The Bet (or: Problems with the First World)
I’m currently on my [technically] second job since deciding to step down from a ministry position at my dream organization. (The first lasted exactly 2 nightmarish graveyard shifts at 3am for a corporate dystopian warehouse where I had been hired to fulfill a completely different position.)
The second is a perfectly fine position at a grocery store deli, working 8 hours a day and making the biggest paycheck of my life, cutting meats and cheeses and being friendly to customers.
And I hate it.
Because I don’t give a flying fuck about any of it.
(Sorry about the language. Fair warning: there's more of it.)
When I worked at OneLife (or any of the ministries and non-profits I've been involved with for that matter), I was frustrated by the financial situation I was in. I had food and housing provided, which was an incredible gift that's easy to overlook, but apart from that I was making pennies in a monthly stipend. And like, I get it, but part of me never understood that. We’re working on-call 24/7 doing life-on-life relational ministry with the next generation of young leaders, training them to be disciples who make disciples in the way of Christ. The importance of this work is staggering; we should have been making $1000/hr! I would even have settled for $100 a day. Being a teacher, an educator, a mentor, a counselor, a career advisor, a life coach, a spiritual director--as well as chauffeur, and janitor, and safety regulator, and event coordinator, and security enforcement, and--well you get the picture, it’s a lot of hats to wear. It’s a very rewarding job, but it’s also a very demanding one. We should have been paid much better.
That’s why I remember getting sent into a bit of a tailspin one Christmas when I went home on break and happened to stop into a Panda Express to get dinner. On the door as I walked in was a sign advertising that they were hiring a manager position, starting pay $70K.
Seventy thousand dollars! In one year! For a fucking Chinese fast food restaurant!
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Panda Express as much as the next guy. I’m sure the job has its stresses and pressures, too. But come on! The world doesn’t need another Starbucks or Panda Express or Build a Bear Workshop. It needs people in the trenches, planting seeds, holding onto hope, fighting to make the future a little better than it is now, practicing the rawest forms of love and forgiveness and grace. That’s valuable work that will make the world come alive.
So why aren’t we paying those types of jobs the money they deserve?
Why does Jeff Bezos get to make literally a million dollars in a single day when I, if you calculate my stipend/salary by hours worked, was only making approximately $3.50/hr?
It doesn’t make sense.
(And this story has a purpose, I promise)
I almost wish that OneLife did pay its employees exorbitant amounts of money. Just shower them with fat paychecks and bonuses. But at the same time, I’m really glad that they don’t. Because then we’d start hiring people who were actually just interested in the money and didn’t give a damn about anything else; they wouldn’t feel a particular call to student ministry or discipleship or investing in the next generation or any of it. And that would be terrible; it would be a disaster for our program, for the student experience, and for the entire discipleship process.
As the saying goes, you don’t work in ministry because of the money. (Often said as a joke, because: lol, there is no money ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.) But also because it takes a certain type of person to do ministry well, and you have to want it enough to do it even though the money is terrible, because you find value in the work itself.
Why am I saying all of this?
Because I think what these experiences in ministry have taught me--what I have implicitly, if not explicitly picked up--is that your work matters, and it’s often disconnected from the actual amount of money you earn. There’s your work, and there’s your paycheck, and those two facets aren’t necessarily correlated.
(I think it’s also tied back to a [perhaps faulty? perhaps frustratingly true?] sense of Calling or Vocation; this idea that each of us was designed for a specific purpose or task, hardwired into us, baked into our very essence; our passions and personalities melding together into some sense of Purpose.)
And yet now, I’m finding myself in the position where I’m doing exactly what I hope OneLife never does: I got googly-eyed over a “big” paycheck, but I couldn't care less about the work itself.
(*By the way, I’m only making $16/hr. It’s not like this job is particularly extravagant. But when my average annual income for the past 10 years has been less than $12K, you can perhaps understand my excitement at the prospect of earning *checks math* almost 3 times that amount.)
And I was excited. You mean you’re going to pay me that much to just stand here and use a slicing machine all day? Occasionally be nice to customers and make them smile? Sign me up! That’s the easiest money in the world!
But I dunno, I think I don’t want easy. Literally anyone can do this job. (Do I just want to feel special? Is that my whole hangup?)
I’m also SO BORED. (Again: valid reason?)
And like… I’m getting paid... just to show up?? This is the definition of “participation trophy” if I’ve ever heard one. (Which boomers love to laugh at millennials for, yet somehow this is the system they’ve created for us to live and work in and structure our lives around?)
The point is, I’m literally only there because someone is willing to pay me for my time. It is not my passion, and I have no intrinsic personal desire to work at a deli. There are exactly zero other rewards or motivations for me to spend my days doing this job. None.
And I dunno, that really makes me pause.
Note: I have this weird thing about money where like, if you don’t want to do something, I don’t think any amount of money should be able to change your opinion about it.
Take this, for instance: Would you ever willingly stick your hand in a pot of boiling water? What if someone said they’d pay you a million dollars for you to hold your hand in boiling water for 20 seconds? Would you do it then? (And I'm not talking like to rescue something that fell into the pot. I'm talking about sticking your hand in boiling water for no other reason than that you knew you would get a financial benefit from it.) And what's your limit? What if they said $100,000? Or $1000? Where's the line? And does that even make a difference, like, morally speaking?
You can swap out the bet for a lot of things: Slapping your mother. Drinking toilet water. Shaving your head. Sleeping with your ex. Licking peanut butter off a homeless man’s toes. It doesn’t matter. The point is: why does the inclusion of money suddenly make something outrageous begin to sound somewhat reasonable?
So when the money becomes disconnected from the work, I can’t help but begin to interpret it through this paradigm. I don’t think the value of discipleship ministry is equal to $3.50/hr; I don’t think the value of slicing deli meat is $16/hr; I don’t think whatever it is that Jeff Bezos actually does during the day is worth whatever he’s worth.
(Really, I guess I just don’t have a good grasp on the inherent value of money, perhaps?)
But when the monetary value is disconnected from the value of the actual work, I begin to see it as just another bet: “Do you want to spend 8 hours a day on a schedule that someone else designed for you standing at a slicer cutting cheese? No? What if we paid you $16/hr?” “Do you want to have someone gouge out your eye with a hot poker and a rusty spoon? No? What if we offered you a nice benefits package?”
I believe that work MATTERS. Which is why I’m so fucking miserable when I’m not spending my days doing work that matters.
There’s nothing wrong with the deli. I’m glad that it exists, and it performs a necessary function in the world. One of my coworkers has been there for 20 years, and she handles all of our cheeses. We have 3 full multi-tiered island counter displays filled with every sort of cheese you could imagine, and she knows everything there is to know about them. She’s like a walking encyclopedia of cheese, and she loves it. She’s passionate about her work.
(*BTW, I’m trying to be very intentional about my use of the words “work” and “job”. Work is the actual task or action you are performing. A job is a thing you do to earn money.)
The deli is great for some people (like the cheese lady), but it isn’t good for me. To me, it isn’t work that matters. It’s just a job.
And the problem with “jobs” is that you still have to devote your life to them, anyway. One of the hardest parts of OneLife was feeling like I didn’t have a life outside of my work, like I didn’t have time to connect with friends or family who didn’t live immediately on campus with me. But now I’m discovering that, oh, actually I still don’t have time for any of those things working 9-5 either, except now I don’t even care about the work I’m doing. I’m missing out on Life for no reason, just because I was distracted by the money.
Case in point: if I stay here, this will be the first time I miss celebrating Christmas with my family in my 32 years of life. I have lived in multiple states, multiple time zones, even another country for a little while; I have worked over 21 different jobs and moved over 27 different times; but I have still been able to make it home for Christmas every year. But now, I will be scheduled just about every day in a row for 3 straight weeks to help handle the holiday rush and I’ll miss out on that family gathering for the first time ever just because I work for a fucking deli?!
No thanks.
Call me crazy, but I think life should be about more than simply answering the question “What [probably sucky thing] are you willing to do to get money?”
How you spend your hours is, of course, how you spend your days. And how you spend your days is ultimately going to add up to how you spent your life. And I don’t want to get to the end of my life realizing that I spent it chasing money instead of the things that actually matter to me.
So….yeah, that’s where I’m at right now. How’s your life going?
When I worked at OneLife (or any of the ministries and non-profits I've been involved with for that matter), I was frustrated by the financial situation I was in. I had food and housing provided, which was an incredible gift that's easy to overlook, but apart from that I was making pennies in a monthly stipend. And like, I get it, but part of me never understood that. We’re working on-call 24/7 doing life-on-life relational ministry with the next generation of young leaders, training them to be disciples who make disciples in the way of Christ. The importance of this work is staggering; we should have been making $1000/hr! I would even have settled for $100 a day. Being a teacher, an educator, a mentor, a counselor, a career advisor, a life coach, a spiritual director--as well as chauffeur, and janitor, and safety regulator, and event coordinator, and security enforcement, and--well you get the picture, it’s a lot of hats to wear. It’s a very rewarding job, but it’s also a very demanding one. We should have been paid much better.
That’s why I remember getting sent into a bit of a tailspin one Christmas when I went home on break and happened to stop into a Panda Express to get dinner. On the door as I walked in was a sign advertising that they were hiring a manager position, starting pay $70K.
Seventy thousand dollars! In one year! For a fucking Chinese fast food restaurant!
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Panda Express as much as the next guy. I’m sure the job has its stresses and pressures, too. But come on! The world doesn’t need another Starbucks or Panda Express or Build a Bear Workshop. It needs people in the trenches, planting seeds, holding onto hope, fighting to make the future a little better than it is now, practicing the rawest forms of love and forgiveness and grace. That’s valuable work that will make the world come alive.
So why aren’t we paying those types of jobs the money they deserve?
Why does Jeff Bezos get to make literally a million dollars in a single day when I, if you calculate my stipend/salary by hours worked, was only making approximately $3.50/hr?
It doesn’t make sense.
(And this story has a purpose, I promise)
I almost wish that OneLife did pay its employees exorbitant amounts of money. Just shower them with fat paychecks and bonuses. But at the same time, I’m really glad that they don’t. Because then we’d start hiring people who were actually just interested in the money and didn’t give a damn about anything else; they wouldn’t feel a particular call to student ministry or discipleship or investing in the next generation or any of it. And that would be terrible; it would be a disaster for our program, for the student experience, and for the entire discipleship process.
As the saying goes, you don’t work in ministry because of the money. (Often said as a joke, because: lol, there is no money ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.) But also because it takes a certain type of person to do ministry well, and you have to want it enough to do it even though the money is terrible, because you find value in the work itself.
Why am I saying all of this?
Because I think what these experiences in ministry have taught me--what I have implicitly, if not explicitly picked up--is that your work matters, and it’s often disconnected from the actual amount of money you earn. There’s your work, and there’s your paycheck, and those two facets aren’t necessarily correlated.
(I think it’s also tied back to a [perhaps faulty? perhaps frustratingly true?] sense of Calling or Vocation; this idea that each of us was designed for a specific purpose or task, hardwired into us, baked into our very essence; our passions and personalities melding together into some sense of Purpose.)
And yet now, I’m finding myself in the position where I’m doing exactly what I hope OneLife never does: I got googly-eyed over a “big” paycheck, but I couldn't care less about the work itself.
(*By the way, I’m only making $16/hr. It’s not like this job is particularly extravagant. But when my average annual income for the past 10 years has been less than $12K, you can perhaps understand my excitement at the prospect of earning *checks math* almost 3 times that amount.)
And I was excited. You mean you’re going to pay me that much to just stand here and use a slicing machine all day? Occasionally be nice to customers and make them smile? Sign me up! That’s the easiest money in the world!
But I dunno, I think I don’t want easy. Literally anyone can do this job. (Do I just want to feel special? Is that my whole hangup?)
I’m also SO BORED. (Again: valid reason?)
And like… I’m getting paid... just to show up?? This is the definition of “participation trophy” if I’ve ever heard one. (Which boomers love to laugh at millennials for, yet somehow this is the system they’ve created for us to live and work in and structure our lives around?)
The point is, I’m literally only there because someone is willing to pay me for my time. It is not my passion, and I have no intrinsic personal desire to work at a deli. There are exactly zero other rewards or motivations for me to spend my days doing this job. None.
And I dunno, that really makes me pause.
Note: I have this weird thing about money where like, if you don’t want to do something, I don’t think any amount of money should be able to change your opinion about it.
Take this, for instance: Would you ever willingly stick your hand in a pot of boiling water? What if someone said they’d pay you a million dollars for you to hold your hand in boiling water for 20 seconds? Would you do it then? (And I'm not talking like to rescue something that fell into the pot. I'm talking about sticking your hand in boiling water for no other reason than that you knew you would get a financial benefit from it.) And what's your limit? What if they said $100,000? Or $1000? Where's the line? And does that even make a difference, like, morally speaking?
You can swap out the bet for a lot of things: Slapping your mother. Drinking toilet water. Shaving your head. Sleeping with your ex. Licking peanut butter off a homeless man’s toes. It doesn’t matter. The point is: why does the inclusion of money suddenly make something outrageous begin to sound somewhat reasonable?
So when the money becomes disconnected from the work, I can’t help but begin to interpret it through this paradigm. I don’t think the value of discipleship ministry is equal to $3.50/hr; I don’t think the value of slicing deli meat is $16/hr; I don’t think whatever it is that Jeff Bezos actually does during the day is worth whatever he’s worth.
(Really, I guess I just don’t have a good grasp on the inherent value of money, perhaps?)
But when the monetary value is disconnected from the value of the actual work, I begin to see it as just another bet: “Do you want to spend 8 hours a day on a schedule that someone else designed for you standing at a slicer cutting cheese? No? What if we paid you $16/hr?” “Do you want to have someone gouge out your eye with a hot poker and a rusty spoon? No? What if we offered you a nice benefits package?”
I believe that work MATTERS. Which is why I’m so fucking miserable when I’m not spending my days doing work that matters.
There’s nothing wrong with the deli. I’m glad that it exists, and it performs a necessary function in the world. One of my coworkers has been there for 20 years, and she handles all of our cheeses. We have 3 full multi-tiered island counter displays filled with every sort of cheese you could imagine, and she knows everything there is to know about them. She’s like a walking encyclopedia of cheese, and she loves it. She’s passionate about her work.
(*BTW, I’m trying to be very intentional about my use of the words “work” and “job”. Work is the actual task or action you are performing. A job is a thing you do to earn money.)
The deli is great for some people (like the cheese lady), but it isn’t good for me. To me, it isn’t work that matters. It’s just a job.
And the problem with “jobs” is that you still have to devote your life to them, anyway. One of the hardest parts of OneLife was feeling like I didn’t have a life outside of my work, like I didn’t have time to connect with friends or family who didn’t live immediately on campus with me. But now I’m discovering that, oh, actually I still don’t have time for any of those things working 9-5 either, except now I don’t even care about the work I’m doing. I’m missing out on Life for no reason, just because I was distracted by the money.
Case in point: if I stay here, this will be the first time I miss celebrating Christmas with my family in my 32 years of life. I have lived in multiple states, multiple time zones, even another country for a little while; I have worked over 21 different jobs and moved over 27 different times; but I have still been able to make it home for Christmas every year. But now, I will be scheduled just about every day in a row for 3 straight weeks to help handle the holiday rush and I’ll miss out on that family gathering for the first time ever just because I work for a fucking deli?!
No thanks.
Call me crazy, but I think life should be about more than simply answering the question “What [probably sucky thing] are you willing to do to get money?”
How you spend your hours is, of course, how you spend your days. And how you spend your days is ultimately going to add up to how you spent your life. And I don’t want to get to the end of my life realizing that I spent it chasing money instead of the things that actually matter to me.
So….yeah, that’s where I’m at right now. How’s your life going?
--
I wrote this 2 weeks ago. I haven’t quit yet; in fact, I almost enjoyed the deli exactly two times today. But I still think the world is stupid and capitalism is gross and I want to just live in a commune in the woods somewhere.
I know it’s such a “first world problem” to complain about a lack of purpose in my job, but damn it, what’s the point in living in the first world if these aren’t the sorts of things we can accomplish with our lives? If existence is just going to be about scrounging for survival anyway, I’d rather do it in the muddy streets of some village somewhere without the unmet potential of all these dreams.
Our whole lives, we’re told that we can be what we want to be and do what we want to do. (And in many ways, I have! I love what I’ve been able to experience and accomplish, precisely because I haven’t been tied down to a single job or career.) But I’m reaching the point where this constant juggling is getting exhausting, always starting over again, and oh god how am I going to keep this up for another 30 years? I feel like we’re supposed to spend our twenties building the ship that’s going to sail us all the way to retirement, but I’ve spent the last 10 years splashing in the water ‘cuz it’s fun. And now the whole “chase your dreams” mentality feels like such a pathetic lie when I’m standing here with nothing tangible to show for it.
And yet…
I have to admit I’m still compelled by that story. What if the world doesn’t actually have to be this way? What if there was a way to earn money and love what you do? This is just 1 job out of literally millions--this is simply “another way NOT to make a light bulb”--there’s bound to be one job out there that will work.
And if not, then I’m just gonna have to make one up myself.
New details coming soon ;)
I wrote this 2 weeks ago. I haven’t quit yet; in fact, I almost enjoyed the deli exactly two times today. But I still think the world is stupid and capitalism is gross and I want to just live in a commune in the woods somewhere.
I know it’s such a “first world problem” to complain about a lack of purpose in my job, but damn it, what’s the point in living in the first world if these aren’t the sorts of things we can accomplish with our lives? If existence is just going to be about scrounging for survival anyway, I’d rather do it in the muddy streets of some village somewhere without the unmet potential of all these dreams.
Our whole lives, we’re told that we can be what we want to be and do what we want to do. (And in many ways, I have! I love what I’ve been able to experience and accomplish, precisely because I haven’t been tied down to a single job or career.) But I’m reaching the point where this constant juggling is getting exhausting, always starting over again, and oh god how am I going to keep this up for another 30 years? I feel like we’re supposed to spend our twenties building the ship that’s going to sail us all the way to retirement, but I’ve spent the last 10 years splashing in the water ‘cuz it’s fun. And now the whole “chase your dreams” mentality feels like such a pathetic lie when I’m standing here with nothing tangible to show for it.
And yet…
I have to admit I’m still compelled by that story. What if the world doesn’t actually have to be this way? What if there was a way to earn money and love what you do? This is just 1 job out of literally millions--this is simply “another way NOT to make a light bulb”--there’s bound to be one job out there that will work.
And if not, then I’m just gonna have to make one up myself.
New details coming soon ;)
--
I'm gonna close by begging you to watch this TED talk; if you've made it this far and you're reading this sentence, you will thank me later, I promise.
Peace,
--JD
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