A comfortable living

A couple decades ago my friend Rich said to me, “Most jobs suck. That’s why the people who own your company are paying you to do your job. If your job was fun to do, they’d do it themselves.”

It’s odd that I find this somehow comforting.

Years later another friend of ours, an accountant and controller, observed, “capitalism means paying people well enough to keep them coming to work but not what their labor is worth. That’s how the owners of the company make a profit, by not paying you what your labor is worth.”

I found this less comforting.

I have a friend who is native American; she grew up in a corner of California far from the coast, near and at times on a reservation. As I got to know her and her husband, he once mentioned that anthropologists who studied the tribes of California, getting to know their foods and customs and extrapolating from that what they could of their lives before Europeans came, figured that they worked perhaps 15 hours a week, maybe as much as 20 hours a week, to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves.

That’s all. Fifteen to 20 hours a week.

His joke for his wife was that, as her tribe had lived in the bay area, that left plenty of time for beach volleyball.

Sometimes, as I get up before dawn to get ready for work and be out the door by 7 to get to the office at 8 to work until 5 to get home around 6 so I can eat dinner and become one with my easychair, sometimes I wonder about all of our notions of progress.

Then I watch the news, and I hear stories about how America is stratifying economically, how income disparities are increasing as the middle class gets squeezed and we become more and more a nation of haves and have nots and I think about the people who own the companies that generate our wealth.

I do not find much comfort in our government increasing their tax breaks, as I find both our dollar and notions of progress stretched increasingly thin.

Any ideas on where to find any comfort in any of that?

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