Jobs aren’t the only source of happiness

In high school, I spent four years working at a gas station and auto repair shop. I had to sell gas, wipe windshields and clean motor oil off of the floor. There was nothing glamorous about it.

Most of the people I worked alongside were older than me — three of them were grown men with families, and as far as the rest of the world’s concerned, they’d never really done anything more significant than sell gas, wipe windshields and clean motor oil.

But they were also some of the hardest working people I’ve ever met. One had another job driving forklifts through a noxious perfume factory that closed multiple times for work safety violations. Another delivered car parts all over Pennsylvania for a local distributor, doing small repairs and odd jobs on the side so he could afford his one-bedroom apartment.

If given a choice, I’d wager they would choose to live in better circumstances. Yet at the same time, I couldn’t accurately describe them as unfulfilled. They went fishing and camping on the weekends, spent time with their families or simply got drunk and watched football, perfectly happy doing so. If that’s not the true face of America, I don’t know what is.

Working part-time shifts meant my coworkers could keep doing what made them happy when they got the chance to leave the garage. The environment for dead-end jobs like ours’ can range from a gray office cubicle to the driver’s seat of a garbage truck, but the key commonality between the gigs is that they lead nowhere else. Part-time work commonly offers little to no upward mobility, hence, “dead end.”

But maybe a dead-end job is just a means to an end. There’s nothing wrong with not turning your real passions — whether they be watching football and drinking beer or making art and writing poetry — into financial gain. In fact, people care way too much about work, and it’s making us all miserable.

Our culture is one that blurs the line between “work time” and “personal time” far more than most of the world. Consistently, studies of public happiness show that Americans have some of the worst work-life balances in the world —  according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the United States is currently ranked 29 out of 38 countries in proportion of time spent on leisure. When you consider that “leisure” here includes sleeping and eating, it becomes even clearer how myopic American lives can be.

As a culture, we’re so obsessed with turning our interests into full-time occupations that if you work a dead-end job for any extended period of time, people assume you misstepped somewhere along the path to finding a real career.

Career-oriented people see service workers and quietly wonder whether they finished high school or have a criminal record preventing them from greater success. Maybe they’re just not very bright. You work the graveyard shift at a warehouse? Something must have gone wrong in your life.

These judgements are, at best, rude. At worst, they are straight up classist. Your life shouldn’t be defined solely by what you do to survive.

My former coworkers, along with more than 20 million other Americans, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, are part-time workers for “noneconomic reasons.” Their employment status isn’t necessarily decided by lack of opportunity or a declining economy, though it may be influenced by them at various points. For most of the conditions listed by the BLS, such as familial obligations or personal interests, part-time work simply suits these individuals’ lifestyles.

Take, for instance, the people who work to pay for their private passions: people who create art without hoping to live off of it or have a love for amatuer athletics but don’t plan on going pro or becoming full-time personal trainers. If, say, Sarah the rock climber’s collection of shifts over the counter at 7-Eleven funds her excursions to the Andes, she deserves credit for making it work. Instead, we question her decisions and hollowly judge her long-term stability.   

Until the 20th century, working was largely just something Americans did to get by. People worked in Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills to support their families, for instance, many incapable of affording the things their work helped build. There have always been individuals who find something they enjoy and are able to monetize, but the idea that one is entitled to follow their calling in life is still relatively new.

People seeking money — and only money — from employment are not missing out on life. They understand that labor is purely functional: employers provide funds, which employees then have freedom to spend. This is very straightforward. Yet somehow these workers end up brushed aside as having “bad” jobs or not pushing themselves.

Obviously there’s nothing wrong with being deeply invested in what you do. I still agree that the ideal would be for everyone to have the opportunity to make money doing productive things they love. But that’s a prescription people don’t necessarily need or want. If I just need some cash to buy crappy Chinese food and crappier beer, let me bus tables without asking whether it will go on my resumé. Our collective goal should be to reduce stress so that pleasures outweigh hurdles, not create a template for achievement.

Don’t act like fulfillment only comes with a certain shade of collar — a name tag can work just fine.

Matt Moret is the Assistant Opinions Editor for The Pitt News. He primarily writes about politics and rhetoric.

Write to Matt at mdm123@pitt.edu