“Fulfilling work”
“meaning”
“values”
Our whole culture for decades has taught us that these are good ideas. “Follow your dreams”. A lot of people think this is just good advice.
I don’t.
We work so that we can earn money so that we can support our family. If you like the work: great. But that isn’t what it’s all about. It’s about the money. And sometimes you do the work, even if you don’t like it, but you do it because the money is what your family needs.
What I see in the 21st century is corporations that do not value workers, and don’t even value customers. The corporations are squeezing money out of everyone, because the stockholders want dividends and the executives want bonuses. The result is that some people work a full-time job and cannot even afford the rent to move out of Mom’s basement. That’s not right.
If your focus is on “fulfilling” work, you will live forever in Mom’s basement. The real key is to find a job that pays well — and at least to some extent, I think the Employers have some obligation to pay their workers a decent wage.
It used to be the engineers and people who actually started out doing the core business tasks, that ran the companies.
Now it’s the bean counters that run things.
I completely agree with you and times of optimism and prosperity, such as the 1949s-1950s, were times of relative equality where the average person was paid fairly for their work.