Work: What Is Right Livelihood?

Traditional wisdom teaches that the function of work is: (1) to give a person a chance to utilize and develop his faculties; (2) to enable him to overcome his inborn egocentricity by joining with other people in a common task; and (3) to bring forth the goods and services needed by all of us for a decent existence.       (E.F. Schumacher in Mindfulness and Meaningful Work: Explorations in Right Livelihood)

If our country’s economic crisis catalyzed reform of how we think about work and go about our jobs, we could end up seeing it as a gift. As jobs disappear and new work environments eventually come into being, they may be radically different from those we have become accustomed to. 55% of Americans are unhappy with their jobs, and would say that “business as usual” doesn’t work. If you were to actively design your work setting, what would it be like? What values would you choose to guide you?

If work is meant to give a person a chance to utilize and develop his or her faculties, your job should closely match your strongest talents and interests. Chances are these talents and interests do not involve, say,  sitting in meetings. They could, however, involve facilitating meetings between line staff who understand how to improve productivity and managers authorized to implement their ideas.

If it were a cultural expectation that one of your job duties was to overcome inborn egocentricity by joining with other people in a common task, when your work group evaluated your supervisor, you might collaborate on relationship building, conflict resolution, and listening skills.

We could argue that bringing forth the good and services needed by all of us for a decent existence is not compatible with a growth economy based on thinking up new products and creating desire for them. And anyway, people are saving their money and reflecting more carefully about what they really need and what feeds their hearts. What will we decide?

Silly idealism? Maybe. Then again, maybe not. Work environments are in a state of flux. It’s up to us what they will become.

Work: Right Livelihood in Action

Doctors Without Borders is an incredible organization that brings medical care to impoverished victims of war and disasters. In one of their newsletters, they featured an excerpt from the book Writing on the Edge, a collection of accounts by 14 highly respected writers who traveled with Doctors Without Borders teams to crisis areas. I’d like to share part of the story Booker Prize-winning novelist DBC Pierre wrote about his journey to Armenia.

“(In the Southern Caucasus) there’s a great stigma placed on mental disability. Sufferers are alone with their problems. Lesser conditions like depression and anxiety are ignored altogether, just taken as another fact of hard life. This dynamic forms the heart of Belgian psychologist Dr. Luk Van Baelen’s project. He has made a start on the task of destigmatization.

“Chambarak opened its first DWB day center in 2003. There is one in each of the towns I’ve visited, staffed with psychologists, social workers, and assistants. They are a hub not just for the disabled, but for the wider community, if only for warmth, coffee, and conversation. Every weekday the center is open for counseling, crafts, music, fitness, anything that brings the twain together in a relaxed and constructive way. Picnics and open days are mounted whenever possible. The able and disabled are mingling. ‘We use any excuse for a party,’ says Chambarak’s psychologist, Loussine Mkrttchian. Subscription is steadily growing at her center.

“It’s also at the day center I see a remembered face. I meet him. His name is Petros, a handsome,weather-beaten, profoundly retarded 35-year-old with airs of great musing and reflection and a fixation with the buttons on his coat. A familiar sight around the district, he simply wanders from morning to night, often in the mountains, often around the prohibited border zone. His family feeds him, but that’s as far as his care goes. He’s been left all his life to wander. He has never spoken a word.”

The people who work with Doctors Without Borders amaze me. Right livelihood in action.

Why Look At Conflicts With Money and Work?

You may have no need to look more deeply into your feelings and beliefs about money and work. If you have little tension, resentment, sadness, or other flavors of unhappiness in these areas, more power to you. If not, keep reading.

My friend, Kyle, is surprised and grateful at how much his life has improved since he started looking at his job and money issues. Creative and smart, he still couldn’t figure out why, by his 45th birthday, he’d never landed a good job, didn’t have enough money to live comfortably, and was phobic about having children despite enjoying them. These issues were brought home to him all the more when his girlfriend handed him his birthday present, a book called The Seven Stages of Money Maturity by George Kinder. Kyle has an aversion to anything that resembles a self-help book. But sensing that his girlfriend really wanted him to to read it, he sat down that night, sighed, and began to read.

By 6 a.m. the following morning, he was nearly finished, and thinking hard about his father. A loving but unhappy man, Kyle’s father made a decent living in work he was not suited for and thoroughly disliked. Either he communicated, or Kyle believed he heard, the message that dads make good money, dislike their jobs, and live this way because they have children.

Kinder gets you thinking about what you learned early in life regarding money and work, and how these messages shaped your view of yourself and what is possible. Pretty soon, you start to realize that your former rock-solid truths about what you must do with money, what you cannot do in your work life, are ideas that you can keep or discard. This prepares you to make changes in how you work and handle money — not how your sister, the people you graduated with, the Greenpeace activist, the conservative businessperson live out their time and energy in this world.

“So,” you say, “Kyle finished this book, got a great job he loves that pays $150,000 a year, got married to that incredible woman and now they have a houseful of adorable children!” Well, not exactly. But he is following the suggestions Kinder offers in the book, earning more money, working at a much more interesting job — and coming to appreciate and respect his irritating, puzzling, wonderful father.

The Dragon in the Window

There is a Zen story about an old, eccentric Chinese monk who collected dragons. Throughout his life, he collected them:  jade, wood, 2 inches high, 6 inches high.  He loved his dragons.  With great gusto, he would show them to visitors and tell the stories of his treasures.

Then, one day, a real dragon came and looked in the window of the monk’s hut.  What do you think the old man did when he saw it?  He fainted!

We all collect stories about money. If only I had more money, I would be happy.  I need to worry about money, because there will never be enough, especially in this frightening economy.  I’m a trust-fund baby. I should be able to have the things I want, and since I don’t have the money, I will have to pull out my credit card.

I once worked with a man named Jake, whose story was that he was just plain incapable of earning a decent living. Because of this, he reasoned, he was a failure as a man.  But at the same time, he was not about to become a typical entitled American who was way too concerned about getting more money. Jake was by no means a failure. Very bright and insightful, he was a natural teacher of gifted kids at an alternative school.  He came to therapy when he decided he might as well become acquainted with his dragon.  At first, our conversations were usually on the intellectual side. One day, though, he started talking about his father, and whap! That dragon’s tail caught him right across the head!

Jake’s father was a hard act to follow in the financial arena.  A successful businessman, he made a great deal of money in a job he didn’t care for.  Throughout his younger years, Jake heard over and over how you need to work hard and earn lots of money, and how unenjoyable that was going to be.  Not that his father actually said these things;  the message came across through his irritability, long hours at work, and subtle complaints about his business. At the same time, Jake felt his parents loved him, and he could tell that his father deeply valued seeing to it that his family would never go without.

When Jake was 13, his parents divorced.  As Dad was the designated Bad Guy and had limited contact with the kids, Jake’s development of a career vision got sidetracked.  He did well in college, but felt at loose ends when he graduated. Eventually, he got a teaching certificate, and had little trouble finding work at progressive, exciting schools that paid peanuts.

When Jake started treatment, he was embarrassed that he didn’t earn enough money to pay for his therapy on his own;  he was using money he inherited from his father, who had died the previous year.  He felt strange about this, as he resented what he described as his father’s preference for money over people. Coming to terms with his dragon helped him acknowledge and let go of feeling superior to his father, and to find real pride within himself about ways he was like his father. He also came to feel grateful that his father’s money allowed him to obtain additional education that led to a better-paying job. By the end of his therapy, he no longer felt funny about his father “paying” for it.  Instead, he felt his dad would be pleased to be able to provide his son with this gift of healing.