I always found the cliché “There are starving children in Africa” response to be a pretty useless tool to use against more well-off children refusing to eat the food offered to them. In reality, the “keeping up with the Jonses” cliché holds true, because we compare ourselves to our peers around us, not to distant people in poverty-stricken countries that we have never been to.
That’s what makes high school reunions so stressful – they are one of the closest peer groups you can compare yourself to, and let see how you line up 10 years down the road with people who grew up in the same town as you, with the same basic education. (I read this in a book, but I’ll need to get back to you with some real citations.) I imagine that, depending on the structure of your work environment, co-workers might be a pretty important comparison group too. If you work in an environment where you have an advanced degree, but most people you work with don’t (like manufacturing) this probably isn’t much of a problem for you.
Before bed last night, I was reading through the “Work” chapters of bell hooks’s book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. The chapter talks about how the feminist movement promoted the idea that women needed to be “allowed” to work, and that work would be liberating. Of course, for poor American women, which included many African American women, this idea didn’t mean much because they had been working for decades, and the type of work they did was not at all “liberating.” What the white women meant, of course, what that a well-paying career would be liberating, but they did not specify that when they referred to “work.” They made the mistake of only comparing their situation to the men at their same class level – and ignoring the plight of the larger population of women.
Hooks also talks about how many middle class women began to work part time to be able to pay for their kids to go to college, or other “luxuries” that were becoming standard for the middle class.
It’s now standard for women to go to college and plan on careers, although here in the South I still know several young women who have worked hard in college and at their current jobs, but think that they will drop it all to be a mom and housewife once they meet the right man. I’m sure none of us know what we want until we get there, but the idea of putting so much time, effort and money into a career and then just abandoning it drives me crazy.
For me, it would be nice not to have to work – but only if that was because I earned enough to retire early. Work is empowering, because it gives me the ability to pay my own rent, buy the things I want, have goals that I know I can accomplish. But some days the fact that I have to spend 10 – 12 hours of my day at work (and commuting to and from work) to be counter productive – like power couples who earn enough to hire the best nannies but never see their children themselves. Why have children in the first place? (Of course, they do get to enjoy their children sometimes and that’s why they have them, but a lot of these couples seem stretched really thin and constantly stressed out.)
There seem to be two ways to approach work – well two ways that seem “good” to me. The first is to get a 9 to 5 (well, 8:30 to 5:30) job, and show up to work every day, do your thing, and then live your “real life” at home. Or, if your job is going to be your life, your job needs to be a place where you can accomplish things, have goals, and enjoy a good portion of the work.
I’m still deciding if I really like my job enough to commit to it and give up on having much time to do other things. I do enjoy the work, and the constant challenge, but I also find it stressful to feel like I never quite know what I’m doing, and also to have to work with so many different personalities overseeing me. I think it’s something that will just take time for me to get comfortable with, and only then can I really see how I feel about this job.
What is your philosophy towards your job? Is it something you do because you need to work to do the stuff you really like, or is your job something you really like to do? What would your ideal job be? Or how would you ideally spend your days if you didn’t “need” to work to pay your rent, food, medical bills, etc?
This post is a good example of why I should write posts all at once, instead of in bits and pieces over several days! My original point of this post is that we start wanting different things depending on our sphere of reference – depending on what the people we compare ourselves to have. It seems that the key to getting away from keeping up with the joneses is to really evaluate what you want and what it will take to get there. If all you want is a tiny little house in the middle of nowhere, you maybe could quit your city job and go for it now. If you want to use your freetime better, maybe quit the demanding career and find a 9-5 job. But first you need to really know what YOU want.
