Redefining work and money
involves an examination of what’s important to us, how we educate
ourselves, what sort of work we do, and what sort of world we want to
live in.
“To find out what one really wants, and what it costs, and how to pay
what it costs, is an important part of everyone’s life work. But it is
not easy to find out what we like or want, when all our lives other
people have been hard a work trying not just to make us do what they
want, but to make us think that we want to do it.” ~John Holt, Never
Too Late: My Musical Life Story
Education and Work
In those two sentences, from a book published in 1978 – around the
time he coined the term “unschooling” – John Holt put his finger on a
problem that people are feeling even more strongly today: How do we make
enough money to live comfortably, how do we find work that pleases us,
how do we arrange our lives to be able to afford to do that sort of
work, and how can we ensure that our children won’t struggle with these
questions? Those questions about redefining work and how they
interrelate with the rest of life are also the basis for my life and
my work.
For instance, in
this 2010 article, I suggested that work is
actually redefining itself. Then I looked at how kids who learn without
attending school (“unschoolers”)
are well prepared to thrive in a world that’s already quite different
from the one in which their parents and grandparents came of age (and
for which our school systems were designed). The very ideas of work and
the value of money are changing in the face of social and economic
upheaval, and ecological decline. Many unschoolers have quite a
different – truly radical – outlook on those topics.
Unjobbing
Charles Eisenstein wrote in his book Sacred Economics,
“True wealth is sovereignty over your own time.” Control of their own
time is something unschoolers develop, because their education has
taught them to trust their own instincts about pursuing what is
important to them. So it’s not surprising that an unschooling dad,
Michael Fogler, borrowed from unschooling to coin the term “un-jobbing”
and write a book about it in 1999 entitled Un-Jobbing: The Adult
Liberation Handbook. He describes un-jobbing as “living the life
you truly want to live without major, full-time employment and still
making your ends meet.”
I’ve written about unjobbing (as I prefer to spell it) as well, since
I have been doing it (while unschooling my daughters) since the
mid-1970s (before either of those words was coined). One particular
article prompted someone (who admitted that he dislikes his
job) to comment to me that unjobbing seems to be a self-absorbed luxury.
I pointed out to him that, in fact, a variety of motivations are at play
for those who are trying to redefine work and income, most of them not
about luxury at all:
- Baby boomers are getting to retirement age and wanting to
continue to work as a way of staying active and relevant.
- Other people are still jobless due to the last recession or
corporate downsizing, and are looking for creative ways to pay the
rent.
- Those with jobs find themselves working harder for less buying
power.
- Some people are convinced there is a need for a new type of
economy and a move to things like green technologies, which are
solutions for issues like climate change and resource scarcity.
- Some people worry that more economic hard times are ahead and
want to be prepared by developing greater self-reliance.
- Still others are just plain burnt out and fed up, wondering if
there’s more to life than the nine-to-five grind and are willing to
trade some purchasing power and stress for a simpler, healthier, and
more convivial lifestyle.
- And then there are the parents who want to stay at home with
their children or elderly parents.
Fogler identified the common ground among all these people who are
redefining work when he wrote in Un-Jobbing that, “What we have
going with our jobbing orientation is chronic national busy-ness (alias
‘business’), which has proven itself to be unhealthful for humans and
our planetary home. We must look in another direction. We must put less
emphasis on jobs and more on cooperation, simplicity, and serving one
another. This may very well involve meaningful work, but that’s not the
same as jobs.”
Meaningful Work
“Meaningful work” is the Buddhist path that says even the humblest
job can have meaning; it’s also part of “Right Livelihood.” Vietnamese
Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, “To practice Right Livelihood, you
have to find a way to earn your living without transgressing your ideals
of love and compassion. The way you support yourself can be an
expression of your deepest self, or it can be a source of suffering for
you and others … Our vocation can nourish our understanding and
compassion, or erode them. We should be awake to the consequences, far
and near, of the way we earn our living.” (The Heart of the Buddha’s
Teaching, Parallax Press, 1998).
In a letter to the editor published in The
Progressive, author and philosopher Wendell Berry took that idea a
bit farther by addressing the issue of work’s quantity and quality. He
said that we need to ask a variety of questions about work before we
suggest people are doing too much of it: Questions like whether or not
we chose our work or feel compelled to do it to earn money; about how
much of our intelligence, skill, and pride is involved in our work; if
we respect the result of our work; and what are the ecological and
social costs of our work.
The problem my friend alluded to when he commented that unjobbing is
a luxury is that although there is much important work to be done that
has positive ecological and social benefits, there is often not enough
willingness to pay for it. And expressing one’s deepest self, redefining
work, or even worrying about the consequences of one’s work is difficult
when struggling to pay the rent. That is where
simple living and minimalism come in, along with
developing some self-sufficiency skills so we can create or mend some of
the things we cannot afford to purchase.
Plenitude Economy
Economist Juliet Schor figures we will all be living that way at some
point soon – in what she calls the Plenitude Economy. She wrote about it
in her book Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth
(entitled True Wealth in softcover). Essentially, Schor
describes her notion of a post-consumer society as redefining work and
money. It is one in which people work fewer hours and pursue
re-skilling, homesteading, and small-scale enterprises that can help
reduce the overall size and impact of the consumer economy.
But what about those whose mental or physical health issues preclude
working at any sort of job (let alone redefining work), and performing
self-reliance skills or homesteading? That’s where a universal basic
income comes in – an old idea that also has caught people’s imagination
again, with a number of jurisdictions announcing plans to test the idea
in the near future.
Whether you think all of this is a prudent reaction to confusing
times or a utopian (naïve?) luxury, I see a compelling convergence of
ideas in economics, education, sociology, and governance. And I think
that redefining work, money, and education holds the germ of a solution
for a happier, more convivial, self-reliant, better educated,
restorative, “civil” civilization. At the very least, it’s hard to deny
what British author and popularizer of Zen philosophy Alan Watts once
wrote:
“If you say that money is the most important thing, you’ll spend
your life completely wasting your time: You’ll be doing things you don’t
like doing in order to go on living, that is, in order to go on doing
things you don’t like doing – which is stupid!”
Wendy
Priesnitz is the editor of
Natural Life Magazine, Life
Learning Magazine, Natural Child
Magazine, and
Child’s Play Magazine. She is also a writer who has worked from home for over 45 years.
