E Some people know it: Over dinner or coffee with friends’ higher-earning boomer parents, the conversation inevitably turns to the job at some point. After “Are you satisfied?” and “What’s next?” you get there quickly Part time debate and poor work ethic among young people. The self-employed dad, be he an architect, engineer or doctor, then says something like “Well, I don’t see my job as work at all,” or even better, “I would do that without pay.”
Middle-class males in their mid-sixties in particular apparently see their job as an extension of their personality, as a gain in freedom. Why is that? And why isn’t everyone like that?
One obvious reason is that work – and therefore money – makes many things possible: Any activity that goes beyond securing the basics of survival allows me to shape the world around me according to my ideas. I can build a house the way I want, buy a family van, trim the hedge in the front yard into the shape of my choice. So potentially, by working, I create freedom for myself.
It can also be argued that there can be something freedom in the act of the work itself. When I create something, build a chair or paint a picture, I can see myself in it. This type of self-confidence and experience is denied to those who only let others work for them, as Hegel, for example, explains in a much more complex way in his master-slave dialectic. It can also come to me if I am not a self-employed workaholic father.
Work rarely brings real self-experience
But wait: since, as you quickly notice even without reading Marx, work is alienated in capitalism and most people have almost nothing to do with the end product in whose production chain they work – many of us are unlikely to be able to enjoy real self-discovery through work. And then often not during working hours, but when making birdhouses after work.
It is not only among young people that many people perceive wage work as a coercion. The sociologist Nicole Mayer-Ahuja also describes working hours as a “measure of freedom” because their length, in turn, determines how much time we have at our own disposal – while in the workplace we are primarily determined to do what others tell us. Even with flexitime, a home office and a foosball table in the break room, very few people have a real say in what, how much and for whom they produce. Only those who can temporarily evade “external access to their own labor power can be considered ‘free’ (even if only formally).” And care work shouldn’t be forgotten either: “I like working a lot,” is easy to say when others do the child-rearing and washing-up for you.
Whether I see my job as an extension or restriction of my freedom depends largely on whether I work for myself or for others, how alienated I am from the product of my work and how much I get out of it. Since only a few, like the happy boomer fathers, still own the means of production, and many instead Bullshitjobs have to do, but the following often applies: the more free time, the higher the “level of freedom”.