What, exactly is labor... Is it better to have a job which fully engages and inspires you or one which doesn't require much effort, leaving you with abundant free time which which to explore your own interests (personal or even professional)? This really is a question the entire working world has grappled with over the past 50 years, perhaps without even fully comprehending the way it has touched all aspects of our lives and values in this time. For example, while women successfully entered the workforce in large numbers during this time, allowing many to find new sources of engagement and inspiration in work outside the home, salary growth stagnated over the same time in real terms, resulting in families doing about as well today as they did at the beginning of this period, in spite of contributing roughly twice the amount of labor.
The current generation of Millennials is said to be 'mission driven', valuing purposefulness over paycheck. It generally seems that employees want to do interesting stuff and make enough for it to be worth their while. Yet one can't ignore how a simple accounting of this seems to add up in the employers' favor, who have a natural interest in simply 'getting it done'. It starts to sound like a familiar story in which the 'mission' is to disrupt the fence painting industry, one bucket of whitewash at a time. One might also conclude that employees who wish to generally pursue the greatest career opportunities would do wise not to seek the most challenging roles, but rather the most boring and seemingly demotivating ones, such as accounting, where there is simply no opportunity for the pretense of a 'mission' or inspiration. Hence the employees dilemma: if you like your job and find it inspiring, then you are probably being underpaid.
It all comes down to how you define labor. Traditionally economists spoke of a 'labor market' in which labor, a commodity, was priced according to the supply (number of potential employees or resource hours) and the demand (number of roles or project hours). Under this paradigm, employees sacrifice their own time through labor, and are compensated by employers, who place a higher value on this than what the employees would be able to gain personally through their own activities (i.e., I hire a nanny to babysit my kids at $50/hour while meanwhile I make $100/hour at my job).
These days, this sort of talk could make you very unpopular around the office. Instead, we employees are like bands of warriors (vikings, pirates, those monks hitting themselves in the face with boards in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, if you're a grad student), and we simply need a leader to point us in the right direction so that we can actualize our goals in activities like standup meetings and hackathons. When it all comes together, you and your band of warriors share in the spoils and it's a beautiful thing. However, reality is often more like the jobs of our parents, but with longer hours and less security, making the myth seem all the more like a fairy tale.
Perhaps we're just overthinking this whole concept. When I was growing up, my dream (one of many) was to play lead guitar for a rock band like Bon Jovi, and even though I still haven't got around to learning guitar, that particular career option still seems pretty appealing now. Why wouldn't you want to play sold out shows to adoring fans (and groupies) every night for a top-tier salary?
It seems like the type of naive question only parents would need to address, simply, by explaining that only a vanishingly small fraction of guitarists ever come close to this kind of success and it often has very little to do with their actual talent. Yet the pull of the stage is strong and many a youngster has picked up a guitar in hopes that he can live this dream. And being one of these, I can't help but wonder if many of our other more mundane professions would benefit from the same parental lecture given the current employment market. Many of these opportunities which would have been considered boring and responsible in our parents' generation are now quite risky in reality, and yet the public has continued to entertain the same narrative. At the very least it appears that we could do with a thorough re-evaluation of the entire value proposition of labor from an individual's perspective.
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