Do What You Love And Other Myths
There seem to be few days that go by where someone doesn’t say, “Do what you love, and you won’t ever have to work a day in your life,” or some variation of this cliche. Sometimes it is a person in a highly compensated field making that claim. More often it is a person that has settled and feels some obligation not to make a young man cynical. About the only cliche that is worse is the one about about hanging out a shingle and making your own job.
Of course like any good cliche, there are opposing cliches. The most common contrary one is don’t be a history major. Then there are the cliches of starving artists and starving musicians. Or to put it in another cliche, sometimes love just ain’t enough. Being a Catholic blog, I suppose I ought to mention the near constant admonition to not get a degree in theology. And as we go through the exceptions, we soon find the exceptions are all consuming. In fact, they are summed up by the aphorism, “Don’t confuse a hobby with a career.”
At one time I thought of starting a homestead. Like the sometime prudent fellow I am, I researched it pretty thoroughly. One common theme I found was that it was unreasonable to believe you could produce as cheaply as commodity producers, even if you valued your time at nothing. Another theme I found was a rift between purists and others who had supplemented their income with off farm work. Then there was the phenomenon of finding blog after blog about homesteading. Each of the blogs had already or was in the process of stopping their experiment with homesteading. Oddly enough, each of them was still pretty happy with the idea of homesteading. To put it in relationship parlance, they were saying, “It’s not you; it’s me.” So in order to scratch out a living, one had to convince others to pay a premium to you for your product, and one had to accept that the edge of poverty was a decent lifestyle. Admittedly the latter part was stated far more euphemistically.
In truth, people are going to have to increasingly accept that poverty is okay. I’m not one to romanticize it, but the truth is that we will finally enter the Malthusian Trap. No, this won’t mean going without cable television or a telephone as the altruism evangelists assure us will solve all our problems. It will mean returning the suburbs to being the places of poverty that they once represented. At some point, it will mean that our elderly will go back to an impoverished existence. Our prisons will slowly be emptied to assume a population level more consistent with the history of mankind. The exploitation of the vulnerable will increase significantly.
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And, have a nice day.
Along these lines:
http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.html
A bit long, but worth it, if you haven’t seen it already.
11:25 is a good start in that video.
BTW, I knew Mike Rowe was smart, but I didn’t realize how educated he was. That was an impressive video.
I’ve had similar thoughts as you about poverty. Like it or not, people just need to gear up to live much less luxurious lives in the future. I think the silver lining to that cloud is that many people are called to voluntary or apostolic poverty, but don’t embrace it because of cultural norms. If people are going to just be poorer, then more people might realize their vocation to simplicity.
I have also pondered homesteading before too, but my wife would never want to, and–as you said–the research shows that it really can’t be done. Something I have wondered though, is that why there aren’t collections of families who are grouping up to homestead together, I think that would be much more likely to succeed.
“That was an impressive video.”
Very impressive. . . the most eloquent defense of the dignity of labor I have ever heard.
Rowe is more optimistic than you (or at least your post), but I’m afraid you are correct about the exploitation of the vulnerable.
A hobby is not a career. But both can become tedious and even painful, and one can transform into the other and back. For the few people lucky/blessed enough to suffer neither one of these pains, it truly is a matter of “do what you love and you won’t have to ‘work’ a day in your life”. And then there is the whole matter of acceptance of your toils…
Human lives take so many different paths that I should hesitate to deny or accept any of the cliches entirely.