What is a job?
Last week while waiting in line to get my smoothie, I over heard lots of lunch time conversations. One conversation in particular made me pause for a second and I had to resist the urge to set the induvial straight. A man with sunglasses turned backwards on his hat told a woman that “A military spouse is not a job”. I know crazy right.
A spouse is a job, military or otherwise. I thought about what I would say if I rudely interrupted this jerk to “set him straight”. I asked myself what is a job exactly. I did some light googling and found this post online. The post has a line that I think succinctly defines a job and it is “a job is an activity, usually regular and often done in exchange for a payment.” See the sunglass wearing jerk let the woman know that the Military Spouse job was not a job because they received no payment. Before my research I immediately thought “jerk and how close minded he is.”
Money, that is how he defined work, this thinking is close minded nearsighted and foolish. Money is and should be treated as a tool however, it seems that in capitalist society we have made money more than just a tool we have allowed it to stand in as a sense of value and worth for people and groups of people.
The Yanomami, Kula Ring of Papua, Awa tribes, Nyimang of Sudan, and Jonbeel Mela are societies in existence today that do not have or use money. The people who live in these societies have jobs even if they do not get a paycheck. The narrow mindedness of sunglass guy and his awful statement about military spouses just denies the existence of these societies and the work that is done.
Money turns my stomach, because of people like sunglass guy. I heard a man in an Egyptian market call money filthy lucre and that has stuck with me for over twenty years. It really is filthy lucre. We allow ourselves to become trapped by money. We work jobs we hate for the promise of it. We starve for the lack of it and when we have it we are often forced to spend it to protect it or forced to part with it.
I truly believe that my grandchildren will live in a cashless society. A post scarcity economy. Essentially an economy based of division of the real resources not imaginary money. You will work for actual food and shelter not paper or electronic transactions. Here is an interesting article about the post scarcity economy. I could write for pages about societies without money and the worlds future (in which there will be no money) but, I must stop digressing. The bottom line is this… We have to stop being narrow minded a$#holes and I have to stop eavesdropping
The Corrigan Encore 