Generation Bubble: Theory of the Leisure Class Pt.2

One more thing, Hansen's description of the demands on white-collar workers made possible by technology are very one-sided. My decade spent as a parking lot attendant has led me to suggest that maybe the relationship between employer and employee ought to be a two-way relationship.

In any work there are tasks that are time-sensitive and those that are not, just as there are tasks that are location dependent and those that aren't. Directing traffic and selling parking tickets were two tasks that were both time and location dependent. Unfortunately my supervisors could never really predict when the demand for these tasks would occur and so I spent countless hours alone in my parking lot waiting for cars to come so that I could fulfill the tasks associated with my job. What made parking cars appealing was that there were few, if any, tasks that were not time or location dependent (ie. nothing to take home at the end of the day). I often used my time in the parking lot, without traffic, to read, write, or engage in other kinds of contemplative work. My employers wanted my skills to be available on-demand within a given time frame and location, but I felt free to engage in activities that didn't compromise my ability to complete those tasks successfully.

If the contemporary white-collar worker's holiday or family time is being encroached upon by off-hour employer demands, I think that it is suitable for family or holiday demands to encroach on employer time. If you can ask me to answer email while at the beach, why can't I answer email at the beach if I have no other location dependent work to do? Do I need to save my afternoon at the beach for my holiday time if I can still complete those tasks to the same degree of completeness while at the beach? Similarly, if it doesn't matter that a non-time sensitive employer task is completed at 10:00 AM or 2:00 PM, does it really matter if I complete it instead at 8:00PM making it possible for me to complete a time-sensitive family task at 2:00 PM or 10:00 AM?

Turnabout's fair play I say.

Generation Bubble: Theory of the Leisure Class

Just the other day a friend and I were wondering if we might have been less angst-ridden if we had become "one of those guys who just comes home from work and drinks beer in front of the tv after dinner." It's not a particularly flattering picture of anyone, as it tends to reduce someone to a singular stereotypical activity. However, more than that, it also has a tendency to place undue value on our own activities.

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.