My point is that these ads are always meant to be touching and they always depress the hell out of me. Most involve some guy on a business trip sitting at some faceless hotel and then linking up his Microsoft brand QualityTimeWithJohnny microprocessor so that he can wish happy birthday to his kid. That's plenty depressing on its own. One recent one was even more brazen though: Some dude's showing his boss some building plans through some InterWebconference-inar-i-doo, and then the camera pans up, and hey! It's an adorable kid on the beach! Hi, Junior! The guy's at the beach with his kid! Isn't it adorable!
No, it's not, not at all. Its deeply offensive, in fact. You're at the fucking beach with your family and you're still working at your dumb-ass job? That qualifies you for the Worst Father of the Year Award. Why not get some sales calls done during your kid's graduation ceremony? Hey, you could squeeze in a board meeting at the hospital while your child is being born! You can have it all, and simultaneously!
These ads always have voiceovers about "now you can make time for those who are truly important." But you know what? If your family was truly important to you, you wouldn't be at a sales conference in Yuma while your kid has a birthday party. You wouldn't be looking at schematics rather than helping your kid build sand castles. You would be with your kid, accomplishing nothing but being with your kid.
I know, some people have demanding jobs. My point is, quit those jobs. Take something lesser. If your family is truly important to you, work less hours so you can spend more time with them. If that means less money, so be it. If that means sacrificing your all-important Career, fuck your career. Careers are for the selfish. Real people have jobs.
I'm overstating the case, per usual -- people should be able to pursue jobs that challenge and interest them. But this attitude of "having it all" really gets to me. There's a very sick and very American idea that everyone should be able to work extremely hard while also being the greatest parents ever. In reality, it's always one or the other.
And what exactly does this career obsession get people? Nicer houses that then collapse in value? It's not like we're in a developing country where you have to work like a dog just to survive. There are plenty of blue-collar folks who might not be well-off but survive just fine, thank you, on 40-hour-a-week jobs. Of course, there are also plenty of blue-collar folks who have to work three jobs to support their family, but that's a different story with a whole different set of issues. We're taking about the upwardly mobile, who work prestigious, crazy-hour business jobs and do it by choice, completely for their own selfish reasons, regardless of what they tell themselves.
And I can hardly object to someone wanting to torture themselves with insane jobs if they're the only ones who suffer. It's the same reason I believe in legalizing drugs: Hey, if you want to kill yourself, be my guest. If you have such an urge, the world would probably be better off without you. Just don't take innocents down with you.
Kids would qualify as innocents here. Kids don't need "quality time," which implies trying to maximize the efficiency of time spent with your kids so as to pack in as much fun as possible, like he or she is some kind of cog in an assembly line that needs specific amounts of caring each day. Kids need "quantity time." They need parents who sit around with them and do a lot of unstructured nothing. That's how you truly develop bonds with children. You can't manufacture or manage these kinds of things. They just happen with time.
Maybe in the current economy this seems like a crazy notion, to actually try to work less, when so many people are not working at all. But this is more of a core American concept, this Work Uber Alles, that all work is good and there is no limit to how much work you should be wiling to do, that has always baffled me. It's not necessary to undergo this to have a high standard of living -- in fact, people in most developed countries take it much easier than we do. Any European in August is not looking at schematics, I'll tell you that.
I've been beating up on the businesspeople, but the core of the problem is American institutions themselves, and the expectations they have. For example, most large law firms expect their new hires to work 70 hours a week. Why? What's the point of putting them through that kind of hazing? To make them lose their families so they can devote themselves fully to making money for you?
I saw an article saying that old crusty lawyers were actually complaining about how the new crop isn't willing to put in those kind of hours. Good for the new crop, I say. Fuck you, old man. I deserve to have a job I like and also be able to sleep and eat and know other human beings.
This Work Uber Alles attitude in America is perpetuated by macho bullshit about being tough and working hard, but it actually has its roots in Puritanism. (This is the part where you fall asleep, if you haven't already.) A guy named Max Weber, a founder of sociology, wrote all about it in a great book called "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism." Basically, in the olden days, when people were even dumber than they are now, all people cared about was whether you were making it to heaven. John Calvin, however, thought that heaven was predestined for some people, and you couldn't buy your way in, as the Catholics thought. So a bunch of people believed Calvin, and they became Calvinists.
Maybe Calvin was trying to get people to chill out and stop worrying about heaven. It's sort of like telling who a kid who won't shut up about going to Chuck E. Cheese's "we'll go when we can. Now go play." But just as that won't work, Calvin's brainstorm didn't work either. People instead started looking for outward manifestations of some inner "chosen"ness. One way to tell if you were destined to be heaven-bound is if you're well-off. This really appealed to people who were well-off, particularly merchants who weren't really accepted in higher society: Hey you know all this money that I squeezed out of weak suckers and don't really need? Turns it out it makes me a saint! I dig this religion!
Meanwhile Catholics still believed poverty was a virtue, and thus let monks go live in a distant hillside and try it out while they amassed wealth. But still, it was an ethic, and wealth was not necessarily a sign of being good.
In America, though, as the Calvinists, including Puritans, swarmed across the land, they brought this idea that greed is heavenly and set it as a firm belief. But they exercised it in sort of a pious way, not making a show of their wealth and fetishizing work instead of conspicuous consumption. Weber quotes Benjamin Franklin saying that every moment of the day should be spent working in some way, always adding to your revenues while minimizing costs. That quote really made me hate Benjamin Franklin for a long time until I learned that he retired at 40 and then spent the rest of the time being a celebrity, going to an occasional Constitutional Convention and then spending the rest of his time snorting blow off of hookers' girdles as he sped down the cobblestone roads in his Porsche. He was kind of a Bill Clinton, really.
Anyway, this new fetishization of work turned out well for us, because industrialization came along and Americans saw an opportunity to really amass some big, big, big wealth and thus get into Super-Duper Heaven (which has better waterslides). Meanwhile, Europe was still busy wearing painful clothes and then taking out their uncomfortableness on each other in the form of bloody wars, and America came out on top. That's all of human history for ya. You're welcome.
Point is, our American worship of work has deep roots and probably isn't going anywhere, as your society, our religious life, and our economy were all largely founded on it. So why am I even bothering to fight it? I don't know. I'm tired now. I'm taking the rest of the day off.
4 comments:
I do agree with you for the most part, but I do think it's more complicated than that. I think another aspect of the difference between America and other countries, which is both good and bad, is the idea that America is the land of opportunities if you just work hard enough. In many other countries, you basically figure out your career path early on in life and then you just do it. If you aren't that bright or whatever, you can't just rise to the top through sheer force of will. But this idea of only needing hard work to achieve your goals can also lead to people wasting their life instead of having realistic goals.
I also think that it's normal to want a fulfilling career. It's a shame that this desire has gotten so sullied in this country by competition and money. But the basic desire to have a fulfilling career is I think in some ways, a similar desire to raising children. It is probably ultimately selfish, but it is also because you think you have something worth contributing to the world, and you want to sacrifice your own personal enjoyment in order make a difference. So, maybe I've drunk the Kool-Aid, but I still believe I can have it all.
Another annoying aspect of these commercials is that it is almost always men. maybe it reflects the new idea that fathers might actually want to be involved in their children's lives on a daily basis, which would be a good thing. but it is still this notion that a man who makes a little effort is like dad of the year, but a mom who wasn't around for her kid's birthday should probably be reported to child protection services. anyway, I also hate all these commercials. I have had to resort to videochat, email, text messages for over a year to stay in touch. The technology makes it a little better to be away from people you love than letters delivered by steamboat, but it still totally blows.
Yeah, this wasn't my most cogent argument, I admit. I tried to get across at the end that it's more a problem with certain institutions and their unrealistic expectations, many of which do seem to be changing by the way, with the emphasis on "work-life balance" and etc.
I mean, everyone wants a fulfilling career and a family and you can hardly blame them for that. I probably should have just stopped at the starting point, which was that these commercials seem to be enabling those who truly put career first to pretend like they're putting family first. That kind of hypocrisy bugs me. The ad should be like "You're on a very important business trip. But your goddamn kid's stupid birthday party is today, and your wife will never forgive you if I don't make a token appearance in some form or another. So take a shot of scotch, link up, say hi, and then get back to work. I works, I'm telling you."
My favorite current example of the genre is this one where this sweet little girl, maybe three years old, says bye-bye to daddy, and he's on his way to the airport when he opens up his briefcase and sees this little stuffed monkey that the little girl presumably put in there. He smiles, and then wherever he goes, he takes a picture with the monkey and sends it home. The mom opens up the pictures and shows them to the little girl, and she's so smiley and excited - there's my monkey in Paris! and London! and Azerbaijan! - and then like eight months later, they open up a picture with the monkey in their front yard, and the kid is like, hooray! daddy's home, and she runs out to the front porch and gives her dad the biggest hug ever. All the while, there's this touching song in the background of the commercial going, "Sweet thing, apple of my eye..." The point of the commercial clearly being, "Wow! I can do business around the world, take twenty seconds every third day to send some low-quality camera-phone picture to my kid, and when I come back, she'll love me more than ever! Sweet!"
And the reason it's always men in these commercials, Emily, is because a) men are the only people who do real work involving suits and briefcases, b) women need to stay home all day to check for monkey pictures, and c) advertising people really liked the year 1962.
I hope you are right that a lot of these industries/professions are changing their emphasis on ridiculous demands for weeding out only but the most "dedicated" (i.e. crazy) employees. I think they have started realizing that they are losing some of the brightest and most talented people and have just ended up with the jerkiest people at the top of the ladder. I guess this is what I was referring to at the beginning at my first comment. That a lot of jobs seem to basically be a version of a crappy reality show. The people that win are the ones willing to do anything, no matter how dehumanizing or humiliating. Obviously people who work hard will always be rewarded, but maybe we shouldn't be rewarding such extreme, shameless behavior.
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