People Never Change

In many cases, people go to school for years to master a profession for the economic benefits, whether or not they actually enjoy it. To be a productive worker in society, one must enjoy their profession, or whatever they may do. Fromm states that ever since the industrial revolution, people have worked simply for the money. In “Work in an Industrial Society,” Erich Fromm shows that people do not care about working, that they only work for the money, and that it leads to people becoming more lazy and apathetic. People do not have the same enjoyment of work as they did in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the eighteenth century. Back then, people worked to feel like they have accomplished something. In today’s world, people get up in the morning to go to work with one goal: to get out of there as early and as quickly as possible. Before, people worked to not just make a living but to obtain satisfaction with their job. No matter how basic the job was they felt that they made a difference. In “Work, Labor, Play,” W.H Auden states that Miss Hannah Arendt defines people as workers and laborers. Workers are interested in what they do as well as what society pays for their work while laborers are people who have a job for just the paycheck and to support the people that depend on them. Around the times of the Industrial Revolution, the type of worker shifted from workers to laborers. People became a part of a machine that produced whatever needed to be made in order to complete the product. People only worked for the paycheck and nothing more. It was a way of survival rather then a career that one could have passion for. When a group of people hate their job, they become unmotivated workers whose goal for the day is to survive the dreadful hours rather than to spread their passion for their work. People become apathetic when they do something that they have no interest in. Today, having a job is viewed as a burden, because you would have to spend time working on something you do not like and would also have to spend time with people that annoy you. From Fromm’s “Work in an Industrial Society”, he shows how society sees working differently than before. The reason for most workers’ ‘working’ mentality is usually to work for money to buy items that they need and to have money for their family to survive. According to C.W Mills, people are able to learn from their work and able to develop skills. But their work is their lives not just a job. During the Industrial Revolution this concept of work was lost. From then on it has been mainly about making a living no matter the job. P. Drucker points out that, “work appears as something unnatural, a disagreeable, meaningless, and stultifying condition of getting the pay check, devoid of dignity as well as of importance.”(Fromm 201). Fromm reveals that people become lazier with their attitude toward their work. Nowsdays, people are not emotionally connected with their jobs. This usually leads to them hating what they do, who they work with, and everything else about their career. In the past people used to work with a passion that would push them to become better workers. Unfortunately, people do not have the same attitude as people once did back then. In this post-Industrial Revolution world we live in today, many people work long and hard hours in any job whether they like it or not. With long hours of unforgiving work, people despise almost anything they do because it takes away from their own personal time. In “Men at Work” by Anna Quindlen, she says that before, there was the ‘five o’clock dad’ who had time at home to watch TV, have quality time with their family and actually have time to sit down and eat dinner with their family. With hours and professions nowadays, these ‘five o’clock dads’ are slowly dying out because of endless hours at the office. This new style of working causes peoples’ attitudes of work to change from one of zeal and passion to one of apathy and disgust. If they did not have families or personal standards they had to meet, they would probably not be wasting their time and energy on these jobs. The attitude is always the same with any job; people work without fervor, ardor, or devotion anymore. The Industrial Revolution gave people a sense of purpose to their jobs because unemployment was widespread and they were actually doing something new, hip, and something that would help them further themselves and even their families, no matter the pay it came with. The attitude of post-Industrial Revolution workers is the same as they are now; many work a dead-end nine to five that they don’t like and continue going to work because of the benefits and accumulated pay and raises. Before the industrial; revolution, people worked hard, no matter what money they made. They all worked and felt accomplished at the end of the day. Today, the average worker does not have the same attitude. When I worked at McDonalds I saw many people work their eight hour shift without caring whether or not the customers were happy. At the end the day they forgot about everything and went home before they could be assigned overtime. They only had any feeling about their job when they had to work; there was no attachment to their work outside of the establishment. Their attitude and methods of working are the same as they were back then. They worked for the paycheck and nothing more. From the Industrial Revolution til’ the twenty-first century, workers’ attitudes toward their jobs have not changed. They do not see work the same way people did in the past. Fromm is corrected about peoples’ attitudes in their jobs, in that they have not changed since the Industrial Revolution. People do not see that work is something that can benefit them, rather, they just see it as something to keep them and their family running. In “Work, Labor, Play” and “Men at Work” both Auden and Quindlen show that workers would rather have a job that they would consider ‘interesting’ that would take away from their personal time than a job that was not ideal that provided a little more family time at the end of the day. In society today it is sad to say that people work to live instead of live to work.