Vicki Robin

long with racism and sexism, our society has a form of caste system based on what you do for money. We call that jobism, and it pervades our interactions with one another on the job, in social settings and even at home. Why else would we consider housewives second-class citizens? Or teachers lower status than doctors even though their desk-side manner with struggling students is far better than many doctors’ bedside manner with the ill and dying?

e work to pay the bills—but we spend more than we make on more than we need, which sends us back to work to get the money to spend to get more stuff to . . .

We build our working lives on this myth of more. Our expectation is to make more money as the years go on. We will get more responsibility and more perks as we move up in our field. Eventually, we hope, we will have more possessions, more prestige and more respect from our community. We become habituated to expecting ever more of ourselves and ever more from the world, but rather than satisfaction, our experience is that the more we have, the more we want—and the less content we are with the status quo.

In 1958, when economist John Kenneth Galbraith appropriately described the United States as “The Affluent Society,” 9.5 percent of U.S. households had air conditioning, about 4 percent had dishwashers, and fewer than 15 percent had more than one car. By 1980, when Ronald Reagan’s successful bid to replace Jimmy Carter was based on the widespread sense that people were suffering economically, the percentage of homes with air conditioning had quintupled, the percentage with dishwashers had increased more than 700 percent and the percentage with two or more cars had about tripled. Yet, despite the astounding economic growth—despite owning more of the gadgets, machines and appliances thought to constitute “the good life”—Americans felt significantly less well-off than they had twenty-two years before, polls showed.10

Just as with money, our concept of work consists of a patchwork of contradictory beliefs, thoughts and feelings—notions we absorbed from our parents, our culture, the media and our life experience. The following quotations highlight the incongruity of our different definitions of work:
E. F. Schumacher says:
. . . the three purposes of human work [are] as follows:
◆First, to provide necessary and useful goods and services.
◆Second, to enable every one of us to use and thereby perfect our gifts like good stewards.
◆Third, to do so in service to, and in cooperation with, others, so as to liberate ourselves from our inborn egocentricity.1
The late economist Robert Theobald tells us:
Work is defined as something that people do not want to do and money as the reward that compensates for the unpleasantness of work.2

We must spend money to maintain our jobs—job costuming, commuting costs, food bought expensively at the workplace.

e must take time to dress for our jobs, commute to our jobs, think about our jobs at work and at home, “decompress” from our jobs. We must spend our evenings and weekends in mindless “escape entertainment” in order to “recreate” from our jobs. We must occasionally “vacate” our

. We are spending so much of our precious time earning in order to spend that we don’t have the time to examine our priorities.

Marketing theory says that people are driven by fear, by the promise of exclusivity, by guilt and greed, and by the need for approval. Advertising technology, armed with market research and sophisticated psychology, aims to throw us off balance emotionally—and then promises to resolve our discomfort with a product.

Rather than having a fixed behavioral response for every stimulus, as some animals do, humans tend to create patterns of response. Some come from personal experience, primarily in the first five years of life. Some are genetic. Some are cultural. Some seem to be universal.