Daily Writing Prompt #2

When we actually think about labour, physical, mental and emotional all taken into consideration and treated with fair weighting, it’s usually just plain awful. And when I say labour, I mean real labour not that labour of love, hobby or personal interest kind. The type that forces you to be reliant on it for your health, food, shelter, and emotional wellbeing. I want to consider this idea of labour in combination with the daily writing prompt as follows:

First, now that we’ve at least clarified the sort of labour we’ll be talking about let’s also define “dream job”. It sounds pretty ironic and a bit side-hustle-bro-ish. And as if I dream of work or a job. I never have, at least as far back as I can remember. My dreams aren’t that mundane, nor that capitalist. 

I think it’s a bit of a sorry state imaginatively if we are thinking and asking such things. To boil such a state down into the fantasy of work. Work sucks, even if it’s a great job; there are always elements you can’t change that make it, at times, kinda shitty. It may be all the time or just on the odd occasion. It could be caused by bad workplace culture, a crappy coworker, or even the business model itself. It’s just part of the gig.

I’ve learned this lesson a few times now. Having bounced around a few jobs since striking out on my own. Hard lessons. But important ones to have had. Do I wish some of those experiences could have been better? Or that they hadn’t happened? Sure. But I don’t think I have any regrets.

I don’t think anyone should dream about labour, though. Or have a “dream job”. It sets you up for unrealistic expectations that ultimately will come crashing down.

A job will not always be there.

A job will not meet all your needs.

A job is not your friend. 

I think we need to all take a step back emotionally from our ideas of work, jobs, and labour and understand that we’ve built up this massive cultural zeitgeist around these concepts. And they’re not even close to realistic. It’s almost pure fantasy about being noble and a provider. But the majority of us are being taken advantage of. Hell, I’m sure that many folks aren’t even getting the full deal they signed on to when they got that employment contract. 

So why should we have dream jobs? What point do they really serve?

I say no thanks.

To me, they’re just some silly cultural norm designed to keep us preoccupied and unsatisfied. So we’ll go out after work, get a beer at the pub, impulse shop online, and then crawl into bed before repeating it all over again.

This is a pretty grim view of work—I get that. But once you understand that your life doesn’t have to revolve around this amorphous, ever-changing thing, it gets easier to decentre. Allowing you to recentre whatever it is in your life that helps you feel fulfilled—for me, that’s writing. But for you, that could be anything.

I just think the moment you turn that special thing you love into a career, it ceases being that original thing. Attaching a requirement for monetary growth fundamentally alters the creation, processing, and servicing of that thing—maybe for the better (think of all the scientific breakthroughs that happened through tech innovation elsewhere), but it’s still different, still changed. 

There are many different ways you can be a provider: An emotional provider, someone who really listens to their friends; or a physical provider, someone who’s always done to help you move even when your building doesn’t have an elevator; or a knowledge provider, someone who’s a good teacher or mentor. These are all extremely important roles for a community. And dare I say, very important jobs as we weather the incoming political and social storms happening out there in the world. 

And so I think we can love and dream about activities, creation, and helping others, and I think that can be a noble thing.

But dreaming about a job? No thanks.