Thursday, August 12, 2010

SOMETIMES IT'S HARD TO GO TO WORK EVERYDAY

I always get annoyed when a celebrity claims that if you find a job you love then you won't feel like you are going to "work" everyday. They make it sound like people can spend their lives in constant happiness and work will just be pure bliss. What they don't say is that no job will make you happy everyday. That sometimes it's hard to make yourself get up and go to work even when most times you enjoy your job. There will always be those days that you are going to work purely for the paycheck. If we teach our kids that work should always be fun, then we are doing them a disservice. I teach my children that although they should enjoy their job overall, they have to also accept that they may be sick of it sometimes. This is not to say that I am teaching them to settle for a career that they don't ever enjoy. When they complain that they are sick of school I listen but I also point out the alternative....not being able to go to school....and they agree that school is mostly a positive thing but they are just sick of it for that time period (like the end of the year).

I do think that there are people who are happy with their jobs everyday but I think that it's more about their personality. Some people are just pure optimists. I consider myself an optimist...most times but not always. I think that most people in the world have their bad days, some more than others. One of the celebrities that I hear talking about "finding your bliss" has a name that starts with "O". I find it annoying that she acts like she just loves every day of her job but at the same time says that she is overweight because she eats out of unhappiness. If her job is truly pure bliss and she spends so much time working, why is she overweight....does all her unhappiness come as soon as she get's home? Maybe she should work more to keep her mind off her problems. My real point is that even "O" must have bad days and by acting like she doesn't she will make others feel as if something is wrong with their jobs because they are not in pure bliss. It would just be nice if she would emphasize the point that a person can sometimes complain about their job and still be happy.

Where would the world be if people only worked at jobs that made them happy everyday? I dare say that society would collapse. How many people love being cashiers, garbage men, sewage treatment facility workers and field workers? I'm not saying that these workers go to work unhappy everyday but that it's possible they could be happier in a job that wasn't so demanding. I think it was on the Jon Stewart show that I saw an activist that had started a "Take our jobs" program for the migrant workers. The basic premise was they would automatically offer a job to any American that wants to work in the fields. Although Americans fear that migrant workers are stealing American jobs, Americans don't want to do the work of a migrant worker! I guess we are just looking for that "job that we love". Maybe some of those migrant workers would much rather be working in an air conditioned office but then what would we all eat? Would we be happy growing our own food? I love to garden but I'd probably go hungry since I get too lazy to water and weed sometimes!

1 comment:

landismom said...

I totally agree. While I enjoy my job almost every day, there are definitely times when I just don't want to do it, or have a bad day. I never pretend otherwise, to my kids.