Job Replacements

As I slowly approach employment—two possibilities fell through yesterday though two more came up at the end of the day—I have been debating as to whether or not to ever here specifically mention what it is that I will be doing to pay my bills once I find a job.

On the one hand, as most of us have somewhere inherited the belief that anyone who is underemployed should immediately feel ashamed of their job, I would either feel the need to specifically mention my job to dispel such an unnecessary absurd notion or for no other reason than to prove that I have nothing to shamefully or regretfully hide. Yet, on the other hand is the great fallacy whereby we define ourselves by jobs and thus to never mention it directly would be a direct assault upon this, yet another, absurd notion.

It is not in knowing full well I will more than likely either find a $7/hour job at a store or restaurant or an office job that might pay slightly more that I do not feel compelled in any way to specifically mention my future job. For even if I were to find a job as a Scientist or [insert some other widely respected profession here] I would not specifically mention it for, as I have said here before, I see no difference between one job and another: they are all annoying, yet still necessary, interruptions. Besides the only two truly necessary occupations in the world (Bartenders and Doctors, though, besides the vast difference in required education, there is little difference between the two) everything else, Lawyers and Politicians more than all else combined, are simply unnecessary roles we have agreed to become; to play for pay upon this stage. To even recognize my job in my attempt to work as little as possible is a contradiction I am not willing to take up here, doubters that I am ashamed of something be damned.

Still, if one is still stubbornly holding onto the idea that our job is a defining quality to what we are, one needs look no further than all the factories, mills and vacant shops now closed in Buffalo, NY. (Perhaps it the abundance of such reminders of the temporal aspects of jobs that Buffalo has that brought me so willingly back?) The moment those jobs no longer produced profit was the moment those jobs were no longer in existence and the men and women who had put in more than half of their lives into that factory or the shopkeeper who lost his savings were suddenly turned away and the very thing that they allowed themselves to be defined by was suddenly taken from and deprived of them. Again, nothing personal, it was just business.

I often think just how replaceable we each are to our jobs, just as the factory workers of previous generations were to their jobs, and worry just how soon the office and service jobs that people are defining themselves by in our current job market might be gone as well. Because it still is, after all, nothing personal, just business. Those rules will never change.

So while I continue to look for a job I keep these things in mind while remembering to never allow a job to be any more irreplaceable than I am to that job.