Get a job. Just be glad you have a job. Follow your bliss. Follow your dream. Dream job. Take this job and shove it. We do have a love-hate relationship with our work most of us. It keeps us alive, it pays the bills and in so many ways it defines us.
Just today I was gushing on to a stranger in a coffee shop about how much I love my work, how rewarding it is, how meaningful, how wonderful, yadda yadda yadda, gag, barf!
But I do love my job. Often. Not always. Okay, sometimes. Now and then. Occasionally? There are challenges and risks and face it, a chronic weltering sense of disempowerment. I know this work is good for me. I spend much of my time giving, giving of myself, giving of my very best, to see that my clients do well, learn and acquire a sense of empowerment, enhance their quality of life, become more independent. This is almost always rewarding and gratifying and the encounters usually positive and life-affirming.
I am also stranded in my job. There was a time, some forty years ago when I was only a year in the work force and it was relatively easy to simply walk away from an unsatisfactory job and find something better. In those days Unemployment Insurance (now stupidly renamed Employment Insurance) was easy to get. If you were laid off you could begin to collect within a couple of weeks the value of two thirds or more of your earnings for up to a year. If you quit or were fired from your job you were disqualified for up to six weeks. If you had saved a little money you would make it through.
My, how things have changed. In the early nineties after gradually scaling back, the Federal Government drastically "reformed" Unemployment Insurance. Dumbly renamed it Employment Insurance and made it all but impossible for people to collect unless they worked a minimum of more than nine hundred hours for the past year. If your work was part time or casual you were out of luck. If you quit your job your only resort was welfare, a hugely reduced standard of living and the likelihood of having to abandon your apartment for a room in a shared house or a single room occupancy, or the sidewalk, the doorway or under a bridge.
The Employment Insurance Commission soon swelled with a surplus of more than five billion dollars. Even though I have not benefited from their largess since 1990, until I was working contracts I still had to pay into their gaping maw. I do not expect to get a refund.
It goes without saying that on the part of the federal government in Ottawa this was a cynical ploy with two objectives in mind: to further disable and cow the work force into submitting to the onerous and low paying jobs that were the bitter and poison fruit of the massive foreign investment brought on by NAFTA and other free trade agreements; and as a salvo to the conservative voters who tend to be wealthy business owners or ignorant rednecks. I forgot to mention by the way that these measures were implemented by a Liberal government as a ploy for drawing voters away from the already disgraced Conservative support base.
As workers we live in more straitened circumstances than ever. To abandon a meaningless, oppressive and low paying job carries often severe penalties: a reduced standard of living, poverty, and sometimes homelessness and hunger. I still have more than five years before hitting retirement age. I will see what I can do to white-knuckle it.
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