Work, job, employment

Some of you may know this, but as of writing this post, I am not employed. I can tell this is something I won't be able to keep up forever, since the world is relentless as is, but that does not mean I don't have the ability to question my environment.

I have not had a good encounter with the concept of employment yet, though this is mostly attributed to the fact that I have ADHD and did not know that at the time of these experiences (alongside being an egg). This resulted in more than one situation in which I could try to put my efforts into a task as much as I wanted, but I never could put my entire focus into it. Adding to that my perfectionism tendencies and the fact that I have never worked well with time limits, it is no surprise that only raw skill and a fair dose of throwing stuff at the wall whether it would stick or not got me through those events.

Even then, several years later I have to wonder how much of this was generally my distaste and limitations, and how much of the modern work environment is something that people grow to resent.

An era of change

The COVID world scale pandemic was a literal world-stopper the likes of which our ancestors may not have survived. Even with the modern capacity and reach of medicine and technology, the global workforce had to come to a near standstill as far as the physical environment was concerned. The time spent in a situation where no one could go beyond their normal circles brought a lot of distress to many for reasons beyond the health hazard that was threatening nearly everyone in the world... yet somehow, it also brought some concepts that were seldom thought of regarding our society into question.

I don't think I need to reiterate that in the present day, companies are effectively the main driving force of production in the world. Whether physical goods like clothing, food or books, up to abstract concepts like legal work and resource/economy management, there is most likely an profit driven organization somewhere that offers services related to your topic of interests. Obviously, these companies require employees to keep up their work, and these employees were quite used to the simple idea: Go to a location, mostly offices or workplaces, clock in, do a job, clock out.

The hit of the pandemic quickly made these actions significantly hazardous for everyone's health, and companies were quickly forced to adapt: and so started the modern concept of a home office, where the employees would leverage use of the internet to make their operations from home, allowing work to be done despite the lack of physical interaction. My claim is that these moments were quite chaotic for many, a downright downgrade for some, and a disaster for those who were very much incapable of doing the transition due to their nature of their job, but others instead saw a huge improvement in their quality of life, for various reasons. With the savings from being able to use their own resources for food and not having to spend on transport, not only did the quality of life of employees in several areas improve, but it would also be a logical argument to claim that companies themselves would see an increase in profits in some way due to not needing to spend resources on transport funds for the employees. This also may have helped employee morale by allowing them better management over their time spent and work environment, allowing individuals that desired to adapt their methods to do so with further freedom, increasing mental wellness. Of course this was not universal, but those who were noticing the upsides of this change were not complaining.

However, when the pandemic came and went, slowly things started to return to the way they used to be, maybe a bit more than necessary. Whereas some services obviously started flourishing again from this return of a previous status quo, it seems companies were not satisfied with the changes to the work dynamic that the pandemic had introduced, and started to roll back to a presence-based system, despite the advantages that had been discovered in this event. While not as vocal as one would hope, there was, expectedly, backlash posted in the web about this, since it seems more than a fair bit illogical to remove a dynamic that had been boosting morale.

Despite not being anyone certified to really analyze this, I do have thoughts I want to share from what I've been learning around the internet.

The differences of the title

It's kind of awkward to try to divide the concepts of "work", "job" and "employment" like I am trying to do in the title, is it not? How can I try to separate three words that all point to the same concept? Well, I would start by thinking of how things are done in a different environment, and seeing how they translate to our own. Based on a preliminary thought, I can say the following.

Work

"Work" is the concept of putting effort into a task to accomplish a goal. A farmer does work by tilling the land and tending to the crops.

Job

A "job" is the concept of putting your skillset to use to the benefit of others in exchange for resources, either physical or monetary. Being a farmer is a job.

Employment

To be "employed" is to be part of a hierarchy that unites workers with different jobs with the purpose of producing value.

You may have noticed that I did not include the farmer analogy in the last description. The thing is, a company needs a farmer, but does the farmer need the company? It depends on the environment of the farmer. In a community, a farmer may be able to exchange plant based resources for other kinds, a symbiotic relationship in the making with the rest of the community.

However, in the current times, the economy is based on the concept of money, which on it's own is pretty logical: a value assigned to the work necessary to offer a product or service.

The problem emerges when companies enter the mix.

Are companies a tragedy?

In the present day, a profit-based organization, which I refer to as a company, is made with one objective it must abide by at all times: profit must increase. In my own opinion, this is a terrible way to manage... well, anything at all really. This endless escalation is, effectively, a guarantee that success will never be truly achieved, and requirements will get exponentially larger in the worst case scenario.

A project requires reosurces (in this case, money) to be developed. To get money, the project usually seeks investors, who put money into the company as a start so they can recieve profit when the product sells. The main issue here is that this relationship is expected to continue in perpetuity, assuming the product needs to keep escalating and attracting more people to consume it to keep the investors on board. If said investors leave the project, it all comes crashing down.

In truth, a project completed does not really need, at least on paper, to make more money to stay afloat. It just needs to stay up to date and functional. Sadly, the expectations of modern society work on a similar wavelength to conquest, where competition is to be crushed in the best case scenario and the userbase must expand to cover as much of the world population as possible. The latter causes the former to become a priority due to the control of different companies over various resources causing a constant flow of monetary value to be supplied.

This effectively causes a project of a profit-based company to become a nightmare of constantly needing more expensive resources to generate more money instead of working on maintaining perfectly serviceable methods. And at some point, this feels like a guaranteed method to destroy the original moral code and vision of the project, resulting in yet another power hungry conglomerate seeking nothing but to expand forever.

What makes this even more worrisome is the fact that this implies that someone has an extreme amount of control over the livelihood of even the leaders of the given project, which is a problem of its own.

The hierarchy of employment

The problem begins when you realize anyone with a service to offer also has their own lives to live, and as such, needs to be compensated for their work in some way if said work is to continue. When enough people are in a workforce together, it becomes complicated to manage and communicate the resources and necessities in between the members of a workforce. It also means that, to maintain a fair balance between the workers and their compensation, there must be a logical system that makes sure everyone is fairly compensated. This brings forth the concept of the "manager", someone who specializes in these tasks.

And here is where I feel something is going awry, even without the ever increasing margin of profit. In the current scheme of work, this manager seems to adopt a superior position to the workers, which creates a hierarchy that was supposed to be avoided by the presence of the manager! While I can admit that there is an elevated level of responsibility to be assumed by the manager, it almost feels like there is a roundabout way of excusing mistreatment of workers as a necessary step enveloped in this dynamic.

In the present, the hierarchy of standard jobs is beyond evident. With CEOs and Boards making innumerable amounts of money whereas their employees, making insane amounts of work, all for a salary that, in some situations, is not even enough to live semi comfortably alone, a power imbalance is almost guaranteed. The way work and jobs have been manipulated into a twisted interpretation of giving purpose to life by giving your efforts to someone else in an unfair exchange for the right to live your life.

I could not tell you if this was a situation that is as natural as humanity's curiosity, for I was not there to witness the beginning of hierarchy in our ancestors and our species. However, I can still make the argument that this logic does not add up, as humans are most effective when in groups, not when alone. And usually, the fighting of different groups results in far more losses than gains.

The fallacy of eternal growth

(NOTE: Hell. Another Tumblr post I can't give proper credit to because I didn't save it. If anyone is aware of the origins of this story, let me know ASAP.)

A story I have heard is regarding some missionaries. They found a settlement of people native to the region, gave them the knowledge of modern productivity resources and left. When said missionaries returned years later, they were shocked to find everything was quite identical to how they had found it the first time. And when they questioned the people that lived there, their answer was something along the lines of: "We have used your new resources! It's fantastic, we got all the work done in half the time!"

While I cannot confirm nor deny the validity of this event, since the details sadly escape my memory, I do have to consider this idea: that progress is not something that must be done in order to exist. The world has grown massively after the events of previous decades of our existence, which sadly makes this point somewhat unable to be applied in the present day. However, it is important to note that this puts a dent on the idea of eternally making greater profits: If people live in safety and comfort, and things are stable, is this search for further growth truly a necessity?

Mind you, I am not an economist. There is a valid chance everything I say today is equivalent to the first cry of a baby: pure confusion guided by instinct. What I do believe is that there is a point where, if things are stable, further need for funds is not as big of a priority.

This also could be applied to reserve funds for different purposes. In the way modern society works, there is no space for scientific study in fund distribution unless there is a specific expected use case for the investigation, which directly contradicts the nature of scientific experimentation.

How do we make our work worth?

So, in a world in which a few revel in the result of the effort of the many, what can be done?

I think there are many things that can be done, at least in a small scale. The thing about small scale projects is that, given enough attention, they can develop into something far greater.

As I said in my about page: I believe we are strong together. The issue is that we have been conditioned to believe there is more people in the world that desire to be powerful at the expense of everyone around them. And I personally think that's only because people fear that without said power, everyone else will screw them over.

Effectively, it's a vicious cycle of distrust, born from the higher echelons of power and their paranoia and amplified downwards, passed down over generations to every corner of society so that no one can coordinate.

And I say, maybe it's time we start trusting again, because many of us want to trust, but we are being railroaded to believe that fear is the way forward.

This process is not easy, for there are several generations behind us who could not unload their fear, their trauma, their beliefs that the world is out to get us all, and so they passed those things down to their children and young to warn them, to make them better, while not noticing it only made the pain larger and more powerful.

There are some truly illogical ideas which may have been truly born from hatred (which I also attribute to fear, if not fear alone), or from a voracious desire to control. And yet, the more people start finding their voices in this day and age, the more we understand something: The greatest disservice one can do to themself is to spurn others for being who they are. Not only does this isolate one from potential peers and separate groups where there are disagreements, it also avoids oneself from truly understanding themself, and causes self sabotage in spaces where growth would be possible.

To make our job worth, we must understand that we may not be equal in skills, capacity, or a lot of other things, but we are all equal in the respect we deserve for being people.

When applied to a work environment, this means appreciating every job as equally worth to make the community prosper, even the ones that our current society finds pointess or unworthy of respect. It also means that responsibility should not be in the hands of one individual at a time, same with power, rather distributed across the workers to a reasonable extent of their capacity.

An unexpected place where this has begun to take form is in the technology community. Mind you, I mention the community, not the industry. Thanks to the open source projects of the world being widely available, one can percieve a cooperation between individuals to improve upon existing standards. While not perfect, this is a start of an idea that might flourish into something a lot more powerful.

In the meantime, if you are reading this and are afraid to take a step... I recommend you start by wondering what brings you fear in your environment, and what can you do to face that fear. The first thoughts of having power over others come from the fear of the unknown, making the answer to learn and understand things we thought were beyond our scope. The best way to understand others is to have the power to understand and accept oneself as they are, as that can be a great kickstarter for understanding the different realities of others with the respect they deserve.

Small steps are still worth something.