In making this comparison, our chief thought was related to angst generated by what we saw as our professional obligations, obligations that tended to follow us around look after the end of the official workday. These obligations are also compounded by a certain amount of ambition, not necessarily a careerist ambition, but (if we're charitable) rather an ambition fueled by passion to do our work well and successfully. The dark side to this passion is a dogged sense of guilt when we fail to live up to our own expectations of where our realm of achievement ought to lay, especially when this professional achievement comes at the cost of a competing value, such as family time.
In our minds, our beer-drinking friend of whom we were envious, engaged in some kind of imaginary blue collar work, the mental calculations of which did not follow him home at the end of his day, allowing him to spend his evenings in some kind of blissful tranquility. Shortly after our conversation, I realized that we were following in the same sort of ill-conceived bourgeois romanticism of the relatively privileged hippies when they idealized the working classes back in the 1960s.
Having grown up in a working class family, surrounded by other working class families, I can tell you it's a pretty smug sense of superiority to consider that a blue collar experience is a less emotionally turbulent one than some kind of professional or "knowledge worker" because it is devoid of intellectual conundrums. In many cases I think it fair to say that basic economic anxiety precludes the luxury of time spent dwelling on existential contemplation.
Which brings me to a recent posting on Generation Bubble, where I fear the author Ylajali Hansen might be making a similar mistake. In her article, Hansen laments her relatively carefree days as a library shelf stocker when compared to the potential demands of the corporate world, referencing the around the clock deluge of emails and Blackberry-enabled action requests from colleagues and supervisors versus the simple pleasure of being able to clock out and go home at the end of the day. For Hansen, in this corporate environment, the possibility of "clocking out" never occurs as "work," like so much else, is now on-demand as well.
For those who have known me since my CJSW days and before, Hansen's argument well-echoes my own descriptions of my halcyon days as a Parking Lot Attendant, a job I have often stated as the best I ever had. Thinking things now, I can honestly say now that the bulk of my economic problems are taken care of, I've had a tendency to gloss over the economic problems I faced as a parking lot attendant, to dwell on the existential pleasures I enjoyed surrounded by acres of asphalt. In reality, I tried one set of privileges and problems for another set, and I think it would be unfair to categorize one or the other as "less angst-ridden."
But true to form, these are the kinds of problems I like to think about and so I love that Generation Bubble brought them up.
