Working

My upstairs neighbor just made an interesting comment.

I was out raking leaves (technically our landlord sends people to do leaves but he doesn’t mind if we do it, and I get an interesting sense of satisfaction scraping the dirt clear of leaves), and my neighbor comes up and says, “I hate to see you working so hard!”

That got me thinking about the value our society puts on work today. It’s so ironic that in our culture people work so hard: people take fewer holidays, work through weekends, stay extra hours, and for many people that’s a badge of honor; and yet somehow practically everyone still hates going to work/working in general (and not having to work is a luxury, sometimes a mark of status, of having “arrived”)–people are always complaining about going in to work, about having to work extra, about how long they have until they get off, about all the housework or chores or errands left to do (I’m guilty of all of the above!). (I’m not even going to go into today’s philosophy of entitlement and the possible crippling effects of social services on work ethic and self-initiative.)

But wasn’t that one of the great attractions of earlier America, that a person could come here, work with their own two hands and make something of themselves? Isn’t there supposed to be something satisfying about working hard?

This is the lesson I need to remind myself of everyday when there are cheerios on the floor, laundry in the dryer, dinner to be made and young women lessons to plan. 🙂