Labour's Love Lost

Khaleej Times (LIFE) / 6 April 2013

 

There are some things you just don’t get on a platter these days. Happy marriages, for instance. Rarer still are happy jobs.

While discussions on the former are still secretive and nibble the ears, the latter is lending itself to vociferous expressions of discontent and has become a trending subject for conversation at dinner tables and social dos.  A casual, “How’s work?” question will return responses that range from words of utter despair and lame resignation to measured nods and unsympathetic shrugs, none of which is too complimentary to the institution of organised employment.

Job satisfaction today seems as mythical as a mirage and, as a term, it is so mutually exclusive that for eight to ten hours every day, the world becomes an insufferably morose place full of men and women who leave their hearts in their homes and turn into robots that complete mechanical chores at the work place. Someone  feels that they are underpaid, someone is overworked, someone else has a bad boss, someone thinks his colleagues are out to get him for strange reasons, someone just doesn’t think he fits his work profile and someone else feels that this was the last thing he had ever wanted to do in life.  Even a person who holds a job that others would die for says he is just getting by.

So, where has all the happiness at work gone? Why does an office now resemble a classroom of kindergarten kids on their first day at school?  What ails us that we bemoan our work life so severely? 

Our fathers retired from where they started their careers, had modest income with which they got us all literate and liberated, (many storing nothing for their feeble years), didn’t know what luxury meant, yet they were happy people who even now wax eloquent about their workplace experiences like proud war veterans.

We now leap from one job to another like crazed primates, earn hefty salaries, wallow in nauseating extravagance, visit the Eiffel Tower and the Pyramids, send our kids to the best schools in town, put away enough for our retirement, and yet, wail like war widows when asked about our jobs.

Even as we put our dissatisfaction down to ‘poor work culture,’ and secretly acknowledge our aspirations and expectations as reasons to our woes, we miss to recognize the most vital ingredient necessary to keep us ticking and humming at work. Love. We simply don’t love what we do. I hate to say this, for it might hurt, but it’s undeniable that a majority of us work either for money or to satisfy our mammoth egos or both. Our achievements carry either material worth or are laced with self-glorification. Our compelling need to find utilitarian purpose to our activities has usurped our love for our occupation.

No one stipulates that we put away money and ego trips. They are must haves in the limited confines of our corporeal world. But sans love, they will only lead to abject misery.

Consider this. The cleaner in my sister’s home in the US isn’t essentially a ‘house maid.’ She has a husband who earns handsomely yet she dons the domestic help’s apron for the sheer love of doing domestic tasks. A priest at the temple near our home in India chucked his job in Dubai to take up the religious vocation he had been longing to do, and a man I know very closely remains unperturbed amidst rattling turbulence constant at his workplace because he loves his assignment too much to be deterred by what happens around him and the peripheral chaos have no bearing on how he conducts his work. Nothing but pure passion for the job at hand can create such fine examples of labour. Job and satisfaction as a pair will be less estranged if only some love creeps into their midst. The secret is no different from that of happy marriages.