The Ten-Pound Sack of Rocks

There's a lot of talk about shitty work environments going on right now, but there always is, so I'm not going to go into contemporary examples. This will remain true until there's a massive sea change in our society around the nature of work.

Work is essential for a functioning society, but there's this underlying assumption that work is misery, and if it isn't, you're not working hard enough. There's a certain variety of person that, when someone gripes about their job, proclaims that "Work isn't supposed to be fun. That's why they call it WORK!"

I checked my Merriam-Webster app and found about thirty distinct definitions for the word. So, what kind of work are they calling it?

The top definition is "to perform work [bit of a tautology there] or fulfill duties regularly for wages or salary." That's what we usually mean when we talk about "work." However another one of the definitions is "to exert oneself physically or mentally, especially in sustained effort for a purpose or under compulsion or necessity." Note that the final clause is attached with an "or" meaning that it can be for a purpose voluntarily.

The house I grew up in had a very large backyard that, when we moved in, was pretty much ivy and trees. Over the years, my parents transformed it into a garden. It took work. It took pulling up ivy and digging holes and putting in flowers and hauling gray water from the washing machine to water those flowers and so much weeding. They worked on it on the weekends and when they retired they worked on in nearly every day. They weren't paid a dime--indeed they put a large amount of money into it--but it was still work. And they derived great joy from it.

Now, supposing my parents did the same things with a ten-pound sack of rocks on their back. It means they'd be working harder, but not to any useful end. It wouldn't make them more effective or efficient. They wouldn't be able to haul as much water or pull as many weeds before they'd have to give up in exhaustion.

But if they insisted on not carrying the ten-pound sack of rocks (they wouldn't ask, they'd insist) and that certain kind of person said that they just weren't willing to work hard, you'd think that person was kind of an idiot, wouldn't you?

In the working world, there are a lot of ten-pound sacks of rocks--unnecessary things that make the job harder but don't make the results any better.

Dragging people back into the office when it has been objectively proven that the work can be done just as effectively--sometimes even more effectively--remotely is a ten-pound sack of rocks.

Meetings about things that could just as easily be sorted out on Slack are ten-pound sacks of rocks.

Bad managers are a ten-pound sack of rocks. Hell, they're a twenty-pound sack of rocks.

But if you ask to put the sack down, you're a slacker who doesn't really want to work, despite all you get done with the actual work. We've taken it for granted that the rocks we haul are what we must endure for our wages.

But what if we didn't? What if we made a point of firing the managers who make their employees lives miserable and replacing them with ones who know how to deal with people in a non-abusive fashion? It'll cost about the same and people are a lot more productive when they're respected. My brother holds an executive position at a multimillion-dollar company that is completely remote. It meant a company several states away was able to hire someone as amazing as my brother. And reducing information to text makes it easier to absorb in less time than listening to someone talk about it.

There are so many things we could be doing (or not doing) to make life easier for people who work for a living. Don't make it so much work for people to do their work.

Today I took pleasure in delicious lemonade.
Today I learned how to set up a blog on a WordPress site after deleting the default blog page.