On Work and Retirement
On or about January 1st, 2024, I pretty much ceased to be involved in running a business I’d been operating for the past 27 or 8 years. Prior to that, I’d started another business that I ran for about 17 years, and had been involved in a few others prior to that. All in all, you can say that I’d been starting and running businesses for my entire adult life, which accounts for about 49 years. While this may seem like a perfectly normal thing for a fella to do with his life, it has been anything but that. In fact, when I stopped working, I never officially announced my retirement because I didn’t really retire. What I did was stop wasting my time supporting myself by doing a bullshit job that I had no interest in, nor what I went to college to study. After nearly half a century, it was time to finally engage full time in the fields I was trained for and where my talents and passions lie.
I happen to be an artist. As a little kid I displayed an aptitude for drawing as well as playing piano. My degree from Kent State University is in painting and I’ve had shows in Soho galleries. I studied music with some of the most prominent musicians of the 20th century for decades and have performed in several major concert venues. I’ve been published in newspapers and magazines such as Art in America, the New York Times, Newsweek, the Village Voice, as well as numerous Jewish papers, music and martial arts journals, etc. and have conducted martial arts workshops in several countries. The one thing all of these endeavors have in common is that none of them remotely pay enough money to survive on. Never being a fan of abject poverty, I did what I had to do to live a comfortable enough lifestyle.
This has involved a myriad of jobs including being a scrap metal sorter and traveling salesman, running a restaurant/nightclub, designing, manufacturing and installing wooden swingsets, and designing the attendant brochures, catalogues and ads, doing home inspections and environmental testing and designing the website that was necessitated. The only things I ever did in my field was teach art for one semester at a private art college when I was 27 years old and give piano and guitar lessons for a couple years when I was about 30. I played a handful of musical gigs which all paid an insultingly meager pittance that would take over five years to earn what an average job would pay in one.
While I ran these dumb businesses, I still did some painting, photography, practiced piano, composed, wrote poetry and essays and studied martial arts very seriously. All of that, I considered to be my real job. Yet while I remained productive, I only had the time and energy to engage in them about 5% of the time. The other stuff that occupied the vast majority of my time was just an impediment to my real work. Therefore, on or about January 1st, 2024, while most people would proudly announce their retirement, I went out with a booming silence, because I didn’t look at it as retirement. I looked at it as getting rid of a burdensome impediment so I could finally engage in my work full time after nearly half a century. I had work to do that was far too long overdue.
While others retire from their job that they may or may not have enjoyed all their lives – lawyers, doctors, stock brokers, factory workers, clerks, salesmen, small business owners, graphic designers, etc., they may engage in hobbies such as fishing, stamp collecting, volunteering, traveling, having second homes, or whatever else people do, my work is only just starting. Some have occupations they love and don’t retire from unless they have to due to getting laid off, company rules, or infirmity. Others suffer through their 9 to 5 because it’s all they can find as a job and everyone has to put food on the proverbial table.
My view is that unless you’re doing something that emanates from the heart, as Henry Miller put it, “work is for dullards.” Yet one cannot summarily dismiss all work because somebody has to do it, whether they like it or not. Society could most definitely not function without it. For the majority of the mundane tasks out there: factory workers, janitors, road crews, waiters, bellboys, truck drivers, gofers in an office building, insurance salesmen, carpenters, phone room workers, etc., the work is tedious, repetitive and uncomfortable yet it has to be done. Who should do it though? As Henry put it, “dullards.” That is to say, without any condensation, people without talent, training and dedication in the arts. Just people who, if they didn’t need the job to survive would be sitting at a fishing hole drinking Budweiser or pumping their hard-earned money into a slot machine in Vegas while choking on an unfiltered cigarette.
To illustrate how jobs should be structured, one should look at bees and ants which are other social creatures. In a bee colony there is a queen, workers and drones. In an ant colony there is a queen, soldiers and workers. Division of labor. They can’t all be queens now, can they? In the same way, those who aren’t destined to become painters, poets, dancers, playwrights, authors, musicians, philosophers, historians or other creative and intellectually-oriented professionals should fulfill the tasks that make society function. The creative people are unfortunately in a field in which a few representatives, and not necessarily the most adept, are paid enormous sums of money while the vast majority cannot survive unless they teach, marry well, inherit a fortune, or have a “day job” as was the case with me. I consider this to be a great crime, at least with American culture. In Europe, for one, the government subsidizes the arts, which is how it should be. The only time this occurred in the US was during FDR’s WPA program, which commissioned artists to, among other things, create public works of art and get paid fairly for it. There is simply no reason a gifted painter should have to labor at a drill press in a factory for 8 hours a day and 40 years of their lives. When archaeologists and historians look back at ancient civilizations, all that is left are the cultural remnants. And every society on the planet has some form of visual art, music, dance, and written or oral history to transmit. Without it, life would be mundane, flatlined, and practically not worth living.
As for non-artists, you have the so-called “professional classes,” which are predominately white collar – the doctors, lawyers, businessmen, politicians, teachers, scientists, clergy, social workers, salesmen, pharmacists, architects and the like, the so-called “blue collar” workers which embody the largest chunk of the workforce – the garbage men, waiters, janitors, contractors, factory workers, short order cooks, plumbers, mechanics, et al, and the in-between professions like archaeologists, biological scientists, geologists, engineers, home inspectors, and environmental assessors which are white collar in education and pay level, but have to get their hands dirty sometimes. And of course there are professional athletes who may not necessarily have the education but get their hands dirty on the grid iron, basketball court or baseball diamond and are more than well compensated for it. The one thing all of these occupations share in common is that they are in demand by the public so as to provide these folks with a paycheck. Sometimes one must work 2 or 3 of these kinds of jobs to get by, but they do at least pay at least minimum wage whereas a musician who has studied and practiced for 20 years – far longer than the time it takes to earn a PHD or MBA must play for $20 – $100 or less when he actually gets a gig, which is usually few and far between. In other words, he is in an expert in a field in which he cannot financially survive in unless he gets a post teaching in a university or lower level school. As much as music plays a major part in people’s lives, it doesn’t exactly seem fair. With that said, one of my former teachers and renowned musician Cecil Taylor once queried, “Does fairness really amount to much?”
As much time, heart and soul that a musician or painter or writer devotes to their art or craft, it is interesting to examine whether the same applies to other occupations. Since I have considerable experience in both sides of the occupational spectrum, I would like to share my observations. As I previously mentioned, there are those who hate their job and just hold their nose to get through it, while there are others who love their job and wouldn’t know what to do without it. They literally fear retirement. One of the most salient shifts I’ve noticed in more recent years is the dearth of professionalism. Business owners have discovered that the consumer will still purchase things or services without the guidance of any employee who knows any more than the consumer does. Go into a Home Depot and ask a question about a product and you will find that the employee, if you can even find an employee because they have so few these days, said employee will just pick up the box and read the same bullet points you read before you asked your question. They look utterly perplexed that the answer is not on the box, yet seem so serious about the validity of their research! You don’t know whether to shake your head in disbelief or just laugh out loud.
My conclusion is that if store owners can get by with less employees, don’t train them, and just deal with the high turnover rate and still get customers to frequent the stores, their profit margin rises and they get richer. But couple the lousy service with a lack of inventory on hand, which has also become a major trend and you end up like Sears. Out of business. People can shop online, but they won’t be able to ask questions about the products, nor will they be able to actually see and touch the products. But apparently people don’t ask for much or demand much. They go along with whatever the greedy rich dish out to them.
Regardless of profession – white collar, blue collar or in-between, what seems to be dissipating in recent years is pride in one’s job performance. If someone is paying you, regardless of whether you like the job or not; regardless of whether you like the boss or fellow employees or not, you owe it to them as well as the clients you serve to do the best job possible. Everybody thinks they are working hard; tells other people they are working hard, that they are soooo busy, but that is not always the case. Much of it is illusion, not necessarily in their conscious minds but in practice. For instance, when I was a salesman in the scrap metal business, I used to travel around the country meeting with purchasing agents for large corporations such as General Motors, Ford, US Steel, Bethlehem Steel, Westinghouse, General Electric and others. I’d be sitting in these guys’ offices and they’d ramble on for hours about golf, football, their families, girlfriends, politics – yet very little about the business I was there for, which was trying to buy their scrap metal. Sometimes there’d be long lunches with or without martinis. I kept thinking to myself, Jesus, these guys don’t really do much all day!
Even when I wasn’t traveling, and even in other businesses, I’d talk to business folks on the phone and they’d yak incessantly for hours about both personal things like what the aforementioned purchasing agent talked about, they’d spin war stories about jobs they had. Crazy customers, times their truck broke down, jobs that were disastrous, complaints about their bosses or employees, etc. Three or four calls like that and they’d kill a whole day! I know someone who has zoom office meetings with a very distinguished firm on a regular basis and everyone just gossips about their personal lives for an hour. What college their kids are going to, what they did over the weekend, what TV shows did they watch, what did they have for dinner….
When I worked as a laborer on an assembly line at a Ford Motor Company plant in Ohio, the machines broke down constantly. You’d only work for an hour or two until something broke, then you’d just sit around for 45 minutes while mechanics in white jumpsuits climbed down from a little tower and tinkered with it enough to get it going for a little while. The tenured union guys had a bargain where they’d work for a finite number of parts called “piecework.” Say a guy had to weld together 500 parts, he’d do it for three or four hours, finish his 500 and then sit in the cafeteria playing cards or reading dirty magazines until it was time to punch out.
And he’d get paid for a full 8 hour day! Ah the power of unions!
Conversely, I knew a guy who only wanted to work for half a year, and didn’t require much to live on. He’d go to a temp agency and get these labor jobs like shoveling snow in Boston. He’d shovel practically nonstop other than a lunch break, for 8 hours, determined to put in an honest day’s work, even if it was very little money. A neighbor of mind works on a road crew doing heavy labor. If there is some kind of delay due to equipment problems or weather or whatever, he’ll tell his boss he’s going home because if he can’t put in an honest day’s work, he’d rather go home and saw logs. His motto is, “I can’t stop and let the devil catch me.”
I was duly impressed with the musician Sixto Rodriguez, the subject of the documentary “Searching for Sugarman.” Rodriguez tried but couldn’t find enough commercial success as a musician, despite being more than qualified. He took on the career of a laborer doing filthy hard excavation work. He even carried refrigerators up stairs. And he was proud of this work. He enjoyed the workout from it as well as the camaraderie with his fellow laborers. Nowadays, it is mostly the immigrants – around my area it’s the Ecuadorians who work like there’s no tomorrow. Give them a broom in a street and they’ll keep sweeping for 50 miles without a break. They may not be the most customer or detail-oriented of chaps, but they take pride in working hard.
But how often do you encounter anyone in any field who really takes pride in what they do? Someone who tells you they want you to be completely happy with their work. Someone who takes time to explain everything to you and make sure you understand it. Who is willing to admit making a mistake if they do so. Who calls you afterward to make sure you are satisfied with their service. Nowadays, even surgeons don’t care about you after they operated on you. You won’t even hear from them again. And if anything goes wrong with a product or service, all you get now effectively is “so long, sucker.”
Back in the twentieth century (I can’t believe I’m saying this), I remember that professions were taken far more seriously. People were well trained and service oriented. Nowdays, the only interest people have is mindlessly starring at their cell phones. I have yet to figure out what is so interesting about a cell phone. When I’ve worked, I always took pride in what I did, even if I hated doing it or was at best, utterly disinterested. My reasoning is that anything you do is everything you do. It’s a reflection of what kind of person you are. Are you a considerate, decent person or a lazy, self-absorbed schmuck? But another reason is that working is viable way to train one’s mind and body. It develops self-discipline and in doing so, makes you a better person. It gives you, as Nietzsche put it, “the will to power.” It also clears your mind of extraneous thoughts and lets you dwell in the moment. You are more self-aware and alive.
This kind of discipline extends, not only to the workplace but to the personal home. That’s why, although I can afford to hire landscapers or buy firewood, enjoy mowing my lawn, doing tree-work, sawing and splitting logs, washing my own car, doing my own laundry, cooking, vacuuming and other chores. The poet Gary Snyder put it best when he cited “the lack of self-reliance, personal hardiness – self-sufficiency. This lack can also be described as the alienation people experience in their lives and work. If there is any one thing that’s unhealthy in America, it’s that it is a whole civilization trying to get out of work- the young, especially get caught in that. There is triple alienation when you try to avoid work: first, you’re trying to get outside energy sources /resources to do it for you; second, you no longer know what your own body can do, where your food or water come from; third, you lose the capacity to discover the unity of mind and body via your work.” The martial arts teacher B.P. Chan explained that the reason he practiced Qigong and martial arts was to find out whether this arm was his arm, or this leg was his leg.” The point being, that if you really know your body, then you will have command and control over it and be able to accomplish movements and tasks efficiently.
In conclusion, it is difficult for me to recognize the validity of the term “retirement.” People should look at life as a growth process, of learning, of mentoring the youth with one’s acquired wisdom, of productivity and helping and of experiencing their environment and their relationship to it. Teach English as a second language or volunteer at a homeless shelter, nursing home or blood bank. A job is just a necessary vehicle to fulfill a needed component for a society to function, as well as a necessary vehicle one needs to put food on the table and pay the rent. But a job is not life, and life doesn’t end when you stop working at that particular job. Every day should be the starting point for a new job, whether it is for money or not. Of course leisure activities are very important but without engaging in learning new things, exercising, taking pride in your tasks, you are just getting fat, lazy and reading a 3 month old magazine in God’s waiting room for the end to relieve you of your miserable, wasted days.