and finished my work quickly. After I moved into the land of computer screens and meetings, I could easily find myself toiling away until the sun had long since set yet never getting enough accomplished.

After complaining loudly about how there just wasn't enough time in the day, I could hear that old professor chattering in my head about working efficiently. I started tracking my time like I tracked my spending. The martyr complex quickly died. I spent countless hours in pointless meetings (are meetings about meetings really necessary, people?), office chit chat (more accurately, gossip), hunting down information because I was disorganized, blah blah blah. In reality, I spent about 3 hours a day actually working, which historically is the average required for survival, even for the hunters and gatherers. The rest of the time was spent spinning my wheels, trying to feel important by hurriedly doing a whole lot of irrelevant crap.

So, I don't buy it anymore. And I don't understand for the life of me why we collectively continue to promote this parody. Although I doubt it's the same for factory or farm work or all white collar gigs, workplace presence has trumped productivity. We spend our obligatory 8 hours each day playing employee because we're required to. If we are honest about the actual amount we work and par our hours down to part-time to reflect actual productivity, we lose benefits and pay, regardless of the output.

There are some progressive companies that are bucking this trend, but they are few. What baffles me is that everyone in this current system suffers. Most of our waking hours are spent at work, and if we become brutally honest, not actually doing work. Yet we moo and move along with the herd, falsely earning our keep, regulating the more important aspects our lives to the scant time left or hoping we live long enough to fully live while in retirement.

In my fantasy utopia, employers set a productivity standard and employees meet those standards in a time frame that best suits them. If you're most productive from noon to 8pm and can finish your work in 3 hours, why shouldn't your daily schedule be noon to 3? If you can do a week's worth of productivity in two days, why is that not acceptable? Why oh why oh why have we all agreed to a system that requires the vast majority of our lives when it is simply not necessary?

Curtis White takes my query even further in his article The Idols of Environmentalism. White makes a compelling argument that the manner in which we frame questions about environmentalism and the context in which we approach "green living" are just as harmful as the demons we fight against when trying to save Mama Earth. He names our economic system as the destructive force and asks us to be honest in how we are the perpetrators of our own demise, simply because we continue to function within an destructive framework. Some thought provoking bits from the article:

We even seem to think that the natural system should work in consort with our economic system.

Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs. We are willingly part of a world designed for the convenience of what Shakespeare called “the visible God”: money. When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order.

We’re willing to be generous in order to “save the world” but not before we’ve insured our own survival in the reigning system.

THE LESSONS OF OUR IDOLS come to this: you cannot defeat something that you imagine to be an external threat to you when it is in fact internal to you, when its life is your life.

Ouch. Sometimes, the truth hurts.

There are some folks who manage to play within the framework while not being a slave to it, as noted in The Four-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss. (Dude must have some serious ADD and OCD going on. I had to put the book down, 'cuz he was making me crave Valium. Despite this, there are some great ideas in his hyper tome. For a limited time only, you can get an audio version of the book for free here) Simple living proponents focus on working less to reclaim what is rightfully ours--our time, the very fabric of life.

Naturally, these issues were far more pressing for me when I hated my job. I'm one of the lucky few now who actually enjoys my paid gig, but I'm not so in love that I wouldn't gladly complete my work in half the time to spend more time snuggling with the my dogs and husband. Yanno, if I could keep the same pay and my benefits.

I've never personally known anyone who genuinely escaped the machine and carved their own path. Some have claimed to, but they've usually had a partner who was really funding the experience, so their claims of "beating the man" didn't do much more than make me roll my eyes and sigh.

Yet I'm fascinated by stories of people, particularly those living in Western nations, who have managed to carve out lives outside of the mainstream work-consume paradigm. Ferriss' story is compelling, but I'd love to find tales of those who have broken free without resorting to the chains of capitalism and its resulting harm. I, like so many others, am simply grateful to have a job I enjoy and am trying to find various ways in which to work within the existing framework to cultivate more of an authentic life. But White's article makes me wonder if there isn't, perhaps, a better option available outside of the machine that has taken over the root system of our lives.