A Job to Love by The School of Life EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author: The School of Life
- Language: English
- Genre: Job Hunting
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
i. How we came to desire a job we could love
One of the most extraordinary and yet quietly routine features of our age is
the assumption that we should be able to find work that we not only
tolerate, or endure for the money, but profoundly appreciate, for its high
degree of purpose, camaraderie and creativity. We see nothing strange in the
remarkable notion that we should try to find a job we love.
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It is possible to be highly sympathetic to this wish and yet refuse to see it as
either normal or easy to fulfil and to insist that, in order to stand any chance
of honouring it, we need to lavish concentrated brain power, time and
imagination on its underlying complexities.
For most of history, the question of whether we might love our work would
have seemed laughable or peculiar. We tilled the soil and herded animals,
worked down mines and emptied chamber pots. And we suffered. The serf
or smallholder could look forward to only a very few moments of
satisfaction, and these would lie firmly outside the hours of employment:
the harvest moon festival next year or the wedding day of their eldest child,
currently six years old.
The corresponding assumption was that if one had sufficient money, one
would simply stop working. The educated classes among the ancient
Romans (whose attitudes dominated Europe for centuries) considered all
paid work to be inherently humiliating. Tellingly, their word for business
was negotium: literally, ‘not-enjoyable activity’. Leisure, doing not very
much, perhaps hunting or giving dinner parties, was felt to be the sole basis
for a life of happiness.
Then, at the close of the Middle Ages, an extraordinary shift began: a few
people started to work for money and for fulfilment. One of the first people
to successfully pursue this highly unusual ambition was the Venetian artist
Titian (c. 1485–1576).
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