I’m disturbed when I hear anyone talk about “creating jobs”. It’s not just that I doubt their sincerity (though I usually do). It’s that it’s a dismissive attitude insulting to those of us who honestly presume that we’re paid because our work is worth our salary.
Nobody wants to be a widget hired as a form of welfare…at least not for long. In theory a job exists because something has to be done and for no other reason.
I don’t take pride in having a job. I take pride in getting things done. You can’t get that from a job that was invented to keep you entertained. Adults are not children to be given a coloring book and set in a corner. We do things because they need to be done. We get paid because we earned it.
If, for some reason, my current job no longer needed doing…I’d be hunting for something that needed doing and figuring out how to get paid for it. There are always things that need doing. Sometimes they’re awesome and more often they’re mundane. Often the pay isn’t what you’d like. But there definitely is stuff that needs to be done.
That’s the magic of taking pride in getting something done; it’s without pretension. If my services designing integrated circuits are no longer needed, perhaps someone has shit that needs shoveling? Would you like an entrepreneur to deliver it as compost to your tomato patch? I’d derive pride from a properly mucked out horse stall just as I’m pleased with a finely tuned algorithm. Because it had to be done and I did it as well as possible. I wouldn’t expect a job to be invented to keep me off the streets any more than I’d expect free cake on Wednesdays.
In recent years this has sounded so out of touch that even my dog thinks I’m archaic. But I believe it.
Then I read this on Maggie’s Farm.
People with true grit create jobs, they don’t look for jobs.
Precisely!
