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May 28, 2010
The Best Job in the World
Two things I read lately made me reflect on my working life.
A book "The Case for Working with your Hands: or why office work is bad for us and fixing things feels good" has just been published. The author Matthew Crawford is an academic philosopher and a mechanic who runs his own motorcycle repair shop in Virginia, so presumably he knows wherof he speaks.
The other is our Simon's latest occasional newsletter which, among other things, contains musings about various jobs he did in his life.
Like Simon's, my working life has been varied, interesting and unconventional. I haven't spent a day working in the office.
At the university, way back in my native Poland, I read Marine Biology. I was going to become a marine biologist and thus be in a possession of what I imagined being 'the best job in the world'. But it was not meant to be. For a combination of reasons (aversion to Communism being only one of them) I left the country and for years worked as a waitress in London. That too was 'the best job in the world' - working evenings allowed me to follow my many interests in the daytime, earn lots of tips, mingle with people, and last but not least, have a 'free' cooked dinner every day.
One of those interests was photography, which I went on to study and then took up professionally, specialising in portaiture. My first assignment for the national newspaper convinced me that I had 'the best job in the world' - to meet, have a chat with and photograph a Well Known Writer, then seeing that picture in print AND being paid for it seemed to me a hight of good fortune.
Alas, finding I was not temperamentally suited to a freelance mode of working (on balance, I felt more insecure than free), I decided to quit photography as a mortgage-paying occupation. That's when my current 'best job in the world' started. Working in an independent bookshop is a perfect mixture of manual and knowledge based work, where books and people who love them come together. It is truly 'the best job in the world. For me. For now. And I can still photograph writers, some of whom are customers.
To go back to 'The case for working with ones hands', I think the manual labour vs 'knowledge based work' is a false distinction. We're still dealing with separation based on the status of a job in society. The author would simply want to reverse the accepted order and calls for respecting work that is done with hands over the other kind. But 'the best job in the world' will always involve using hands, head, and heart, whatever the nature of it : repairing motorcycles, building houses or writing a novel. What matters is the love of it and the meaning behind it, not the social status conferred on it by society.
Posted by Marzena at May 28, 2010 08:37 PM