For example, imagine a family of 2 that has decided to have 5 children they can't afford. The woman is a stay at home mom and the father is a poor boy with no college degree, forced to take two jobs. One of the jobs he works full time at a Reebok shoe store in a mall hardly anyne goes to all week long, and the other is a part time job that he works in a Subway restauraunt making sandwiches for highway drivers, late at night. You can be certain, in our modern world, that everyone in this guys family will brag endlessly about what a "hard worker" he is, and how much he "struggles" for his family. In the dump of a city I live in, destroyed by Republican policies, a guy like this can and will be elevated to an almost "model citizen" slot of the community. He's seen as glorious. He has not left his baby momma. He has not joined a gang to earn "fast money". He is earning honest dough. At backyard barbeques, he never forgets to mention how one day he will go to night school, in addition to the two jobs, so he can maybe become educated, too. God this guy is so holy. He is such a hard worker! He is trying his best for his family...blah blah. He is doing what the Bible told him to do. He is working to eat. Working to live.
But what i find fascinating myself about the idea of how hard this guy works is that, more or less, what he actually does when he's at the two jobs, is hardly even discussed. In other words, the entire conversation about this mans hard workin' lifestyle begins and ends with the fact that he is employed, and he gets to enjoy that title "hard worker" thanks to being employed , regardless of what he does whilst on the job. In this case, for instance, he works at that shoe store in a mall hardly anyone goes to. Chances are he is literally just sitting in an air conditioned room all day, a room that smells rather nice, hardly even moving from his seat behind the counter. He is probably on his iPhone 3/4 of the day, and he might serve some customers...of course...but even then, what does he really do? He opens some shoe boxes, he goes to the back of the shop and gets the shoe they want, he rings them out at the check out line. He gets yelled at sometimes by his snobby boss. He has to wear a uniform. He has to deal with co-workers who are rude. Hard work.
Now, however, shoot yourself 5-600 years into the past, or even just a mere 100 years into the past, and bring to mind the type of job that an average fellow would have had to do then. Countless shoe stores and shopping malls didn't exist then. So what this guy would have done in 1905, or 1850, is that he would have probably been out in the hot sun all day, with no air conditioning, literally breaking back to earn his daily bread. He would have been doing the true definitino of hard work -- which to me, means you are working so hard, that you are breaking an actual sweat. Or that you may even actually be killed whilst on the job. A man who was forced to go out to sea to be a fisherman, for example, in the 1700s (a very common job a poor man would have taken if he was born in a coastal area) would be very likely to be killed whilst on the job.
Of course, some folks will gleefully shout, at this point, that many such jobs that are very hard and back breaking still exist. These folks are correct! However, the plain fact is that the majority of jobs these days aren't really back breaking jobs anymore, and they haven't been for awhile. Most jobs people have now aren't the sort where you might accidentally fall into an ocean and be ripped to shreds by a shark. You won't accidnetally stick your hand into a machine and have your arm torn off.
I have basically been poor my entire life...so has everyone I've known been poor. But I can count on one hand the number of people I know who have ever, even once in their life, done back breaking manual labor. Most people I know, I don't consider them "hard workers". I consider them merely employed --and i think there is a huge difference. They work at shoe stores, at clothing boutiques, as receptionists, as school teachers, at ice cream parlors, at gas stations, at Subway restauraunts. Some of them work as plumbers and fix toilets. Some fix furnaces. Some are firemen who run into houses and put out fires..a few times a year. But even the furnace fixers and the firemen -- which are considered pretty "dangerous" jobs in our modern time--aren't realy all that dangerous, in comparison to the average job of the deep past.
Does this mean, however, that jobs of nowadays are more pleasurable or something, since they are clearly so much easier than the back breaking manual labor of the 16-1700s etc? Yes and no.
You see, the real reason why many people still use the term "hard work", even when they're talking about a guy who sits in a single seat at a shoe store for 8 hours a day, in air conditioning, is because this work is still "hard" -- but not in the physical sense it used to be. The reality of work in the modern age is that its mentally challenging. Not because its difficult to sell shoes or be a receptionist. Quite to the contrary. The common work of today is actually so easy and so mundane that it is, in fact, maddening. Its so boring, in other words, and so mundane, that after about 5 days on the job, people start losing their minds doing it over and over and over. So they call it "hard work". But , like i say, this is a misnomer, and I do think its important to point out, because once you reveal that it isn't really hard work ... you also reveal something else.
Whats that? Its the basic fact that a lot of the work modern people have gotten stuck doing is largely useless work. Remember, for example, back in high school, when it was clear the teacher had nothing left to teach, and so she would hand out "busy work"? This is largely the sort of time period we find ourselves in right now. The work of the modern era is now largely without purpose. Even the jobs that so many would say have a grand purpose -- like someone who works as a psychologist and earns 85,000$ a year -- is actually pretty useless work, if you really dwell on it. After all, who are psychologists usually passing their time with all day? Hint: People who are deeply depressed over being forced to sit quietly in an air conditioned shoe store all the livelong day, for $12.00 an hour.
For those of us born in the post 1960 era, we were born into a world where so much of the really hard work was either already done (i.e. buildng massive highways, countless houses, laying down roads,and so forth) and where the remaining hard work was starting to be done by ever more complex machines. One must keep in mind, for example, that when Ancient Romans laid down the first roads of Rome 2,000 + years ago, they had no machnes to do the work for them. They laid those stones with their own hands, brick by brick, stone by stone, individually. When a highway is built now, even a massive one, workers are naturally involved---but so too are dozens of machines. The workers control the machines. Thats pretty much the extent of their hard work now. They control machines. It is almost laughable to think ofit as hard work, as i say, in comparison to what the Ancient Roman laying the stone road 2,000 yeras ago would have had to do.
Now there are a few very key reasons why this is all desperately important to point out, especially for the Republican crowd of Christians who literally never shut up about the values of "hard workin' folk". Here are the main reasons: In the first place, because so much work has already been done, and is now being done by machines, there actually have not been enough jobs -- even these boring dumbie jobs --- to go around for a very long while now. This is a curious little fact that it seems many Republicans out there, and also some DEmocrats I suppose, simply can't wrap their heads around. In the eyes of the conservatives, the only reason unemployed people are unemployed is always the same reason, whether you're talking about one person or an actual large number of people, like 10 million: They are unemployed because they want to be, and because they are bad and lazy. They are unemployed because they are stupid and cannot find work. Mostly, because something is wrong with them, and not with society. Certainly, the Republican screams at us all, nothing could be wrong with our society, because God loves us and he has arranged all things perfectly...
But once you come to understand the fact about the machines we have invented, and about how so much important work, as i write, is already completed (again, the highways, the buildings, the skyscrapers, the houses, the roads etc) you immediately should be able to see the reality of the situation: Huge masses of people are unemployed and it has nothing to do with them being lazy, and everything to do with them not being ableto find a job because so many jobs that once existed no longer existed--and were never adequately replaced.
If you don't believe that much of the work is already done, and you seriously believe that the concept of work is still as it was in a year like 1935, (i..e in 1935 it was all very urgent) take a moment to realize that, following a perod like the Great Depression, President Roosevelt, in an effort to save our country from devastating unemployment, created a thing called the WPA, the Works Progress Administration. This was a wildly liberal idea at the time, because he was using government money to fund it and conservatives hated it. The result of it, however, was a glorious thing, and the long and short of what this thing President Roosevelt created was that it employed ass numbers of people with a basically guaranteed job.
What wer the jobs? Essentially they were the jobs that saw the United States finally receive an acrtual foundation. Millions upon millions of strong armed men set to work building the interstates that had not existed previously, and then after they built the interstates, they started work on the suburbs and the houses within them. This went on for a very long while and built an entire country and kept folks wondrously employed. But then it was eventually another period of history that ended, and a new period started, a new period where, as i say, even more intelligent machines existed, that could do many more jobs for us. It is said, for example, that for every machine created, 6-7 people are immediately out ofa job. For instance, when the Internet age of Amazon and online shopping began to bloom, it is said that basically 10 retail workers lost their jobs for every online store. This is because we have now significantly less people shopping retail. So why do we need as many retail workers in the stores? Machines are now helping us buy things online. And now imagine when Amazon finally figures out how to get, say, the drones to work, so that the drones can deliver packages, instead of the UPS trucks. Now the UPS guys will be out of work.
The machines took the jobs!
Many people read a sentence like this and automatically find it scary and bad. "Its so awful!" they say, "that machines are stealing our jobs! Its A NIGHTMARE!"
This, however, could not be any further from the truth. For the fact is that, accusing a machine of stealing your job would be like accusing an air conditioning of stealing the job that a little fan you hold in your hand used to do. No one would ever say that, because everyone instinctively understands that holding the fan yourself was annoying, and not nearly as efficient, as having an air conditioning. So why don't we view so many jobs the same way? Why don't we rejoice when the machine takes them, instead of grieve?
The reason is simple: It is because our society, mostly thanks to religious books like the Bible, is still very much refusing to admit that there is life beyond hard work and suffering. It's almost as though its simply unfathomable to people to think that life could actually be largely enjoyable, in a world that is mostly powered almost entirely by machines, instead of suffering hard workers. Imagine, for example, that you are on the Titanic for a second. Assuming you've seen the film, you might remember the shots of Rose and Jack running through the boiler rooms, where men with faces full of black grease and oil, shoveled coal to make sure the engines of the mighty ship kept turning. In fact, go even further back in time, to a previous age of the ship, like the famous age of the pirates. Probably you are aware of how enormous pirate and sailing crews used to have to be, in order to keep a sailing ship afloat and moving. Now, imagine a modern boat. The crew is unusually tiny in comparison to the crew of 100+ men (some big sailing ships needed 500+ men in the 1700s). Why aren't 500 plus men necessary now to sail a ship. Because the ships are essentially intelligent machines that are almost sailing themselves....
And conservatives, at this point in time, are basically asking us to cry for the fact that machines can now save men from ever having to do that job. They're asking us to cry over it because...well, what is life without hard work? God only loves hard workers. Its written in the Bible. We can't possibly give peolpe something like a Universal Basic Income, as Elon Musk proposes, the Republicans tell us, because ... the Bible says we must all EARN our daily bread, by the sweat of our brow! We must work HARD For our money, doing whatever hard work is available. If no hard wrk is available, like we are seeing now, then people just have to die in the streets, i guess. Its what God wants.
Yet, like i say, once you realize that the very definition of hard work has been being used in a pretty phony way for the past 60-70 years anyways, you start to see that a world where machines do all the dirty work, and where human beings get to sit back and relax, isn't really that hard to imagine anyways. In so many ways, we are already almost there. After all, if God is really judging us by the idea that you have to work hard and suffer by the sweat of your brow each day to get into Heaven, I can't imagine that too many conservative politicians, many of whom seem to have had a desk job in an air conditoned office for all their lives, are going to get in.
--- Hard work in the modern age is a myth, nothing more..
Sally Two Bones
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