Wed 6 Dec 2006 7:59 PM
Not Kings, but Snowflakes
Posted by kaxline under Art , Economics , Education , Fatalism , Friends , Hesitating , Identity , Media , Philosophy , Productivity , Society , Suburbia , The Future , Work
My peer group - for the most part - is a well-washed mass of royalty. Or, rather, anticipated royalty. Chris Ott at Shallow Rewards puts it best:
Our parents dreamt of doing lots of things and didn’t, dousing their desires to make sure we could explore ours more fully. The working at gas stations and walking miles in the snow…many of our parents had to supplement their family’s income, and wanted better
Ultimately, our parents’ drive to deliver a better childhood is proving a mistake, if a well-intentioned one. We are a generation embarrassed to have day jobs, embarrassed to work for a living. Embarrassed not to be kings and queens.
Ott acknowledges the myth that this wasn’t basically true of our parents’ generation as well. His implicit solution is to work a tolerable job and save your passion for your free time. Here’s where I disagree. While I appreciate the sentiment and the notion that most kids my age should just get over themselves, I take issue with the one-size-fits-all solution. Some people are legitimately depressed by their 9 to 5 jobs, and it seems like a format for living that better serves fictional economic bodies rather than individuals.
I read about a study once that said the average U.S. employee works more hours than anywhere else in the world, but the amount of work accomplished with each additional hour was the lowest. In other words, our attitude towards work keeps us at the office longer with the least amount of payoff. When you have an arbitrary standard of 40 hours a week, you get people extending 30 hours of work unnecessarily. And I would wager that the increased employee dissatisfaction plays a role in productivity as well.
I can understand why the work week was structured the way it is, but it’s one specific solution to an organizational problem that is perhaps outdated. The drive to maximize one’s earning torque doesn’t work for a lot of people. And for that segment of the population there are socialist pipe dreams. In my view, we should be looking back upon this time a hundred years from now and putting this labor schedule on a level analogous to how we view serfdom now. It’s simply an inefficient system for any civic goals you may have. The only realm in which it makes sense is one driven by bureaucracy rather than populism.
And so I think Ott’s solution is flawed. I think that the king syndrome is the product of our fucked up view towards work and leisure, and the problems of polarizing one’s life into those two categories in the first place. We shouldn’t think that we’re special, but we should acknowledge that we are unique. And rather than having a market economy - which is not a level playing field by any stretch of the imagination - create a variety of life paths that so that you can choose how best your talents serve consumers, we should have a system that takes care of economic necessities while allowing for the diversity of human experience.
Fruity, I know. But I’m sick of most people getting nothing just so everyone can entertain the illusion that they could have everything.
December 8th, 2006 at 12:56 am
Keith,
If Terrel Owens does 3000 sit-ups a day, and I do 10, it’s possible that his productivity of sit-ups per unit of time drops below mine after whenever I quit (or after whatever point we decide to mark out as “additional”). That’s just brute diminishing returns.
Your fact about relative productivity doesn’t do any work, unless there’s decent reason to believe that folks in lower work-week countries are having better luck at self-actualizing (by avocationally pursuing passions, or whatever, in that “extra” time). Sounds great, but why believe it’s true?
Also, the generational tension you gloss (and link to) seems to describe the tension between boomers* and their parents more accurately than it does the tension between boomers and their kids. I don’t think the trop about self-denying predecessor generations is plausibly recycled here.
*Cf. “The Graduate,” “The Big Chill,” etc.
December 8th, 2006 at 7:08 am
The difference is that no one is making you do an arbitrary amount of sit-ups a week to feed and house yourself. I don’t necessarily believe it’s easier to pursue your dreams in other countries, but yeah, they spend less time working and I think that’s qualitatively better than the attitude towards work here.
Even without this anecdote, it’s my observation that people work unnecessarily hard to support the largess of industry. A few people are writing the rules to benefit themselves and screw a lot of people over, and no one says anything because it’s an implicit foundation of our culture that people should spend most of their lives working. I don’t agree.
It’s true that the generational tension I cite is also largely true for the boomers and their parents. But there’s a nuanced evolution to that phenomenon that I’ve experienced first hand, and in some ways I think it’s even more true for me and some of my peers. I think it’s rare that wealthy parents imbue their children with a sense of humility, and this distorts a child’s expectations for themselves later on.
December 10th, 2006 at 1:56 pm
The difference is that no one is making you do an arbitrary amount of sit-ups a week to feed and house yourself.
This misses the point; which is that nothing in the scenario with me and TO tells you whose program is closer to correctly valuing sit-ups as against alternatives. You seem to suggest that the fact that we’re less productive in the marginal hour after some unknown point is implicated in the proposition that American culture overvalues work as against alternatives, but, *alone*, it’s just not.
…they spend less time working and I think that’s qualitatively better than the attitude towards work here.
A lot depends on how you unpack “they” here, but I’m not convinced this proposition flies. I haven’t read anything about job-satisfaction recently, but my sense is that we pretty regularly rank above countries like England and France, and below countries like Denmark. That sort of an ordering doesn’t facially support the claim that we’re especially bad at this stuff. For what it’s worth, I think roughly the same ordering obtains with respect to average happiness.
To be clear, I don’t disagree with your ideas that American culture overvalues work and that this situation in some respects contributes to our leading less fulfilling lives than we might. I just don’t really see how what you say here diagnoses that connection.
I think it’s rare that wealthy parents imbue their children with a sense of humility, and this distorts a child’s expectations for themselves later on.
I’ll buy this one, but I also think it’s just a fact about human psychology that as more basic problems are solved, our needs become increasingly sophisticated (see, e.g., Maslow’s hierarchy). My own intuition here is that because, on the whole, we do such a terrible job of addressing “higher level” needs, young middle-class folks often misinterpret or misdirect those needs in a kind of impulse to get outside of ordinary life–your “king syndrome.” Inasmuch as I think a shorter work-week would be great, I tend to think it would only marginally impact this problem.
Anyway, interesting post, and thanks for the exchange.
December 11th, 2006 at 4:57 pm
I think we may just be missing each other on this one. I do perhaps over-romanticize schedules in countries like Spain where work seems to be a secondary influence on how you spend your time. But in reality I don’t know if anywhere really has an ideal situation across the board.
My initial point that I strayed from and perhaps obfuscated was that having 40 hour/week day job is an out of date, organizational solution that doesn’t work for a lot of people. But because it’s been around forever, you get marginalized pretty quickly if you don’t fit the mold. Even I am guilty of looking down on the occasional friend who can’t cut it in the 9 to 5 world. This is becoming problematic since I’m turning into one of those people.
The reason I brought up the work/efficiency thing (which I think would make sense if I could find the original source and cite it correctly) is that I’d like to take solutions from other cultures and augment the things we do well here as far as support for flexible lifestyles.
This is all, of course, opinion. I don’t mean to radiate a voice of authority as I struggle to articulate these musings to myself.
In any case, thanks for the discussion.