Work Is Job One

Hearing my father’s stories about the jobs he held as a child, I think of how much harder he worked than I did. And when I think of how hard I worked as a teenager, it makes me think of how much less hard my children work.

That each generation works less hard than the last—is this progress? The question answers itself, but I have to say that I hated having to work as a kid.

It didn’t make sense that I had to haul milk and soda and beer as a stockboy in a delicatessen. Or that I had to make sandwiches and man the kitchen when I became a clerk. Why work at all when there was homework I wouldn’t get to, books I wouldn’t find time to read, or sleep that I wouldn’t have a chance to catch up on?

Of course, had I not been spending 12 or so hours a week working at the Douglaston Deli, I very well might have squandered every minute of that time on nothing so productive as homework or reading. But in my self-righteous imagination, that’s where all that wasted time in the deli would have gone: to the perfection of my mind.

This notion was flimsy but not entirely unfounded. My sisters had brought home many literature anthologies from college that I made time with. For my AP exam, I wrote about Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, which I knew from an old paperback my father, while in the Navy, had lugged around the world in a book-filled suitcase. It was a strange mélange of literature that I explored as a teenager, from the essays of Francis Bacon to the absurdities of Franz Kafka, from old British poetry to Sylvia Plath, from Washington Irving to John Irving. I felt a curiosity about every book I came across. That it was written down, printed, and placed between covers was enough reason to get started. So long as someone had stuck it into a book, I felt honor-bound to find out why.

Catching me in my bedroom reading, my mother would say I was not being productive. I knew she was wrong. Reading had something to do with how I was going to spend my life—that seemed certain. Even if I were to become a pauper, I would be a book-loving pauper.

But in my house, everyone had to have a job as soon as that was practical. We were being taught to work. Not, mind you, how to work, but whether to work. And though I say whether, there was no “or not.” The only option was to work.

We were taught to accept as inevitable, as an unquestionable fact, that our lives would be structured around the exchange of our labor for money. I could still become a pauper if I really wanted, but knowing that I ought to work, it became more natural to picture myself earning a living.

I did not appreciate this lesson until years later when I made a friend who had not learned it. The son of a very successful businessman, he had been raised with the assumption that he would grow up free to pursue his dreams, and that the money to carry him over the dry patches would already be in his bank account.

Then his father went bust, and my friend found himself waiting for his old man to recover. When that didn’t happen, he continued to think a revival in their fortunes was just around the corner. It wasn’t. Many times I suggested to my friend that he get a job, any job. People do it all the time, I said.

He was without money and without the will to earn it. One day he asked me what I thought of what had become of his life, and with some impatience I spoke at length about the lessons that his family’s wealth had deprived him of—that people need to work, not just to survive, but, in most cases, to thrive.

I was too blunt, apparently. He stopped speaking to me.

All the time my kids hear that they ought to dream. True enough, but now I must tell them that they ought to work as well.