Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/269

 WHAT 8 IN A JOB 263

��WHAT^S IN A JOB?

Bt BBNJAMIN C. GEUlDNBOBa 8SCXBZABX OF THS TOCAXIONAL OUIDANCB ▲880CXATI0M OF NSW TOBK

MEN and women should rejoice in fheir work. Not simply be- cause^ as Solomon intimated^ that is their portion; but because that is their life. The world's work occupies more than half of the waking time of the world's workers. A business man or a professional man often takes the problems of his occupation with him into the hours of '^ leisure/' and even to his bed. But even the irresponsible workers who do not have to worry — ^about the work — after the whistle blows spend most of their waking hours with the job. In other words, the largest part of the life that counts, the life of which we are aware, is put in at the process by which men and women obtain the means of livelihood.

In the various demands that have been made from time to time for greater fulness of life, for life more abundant, people have asked for ** shorter hours" — for more leisure — ^generally. Too few have di- rected attention to the possibilities of life within the hours of work. The artists have been looked upon as people who got their fun out of life by working all day at the sort of thing they like to do. The boy envies the profession^ baseball player, because the latter plays and gets paid for it besides! Indeed, the other fellow's job is often apt to look like play to us; but our own job, our own way of living and of making a living — that is hard work, and no fun.

The many social and civic surveys, the investigations into the in- dustries, the '' vocational" propaganda and the preachments of various schools of reformers have all helped to direct attention to the question of the individual's job. And we learn with a variety of emotions that in all except the strictly agricultural and the strictly mining communi- ties the occupations of over ninety per cent, of the people are deter^ mined by the "finding of jobs" by boys and girls who are "willing to do anything." That is to say, more than nineiy people in a hundred have no positive voice in deciding upon their "life work."

This idea, "life work," is indeed foreign to the mass of workers^ though most of them are doomed to hard work for life. The expres- sion suggests something in the nature of a calling, in the literal sense of that word, and it intimates some connection between the purpose of life as a whole and the character of the work. The missionary feels a calling, and he devotes himself to converting savages or saving

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