Re-evaluation

Sometimes it’s good to revisit assumptions, think about things that you take for granted, re-examine old ideas and beliefs. Not always, but sometimes.

One thing that I remember from my youth was that I did not like pineapple. It turned out that what I didn’t like was the yellow pineapple-based goop that they put on banana splits in ice cream parlours. I don’t recall my family ever buying a fresh pineapple, and so I didn’t really know what they tasted like, I just thought I did. When I was in my late 20s, I had my first taste of fresh pineapple and it turned out to be really very good. I still object to putting it on pizza, however.

Another food item that I didn’t think I liked was popcorn. I like the smell of it but not the taste. Then one day in my early adulthood I had some microwaved popcorn and loved it. It turns out that what I don’t like is salty popcorn with dripping soggy wet butter. I like natural unadorned popcorn. I won’t even discuss that food item that is sold in cinemas that consists of popped corn covered with a yellow, oily, smelly ooze whose origins are probably inside a petro-chemical plant. My own personal belief is that whatever that stuff is, it can probably be used as a chemical weapon.

There was an interesting article in the November 5, 2007 edition of Macleans magazine titled, Why men are getting happier (and women more miserable), credited to three writers, Nancy Macdonald, Lianne George and John Intini. The article is based on the concept of measuring “happiness”, a topic that has caught on with social thinkers, economists and nobodies like me.

They cite social statistics collected in the last few decades that seem to show that, in our industrialized societies at least, women are becoming less happy, while men are becoming happier. They dub it the “happiness gap”. They give several examples of heterosexual couples, either still living together or not, where the male half seems to be enjoying his existence, his activities, the way he conducts his life, while the female half report constant and growing stress with the life that she is living. The cases presented are anecdotal of course, but are given as examples to illustrate the point. In some of the examples, the males have abandoned the workaday grind to establish new lives in the arts or other more personal pastimes, while the women embraced the relatively new feminist attraction to life-validating careers. It is a perplexing development given how the “career” was billed as the great liberator of our age, and that women would find their independence and self-worth through work. The books don’t seem to be balancing though, because if those promises had validity, women should be happier at this point than they seem to be. Why aren’t they?

The article presents various analyses of the phenomenon. The usual right-wing loonies argue that women are happier in the home looking after babies, so that this trend is no surprise. Sure, and popsicles still cost a nickel. Others propose that female emergence as corporate leaders is still ultimately stifled and that therefore the workplace presents more frustration than reward. That is a tempting thesis but to my mind it is unconvincing. The pursuit is as important as the attainment and should provide its own reward, and so to my mind, the argument does not explain the growing trend to “unhappiness”. I don’t doubt that not all deserving females self-actualize in the corporate world, but a lot do and in any case not all deserving males ever did either. Another point of view states that maybe females expected too much from the world of work and are now disappointed at the non-delivery, in short they were sold a bill of goods.

The article points to the decrease in the number of men attending universities, across many disciplines, and a slow trend among males to abandon the workplace treadmill. This seems to be a disturbing societal effect that we are seeing for the first time. It is an odd social development that able-bodied healthy males are moving away from the work-to-success pattern that was taken for granted in previous generations. I suggest that you search for that article and read it. It consists of four pages of text with hardly any pictures and so there is no way that I can do it justice in this meager summary.

However, I think that it is instructive to set aside the current accepted thinking on the matter and re-examine the basic data: 1) women are working more and are becoming more unhappy and 2) men are working less and becoming happier.

Maybe then, work just sucks.

One hundred and fifty years ago, a guy would get up in the morning, look out over his fields and decide whether it was time to pick the corn. If not, he could head over to the barn and repair something. Or he could fix the shingles on the roof of his farmhouse. Or he and his wife could stay in bed and enjoy what a carnal life has to offer. He was at the mercy of the weather and the volatile prices of grain as determined by the commodity speculators of the day, but nevertheless, he and his wife decided for themselves how to spend their days, the way their ancestors had done for centuries. The days weren’t always pleasant, of course, that goes almost without saying, but are yours? Moving ahead in time, that farmer’s children spent 18 hours a day in West Virginia coal mines making barely enough money to cover the rent and food, and more often than not they could not make ends meet, because that’s how the system was designed to operate. The son of that farmer did not control how he spent his days. Do you think many coal miners self-actualized? A generation or two after that and people now spend their days staring at computer screens and living in suburbs so ugly that every once in a while, one of them goes berserk and shoots a group of innocent people at a burger joint or on a college campus.

Maybe the kinds of work that we have created for ourselves, to which we try to attach life validation simply are not up to the task. Maybe the jobs that most people spend their days doing are just not that important or life affirming, and maybe many of our careers do not amount to much in the end. Some do, but a lot do not. Maybe it’s a mistake to try and link meaning in our lives to jobs like that. Maybe what’s happened is that when a generation of women entered the workforce to compete for mens’ jobs, a lot of the boys took a step back and said, “Ladies, you can have them, I’m going fishing.”