Peace House Community Journal
By MARTI MALTBY
Someone recently sent me an article that, among other things, lamented the busyness that people experience at their jobs and the amount of time and energy that this busyness wastes. The author’s goal was to get his readers to move from busyness to action, from working a job that may or may not pay the bills to finding ways to deal with weightier societal issues like the breakup of the republic, the mass extinction of many of earth’s animals, war, disease, famine … the list goes on.
The author pointed out that many people discovered during the pandemic that their jobs involved far more busyness than accomplishment. From picking out appropriate work clothes to sitting in traffic to finding a parking space, workers found that they could accomplish just as much by staying home as they could by going to work. And all that time was saved before they even started working. Once they added on the time saved by avoiding interruptions by coworkers and other workplace inconveniences, they had to come to terms with how much of their lives had been wasted with activity that produced nothing.
The article went on to examine how this realization may have influenced many people to resign their jobs to find something more fulfilling. At least, I think that’s what it might have said. I stopped reading because my mind had wandered off in a different direction. I had begun thinking about my past jobs at agencies that “served” the homeless, and how many times our clients told my co-workers and I that we were “only in it for the money”. Since none of us expected to make millions working in social services, we often got offended (or at least amused) by these comments.
But our clients had a point. We were getting paid a reasonable wage (complete with health insurance, PTO, and other benefits) to fill out forms, attend meetings, make phone calls, and anything else that would get our clients into housing. But they were still homeless. They understood that we were benefiting from them being homeless much more than they were benefiting from cooperating with us. In other words, we were staying busy, but we weren’t working, and we were part of a system that wasn’t working.
This scenario gets repeated in other industries every day. I’ve seen many people in all kinds of jobs who know what they are supposed to do, but they seem clueless about why they are supposed to do it. They run lawnmowers over the grass thinking their job is to cut grass, not to make the lawn look good. They conduct employee satisfaction surveys because management books say that’s what successful companies do, not because they want a happy and engaged workforce that will want the company to succeed.
I doubt the pandemic is going to grant great insights to individual workers who don’t put a lot of thought into their jobs, but I think there is a lot of hope for those who do think about what they want to accomplish, whether in their jobs or in their personal lives. For all those who are doing more than just keeping themselves busy, there will be a sense of pride and of purpose in their efforts. For all the frustrations we’ve endured, we can at least hope that we experience the joy of meeting some people who truly enjoy and excel at what they do.
