Ruminations-Committed Vs Interested

A little riffing about the fable of the chicken and the pig, writ large. As my PhD Advisor told me upon graduation: no one will put a statue of you in front of the building no matter how much you do.

This thought came from my monthly conversations with my old college friends. We all entered the University of Illinois at around the same time, some of us collectively weathered the ritual known as New Student Week. Weathered is probably understating it, it was more along the lines of survival.

A few of my old college cohorts have officially retired from the work force. More than a few of those lucky souls were speaking extemporaneously about their feelings of being unsettled, displaced, and not knowing what to do in their daily lives. It is as if they have lost their compasses for their daily habits and rituals because prior to their retirement, all their waking hour had been devoted to the job and the schedule that had been imposed on them by the job. Some are still searching for their equilibrium after they have had their psychological crutch taken away from them, while others have re-centered and re-calibrated their internal center of gravity and are doing fine. 

The discussion then progressed to the reason why they felt so discombobulated by the life change. The change is quite significant, I am not going to diminish the difficulty of the sudden inertia and dynamics of this specific life change, they are real and very confusing; but as we discussed the sudden psychological impact of the changes that comes from quitting a life activity that has been with them since they started adulting.

A story that surfaced in my mind involves a long-time engineer at a large corporation where I used to work. Joe was a respected engineer who worked with agency and standards. He was well into his 70’s when word came that he was going to finally retire. He had been with the company for fifty years. It was unheard of to have worked for that long at one company, even back then. Festivities were planned to honor Joe’s years of service. He and his family were invited to have breakfast at the corporate executive dining room with the long time CEO of the company. They gave him and his wife a very nice farewell gift during the informal ceremony at the building where we both worked, and we sent Joe off to his happy retirement. All’s well that ends well. Except that we saw Joe back at his desk a couple of weeks later. He came back as a consultant because he got tired of sitting around not having anything to occupy his mind and he was driving his wife crazy, so he asked to come back. Joe was not someone who had no life outside of his work. He kept his work life and home life separate, but he was having a hard time filling the massive void that was his work life. He came into work so often that HR had to ask him not to come in because he was working more than the 20 hours a week allowed which would have jeopardized his social security.

Thinking about Joe’s story triggered about how we all treated our work, whether we are committed or just interested in our daily work. Most of us take pride in our work accomplishments, there is a salient sense of satisfaction which comes from accomplishing difficult tasks despite overwhelming deterrence. It is a good feeling, and we should all treasure that feeling. My real question is: how committed are we to our work? Are we completely committed or are we just interested bystanders in our workplace? Are we so committed as to become another Joe?

I used to tell the anecdote of the chicken and the pig as a parable for the difference between being interested and being committed to inspire the players that played for me. The difference between interested and committed can be described by the roles of those animals that bring us our breakfast; the chicken is interested in what is served at breakfast, but the pig is fully committed. I have always implored them to be more pig-like.    

In the context of working, I wonder about my own commitment to my former employers, whether I was pig like or whether I was more chicken like?

One of my co-workers once shared this thought that his father-in-law gave him: if you are not giving everything you have all the time to your employers, then you are just stealing your salary from them. I can see someone of his age and era talking about employers like this; the attitude grew from a time when workers and employers were mutually dependent and loyalty was a very real sentiment; where the employers take responsibility for the worker’s welfare in and out of the workplace, and the worker’s loyalty to the employer is absolute and unquestioned. This was when the worker/employer relationship was more than transactional, mostly happening in small businesses, and the interests of both were mutually dependent and were tightly coupled. But today, even Japan, with its salaryman culture, have turned to massive layoffs and taken a turn away from lifelong employment, unquestioned loyalty to, and responsibility for the workers. China, with its faded culture of the iron rice bowl, has also been indoctrinated into the western ways of strictly transactional relationship with the employees.

Having worked for multinational corporations most of my life, I can unequivocally state that my dealings with my employers have always been strictly transactional. It is true that my livelihood depended on the employer, but I always had the freedom to get another job. On the other hand, the employer had the right to replace me with someone better, younger, and cheaper. While the typical Human Resource games have always been about eliciting loyalty from the work force through various extrinsic and surface activities: recognition banquets, appreciation parties, and other excuses for forced comradery celebrations; most workers see right through it. The biggest incentive that companies can think of is more direct: it is financial. Salary increases, bonuses, fringe benefits, and other incentives. It is the only hammer that they have and every employee looks like a nail to be struck. While money is a considerable incentive for many of us; we must think about putting bread on the table, raising our families, and planning for our retirement. Financial gains are not or should not be the whole picture to most humans, which is what most companies either fail to see or fail to acknowledge.

I started thinking about my own work history. I thought about whether I would categorize my attitude about work as pig-like or chicken-like. I remember being asked to work during the weekends as a salaried employee when we had to test a hundred motors for an automotive customer because we had to perform gauge R&R on the 100 prototypes that we had manufactured as a part of the prototype testing and we just did not have enough lab technicians to do all the work on time. One of my colleagues balked at the request, saying rather haughtily that working on weekends was not why he attended university. I was rather put off by his attitude at the time because I felt a duty to do whatever it took for my employer to get the job done on time. Yet a decade later, I was asked by another employer to be available for lab testing on third shift because the lab dynos were scheduled for all three shifts and my project was scheduled for third shift. This time I was rather put off by the request, not because the situation was very different, but because I had become more cynical about the intentions of my employer. I distrusted them and I knew that nothing could be that urgent because the schedules were created out of thin air, as I witnessed project after project miss deadline after deadline. I was older and much more skeptical, so much so that my commitment lagged, both consciously and subconsciously. It became a battle within me, whether my identity was the employee of XYZ versus who I was inside my identity.

Ever since the COVID epidemic, the phrase: work/life balance has been the focus for many of us who toil away in the figurative coal mines. Many people are re-examining their priorities and the lives that they were living within corporate wonderland. They realized that their lives are exceedingly unsatisfactory because they were committed to their jobs and careers, committing all their waking hours to the corporate objectives, and doing what they are told to do regardless of the costs that are exacted by doing so. I am not sure how this gradual realization of the reality of their lives will persist or what that realization will do to the accepted level of commitment demanded by the employers, but I see it as at least a pause in the continuum of strict adherence to complete commitment to work and the company.

I pondered the arc of the average worker in corporate America. I wondered if this is all that we must look forward to: we willingly thrust ourselves into the gaping mouths of the corporate machinery in exchange for  a career, a livelihood, stability for our families, and safe harbor from the turbulence of the world. Is this what being a committed pig mean? Is this enough for me, the person? Is this Faustean bargain worth the surrendering of the only life we have?

The ambiguity of the terms committed and interested is also problematic. What does commitment mean? Does my former colleague’s father-in-law’s admonitions to him define commitment? To give his all, at all times? Digging a little deeper, does burning up all of what makes me unique and productive for the company mean that I am a fully committed pig? Does commitment mean that I must use up all of what makes me myself: my energies, mental acuity, independent thoughts, and creativity for my employer before I enter retirement?

A caveat here is that I am not talking about the retirees entering a life of leisure, of enjoying life with the family, or indulging in those things that we had no time to do while we worked. Many of my friends have taken on the joyful projects of doing what they have always wanted to do while they worked, which is to read, or travel, or golf, or hunt, or fish to their heart’s content. It is an enviable life, where clock time does not exist anymore, and they can while away the time over a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer with their friends. They deserve their leisure.

What I AM talking about is meaning. Meaning in the sense that Viktor Frankl writes about in his book Man’s Search for Meaning (Frankl, 2006). In short, Frankl says that it is the meaning in life which gives us hope and intrinsic purpose to not only survive but to thrive. Does being committed while working mean that we are obligated to give up the meaning in our lives just so that we can burn ourselves out for work? Must emulating the pig mean forsaking the meaning in our life? Or should we just be the chicken and give the employer what we can and save the meaning of our lives?

Should our personal and intrinsic meaning be translated into commitment to our working life? Should we sacrifice our intrinsic self to whoever is enabling us to live a comfortable life? Have we already, subconsciously or not, sacrificed our intrinsic selves? Do we or will we have any of our true selves left after having worked a whole career? Will we have a second or a third career that is productive and meaningful? Or is it just one shot and out?

In my rather unique circumstance, I can honestly say that I was not a committed pig when I worked. I was committed to the subjects and problems that I was thinking about but not to the employer. I will not apologize for that because I have, I hope, enough of me left to pursue a polymathic path as my curiosity pulls me along. Yet I wonder about how much of me is left and whether it is enough to pursue my meaning?

References

Frankl, V. (2006). Man's Search for Meaning. Beacon Press.