PASSIONATE EMPLOYMENT

How Doing What We Love Creates a Better Society

What would happen if everyone quit the jobs they hated and started working at what they love?

Many people out there seem to be unhappy in their jobs, and only a few I know can really say they love what they do for a living. Yet, the majority of us spend at least a third of our days (and that means our whole lives) working. A lot of people are going to boring jobs in order to save up for, wait for, get by until, what they love, magically appears. And because working at what we don’t love takes up so much time, much more energy than we spend focusing on our dreams, where we don’t love is where we stay, unless we push against that or take a leap of faith to change it.

Now if it’s true that the Universe actually revolves around us, rather than vice versa, then we could all quit the jobs we didn’t like today and know we’d be safe. We could take that leap of faith and get down to exactly what it is we want to do while we’re here. It’s probably a good thing we don’t do it all at once because it would mean a complete change in society as we know it, which may throw us into a bit of a tither. However it is happening and it’s quite exciting to think about.

Now if many of us are working in jobs that are not our passion, how and why the heck did we create these boring jobs in boring environments in the first place? I have a sneaking suspicion it was a little bit about money, and a little bit about misunderstanding how powerful we really are.

Apart from the fact that shopping and buying stuff can be a lot of fun, our culture has created a great supply of superfluous things in order to make money. Take shampoo for instance. We don’t really need to wash our hair. If you stop washing your hair for a month, the natural PH balance will be restored and you’ll never have to wash it again. We were made perfect, to function in this glorious world just as it is. But you go to the supermarket now and there are aisles full of the stuff. We’ve even bought the idea that we all have different needs for our hair, different ‘problems ‘ with our hair, and therefore `need’ about four or five products each, on a continual basis, just for our hair! Multiply that by all the other parts of our bodies, and you have a hell of a lot of needless products out there, that need to be made, advertised, packed, shelved and sold. And shazam!, you’ve created a ‘need’ for a supermarket. Who likes working in supermarkets, in their present form anyway? Go in and ask the staff at your local one. How many of them are passionate about working there?

OK, so through advertising we tell each other how much we need all these products, which creates a demand for them, and then of course we need people to work in these industries so that is where we have created most of our jobs.

Another place I see people get trapped in the `job while I’m waiting for the real job’ is in waiting tables. Most people do this while they are ‘waiting’ to do their passion: except now ‘waiting’ has become a job all of its own. We’re all waiting. Waiting tables, waiting on the boss, waiting on people. What would happen if everyone left? The people who stayed in cafes and restaurants would be there because they loved it. And it would probably be their own business, done just the way they liked it. They would be people with a passion for food, or passion for coffee or passion for chatting to people. If we taught young people to find and learn (and therefore do) their passion, most cafes would shut down because they’d be no one to work in them. Or we’d revolutionise them so it’s so much fun everyone can’t wait to come to work.

It’s not just in the private sector either. Have you walked into a Medicare office lately? My local Medicare office is full of very unhappy people who look like they’d give their right arm to be anywhere else. What happens on the day all of them decide to walk out? There’d be no one to manage the whole structure of paying back the large sums of money we’ve just paid for medical care. So first, doctors would have to go back to charging people themselves: second, people would have to be able to afford the bills, and third, we would have to take a serious look at preventative health because it would be in our best interests to do so. While we get free medical attention, why worry about preventing health problems when you can just go and get someone to fix it for you? So my feeling is that where there are many unhappy people in one industry, it’s just a sign that there’s something out of balance within that industry, that system of running things.

People would argue that doctors study for 4 –6 years and deserve to get paid more than say an ‘unskilled’ worker who serves people coffee. My answer to this is that when you are living your passion, it’s always a lifetime of learning, because you are genuinely interested in the subject and it’s usually something you’ve done all you life anyway (as it is with passions). So a person with a passion for coffee and serving it with finesse deserves as much return for that as a doctor. Who knows, that wonderful coffee aroma and the friendly banter of the barrister may have just lifted the spirits of someone who was about to give up on life. Like the musician who has spent years in the bedroom perfecting his playing and song writing and had spent as much time on his craft as that of the lawyer or astronaut down the street. And yet often musicians have to `pay-to-play’ to 20 people whom they give a lot of enjoyment to, while the doctor gives relief to 20 people a day on a sizeable income. What’s the difference?

If we are also receiving the same amounts of money as everyone else, it takes away a lot of financial stress because most things will be priced affordably. This is because a. no one would bother buying things at over-the-top prices, b. the producer wouldn’t bother producing things s/he didn’t love or need because they are earning the same as everyone else, so why waste the day creating items no one else wants or needs?

Perhaps along with similar incomes, we may organise ourselves into communities, as the community could redistribute the necessary money out to everyone. So every person would be given the training and the time to develop their passion, and then the whole community would benefit, and in effect, pay the person, by money or in kind. We already have this mechanism down pat; we just need to put the `luurve’ back into it.

We would no longer ‘work’; we would simply be playing, without effort or `labour’. Our life would be our work, which is why we call it `life work’. So there would be little need for work hours, pay structures and many other work-related rules, industries and infrastructure, because we are just doing what we love as part of our lives. So all the office blocks and jobs we’ve created for unions, banks, pay systems, work laws etc could go out the window, and we could all go out the windows too, and into the sunshine! (Unless working in an office block is what you love, of course.)

I think at some deep level we understand that we are working outside our internal passions. You can tell that by the phrases we use around work such as `working for the man’, `working hard for the money’, `it’s just a job’ ` another day another dollar’ etc. There are two sides to this. One is that as a society we’ve decided to create `false’ products and services, and knowing this, we don’t enjoy working with them. The other side of the coin is that we’ve also decided it’s easier to let an `other’ rule us (the boss, the job, the government, the need for money) rather than take responsibility for our lives and dreams, and so have created these jobs in order to hide within them.

Imagine walking into shops and cafés where the people love serving you and love making things for you, because really, they are making it for themselves. There are people doing that now, and don’t we love to buy their stuff! It’s the best advertisement I can think of.