Working Man's Blues

"Destiny will betray you, crush your ideals...dress you in the grey uniform of another family man, and without a whimper you will serve out your time, fly from pain to duty, from joy to work, from commitment to neutrality."  - Thomas Pynchon

Probin, my hotel desk clerk, tells me he feels like a slave.  He seems like he could cry.  We are standing on the balcony of Hotel Silver Home.  My shiny new laptop is sitting between us, making me want to hide it in wealth-shame.  He is telling me about his job and suddenly it sounds too familiar, like I’ve heard this story from an endless parade of people who work for a living.  I know without asking that he gets out of bed five minutes too late every morning with a dead weight in his chest, thinking of calling in sick.  He tells me he just needs his boss to show him he’s valued occasionally, that he doesn’t know how he ended up here, that he doesn’t make enough money, and that his work is crushing him.  I try to commiserate and it sounds false.  I tell him I too have had jobs where I felt like a slave, but I can see in his eyes that he knows it's bullshit.   I tell him I’m lucky.  He knows that.

  

I wish I had a solution for Probin.  I wish I knew someone in Dubai or The States who could give him a job and a plane ticket out of his ugly little corner of the world.  I know it would give him that elusive sense of satisfaction to live in a higher social stratum, to perhaps own a car, drink wine with dinner.   That is, of course, until he gets used to it, until he realizes he still has to go to work every day and doesn’t get a raise when he practically runs the place and his boss is the same arrogant asshole with a different nationality.  At least it would be better for awhile.

I’ve met people on the road, one each from Austria, France, and Germany, two from China (not to mention my hometown inspiration), who have quit their jobs and are drifting.  Like Probin, they were sick to death of the grind.  Unlike him, they had the means to end it.  It’s a reckless luxury that few of us can even contemplate, and my own scorched earth exit from the working life was not without cost, but I’m starting to realize that there are some hidden benefits.  I don’t work for a car or a mortgage or to pay off debt anymore.  My next job doesn’t have to “pay enough”.  It just has to make me feel like getting out of bed in the morning.   Maybe it is a symptom of the disease of our post-modern culture that Probin and I feel entitled to employment that goes beyond tending the machinery of commerce for the sake only of more commerce, and maybe it is true, as I sense it is, that our grandfathers never questioned the personal satisfaction they gained from work, that they simply lifted the load without complaint, dutifully providing for themselves and their families.  I'm still hoping to find something better .