I recently overheard a conversation between two relative strangers: a middle-aged, mothering woman was asking a scrappy-headed and pockmark-faced young man in his mid-twenties how he liked his job.
“It’s okay,” he said, staring down at his unlaced black Skechers.
“Pays the bills, right?” she prompted with an encouraging smile.
“Yeah, no – it’s not so bad. For now.”
His “it’s okay for now” response seems to sum up the vague sense of detachment experienced by a large swath of working folks these days. A recent survey from Right Management revealed that over two-thirds of respondents were unhappy at work.
This comes as no surprise to some, arguing that work is nothing more than a curse, a punishment from God. After all, isn’t that how it was depicted in the early account of Genesis after the Fall? “By the sweat of the brow you will eat your food” (Gen. 3:19). So lace up your bootstraps, or your Skechers, or whatever, suck it up and march forth into the prickly thickets of the gnarly workforce. Any naïve attempts to package it up differently will only lead to disappointment and disillusionment. The human race screwed up a long time ago, and that’s that.
Well, honestly. This is quite depressing.
Work is simply an act of creating or producing output. It can take all sorts of shapes and forms, whether we get paid for it or not. And come to think of it, weren’t Adam and Eve working before the Fall, anyway? Sure they were. They were subduing the earth and naming animals and making babies, just like God told them to do. The only difference was they had the benefit of that delicious hyper-local super-organic fruit dropping right off the trees, which left them free to pursue more creative and fulfilling outlets rather than tilling the soil.
