Married to the job

Well, I am not a Literature person. I stopped reading the book 'Pride and Prejudice' on Page 23.

Then I started another book, which is much more interesting to me - "Married to the job" by Ilene Philipson. It is about the working phenomenon in U.S. in the last two decades. The fragmentation of social connection, the weakening of community bonding and the collapse of marriage institution urge U.S. people to invest all their efforts and emotion to another place, i.e. the working place. With the mainstream culture of consumerism, people dedicate to their career development and seek for the material success in order to get the approval from the society. They deny the importance of family bonding and the interdependence of each other. In fact, they believe a 'normal' adult should be totally independent and work very hard on their jobs. However, once people feel the companies betray and do not care them, or cannot get what they expect to receive from the jobs, some will totally breakdown and suppose they lose everything, because they have no other things to anchor.

I have a strong empathy to most case studies in the book because I had been totally dedicated to my job before. Luckily I broke up with the job before I get married to it. When I was in my previous job, I scheduled my wedding based on the time-line of my work, and I forced myself to be excel in my work, I worked harder than other colleagues, as I wanted to be important to the company. Well, one day, after I got married, I discovered that I was actually no body to my ex-boss simply because I was not no longer a single woman, he assumed that I would be economic dependent to my husband and did not have to work hard anymore. His prejudice and discrimination towards married women was not the main point of this experience. In fact, I realized that I was extremely silly to over-invest in my job.

Now I know, outside the job, there are much more things worth me to spend time with, and to take care of, such as my family, my friends, my community and even this planet, I should not force myself to focus on career only, despite that it is undeniably an important part of my life.

I would like to share several paragraphs with you from the book:
'Freedom can only exist in a context of security. And without feeling secure, institutionally anchored, connected, and attended to, we seems all too ready to shackle ourselves to the workplace.' (Pg. 227)

'Many of us have come to avoid, perhaps even to fear, leisure. For some, having free time has become a sign of professional inadequacy.' (Pg. 233)

'Perhaps finding ways of connecting with, committing to, and caring about each others is the highest goal to which we can aspire, both as individuals and as a society. Certainly, living to work not only stymies this goal but prevents us from asking ourselves how life should be lived and to whom we matter.' (Pg. 235)

After all, we go back to the very basic and universal philosophical question, 'What is the meaning of life?'