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Truth-out: It's Not Just a Job
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/25688-its-not-just-a-jobWhen the federal government embraces policies and trade agreements that decrease the number and quality of jobs in the nation, many citizens will lose much more than income and the ability to support their families. When a nation exports its jobs to other countries, its citizens are depreciated as human beings because they are deprived of access to avenues of experience in which they discover and evaluate the significance of their own existence. Participation in occupational activities and the demands they place upon us are some of the crucial ways we experience the strength and powers of self.
In every work context, the completion of familiar tasks calls up past experience and gives exercise to achieved habits and capacities. But it is the encounters with unforeseen obstacles, unexpected barriers and unpredicted obstructions that intensify attention and trigger emotional challenge. Unexpected difficulties create a focusing of resources, an animation of spirit, a presentation of opportunities that not only call forth the exercise and evaluation of skills and abilities, but also provide occasions for the release of energy through which we recognize and experience self-competence, along with satisfaction in what we have done and confidence in what we can do.
Our job is an important condition of our development as a creative, thinking self. By improving what we do, we experience ourselves as people of achievement and of societal value. Deprive us of our ability to engage in the activities in which we have developed expertise, and we are unable to exercise our powers and express self - a self that has grown from youth into a person who is an asset to self, family and nation. Take away those jobs that help develop people who make a society functional and beneficial to others, and we are diminished as human beings, and prevented from becoming the ones we hope to be. Without opportunities for the exercise of imagination and inventiveness, what is to become of our selves?
In every work context, the completion of familiar tasks calls up past experience and gives exercise to achieved habits and capacities. But it is the encounters with unforeseen obstacles, unexpected barriers and unpredicted obstructions that intensify attention and trigger emotional challenge. Unexpected difficulties create a focusing of resources, an animation of spirit, a presentation of opportunities that not only call forth the exercise and evaluation of skills and abilities, but also provide occasions for the release of energy through which we recognize and experience self-competence, along with satisfaction in what we have done and confidence in what we can do.
Our job is an important condition of our development as a creative, thinking self. By improving what we do, we experience ourselves as people of achievement and of societal value. Deprive us of our ability to engage in the activities in which we have developed expertise, and we are unable to exercise our powers and express self - a self that has grown from youth into a person who is an asset to self, family and nation. Take away those jobs that help develop people who make a society functional and beneficial to others, and we are diminished as human beings, and prevented from becoming the ones we hope to be. Without opportunities for the exercise of imagination and inventiveness, what is to become of our selves?
