Why We Need Meaningful Work, Not Jobs

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Even today many of us avoid the word job, preferring more upscale terms like occupation or career to describe what we do for 40-plus hours each week. Yet the older meaning of these words also reveals something about the nature of work. Occupation originally meant to seize or capture. (It is still used in this sense when, for instance, we speak of the German occupation of France during World War II.) What an apt description of how jobs take over our lives, subjecting us to the demands of outside rulers. The original meaning of career fits well with the role we play in the speeded-up global economic rat race. In the 19th century, career meant "racing course" or "rapid and unrestrained" activity.

In searching for ways to put meaning back into our work, we might want to revive the term vocation (from the Latin for "voice" or "calling"). Today, "having a vocation" or "answering a calling" usually means embarking upon a religious life—an unfortunate narrowing of the concept. We all deserve to be involved in work to which we have been called by our passions and beliefs. Following a vocation can lead to a profession—literally, a "public declaration" of what we believe and who we are. A profession is what our work should be, but so rarely is.

The Cult of Efficiency 

Any attempt to transform our work from a mere job into a profession of deeply felt values sets us on an inevitable path of conflict with the values of the industrialized job system. These values—speed, productivity, efficiency—govern the workplace in remarkably similar ways in both capitalist and socialist economies. Even though we are supposed to be living in the postindustrial era—many of our jobs are now dictated by the demands of computers instead of assembly lines—our lives at work are really not much different from those of 19th-century factory workers. We are still seen as replaceable spare parts for the great machines of production. From the checkout person at the grocery store to the highly trained engineer, we are all expected to work faster, waste less time, produce more.

We are not machines, of course, and the drive for ever greater efficiency in the competitive global economy is taking its toll. More than 80 percent of Americans say their lives are more stressful now than they were five years ago; pressures at work are cited as the primary reason. More and more of us need to be medicated just to get through the workday. More than 45 million American adults are taking prescription psychotropic medications. The largest increase is not in the use of the much publicized antidepressant Prozac, but rather in a variety of drugs used to treat anxiety and stress disorders.

As a society we continue to honor the virtues of caring and empathy in our personal lives, and these must become the cornerstones of a new kind of work ethic. Empathy for the physical and mental needs of workers must replace efficiency as the paramount value of the workplace. After all, no one in their right mind evaluates the importance of their family, friends, or even pets on a strict efficiency basis.

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