What Does it Mean to Work?

As another Labor Day moves toward twilight, I find myself wanting to reflect on the nature of work. After all, it does consume more of our time than sleep—that is, if, like me, you don’t sleep well. And it seems to be what consumes much of our attention and worry as well.

My wife just began a new full-time position teaching elementary band, something she is extremely well-qualified for, and she is enjoying it immensely. One of her colleagues looked at her after they had introduced another elementary school to the instruments that make up the band and the symphony orchestra and said, “We actually get paid to do this.”

This is fulfillment in ones work, an enviable prospect. When I was younger, I was forced to work at jobs that did not require my best, or they challenged me because I wasn’t quite qualified. And when I went through a season of unemployment, I began to understand the importance and dignity of all labor.

As I reflect on this Labor Day, when the economy seems, by jolts and setbacks, to be getting better, it seems to me that this one day off seems universal, unlike many of the religious holidays we have today. And I am aware that work may be the way we separate the boys and girls from the men and women. That’s right. Work, a job, constitutes a kind of rite of passage. A first job in ones teen years seems to do this, even if it lacks the dignity of a Bar Mitzvah.

This is, of course, to really note that rites of passage as form and external markers are largely lacking in American culture, and so men in their late thirties can continue to live in their parents’ basements and aging, slumping middle aged managers with comb-overs can go on pretending that they don’t have to admit that they are outside of the eighteen to forty-nine year old demographic television producers covet.

What Fits Our Style

No, it seems to me that Americans seem pretty okay with the fact that we are lacking in the quest images that were social markers of hunting and warrior tribes, or even the celebration and symbolism of the Bar Mitzvah. We really don’t seem to mind that we don’t have much clarity on how to establish that childhood has ended and adulthood has commenced. In former times, the assumption seemed to have worked that, in a democracy, the passage into adulthood should be handled by the family and in the privacy of the home. More recently, this democratic process seems to have evolved into a lasez-faire, existential void.

As a rite of passage, a first job lacks any of the high seriousness or religious significance of these other forms of cultural expression. But it does introduce the young to the very secular adult requirements of paying taxes and bills and learning to balance a personal budget, and this is what seems to matter most to us as a people. It also can announce a new responsibility to the social forces of the community at play beyond the enclosed, presumably nurturing structures of family and neighborhood, though apparently it doesn’t always.