It seems that most men are reluctant to bare their inner souls and to openly address the bigger questions of life - the ones we all ask, perhaps mutely, but only occasionally share, and then only with those we know well and trust. I suspect this is partly because Australians in particular are coy about baring their souls philosophically. So at the risk of not being published again I emerge from my cocoon to ask, “What is the ultimate purpose of our lives, our work, our careers?” Dust to dust, ashes to ashes?

For most of us life spans two decades of education and training, four decades of paid work and about one and a half of leisure and retirement.

We are trained and taught to expect that our work, what we do for a living, is all important. Through our work, paid or unpaid, most of us try to find our identity, self-worth and meaning. For the young it involves preparation through education, exams and a confusing array of data to help determine their careers. A puzzling maze of choices, pressures and values confront them as they seek to match their expectations with reality. For those in their prime of life—the 20s---there is often the conflict of relationships, mortgage and job. For the middle aged there are questions of job satisfaction, distant fields and purpose. In retirement many enter a solemn period of reflection (sometimes morbid introspection) or new pursuits, or a combination of both. Often deep depression sets in, darker than the stormiest clouds, resulting from a sense of separation, a loss of motivation, fulfilment and identity. These may even manifest much earlier if triggered by sickness or retrenchment.

In our society there are the extremes of long term unemployment on the one hand and workaholism on the other., with most of us fitting somewhere between these two extremes.

We all tend to fall into the work hierarchy trap, creating in our minds a ladder of merit in which the elusively prestigious jobs are at the top and others well below. And oh how some struggle to reach for the next rung and sometimes in the process press hard with our feet on the rungs below!  We often value people more for what they do than for who they are. In our eyes their very being is inextricably bound up with their work and how they perform it.. Yet are we right to set vocational status ahead of individual worth? In some ways that smacks of totalitarianism in a more palatable form! Though I subscribe to the Biblical view that no single form of work, trade or profession is more significant than another, I don’t always submit to it.

With accelerated social and technological change many of us find that coping with the present is increasingly demanding, while contemplating the future is often an uncomfortable preoccupation. Stress, pessimism and fear of failure are common human experiences, real or imagined. For every optimist and success-oriented person there is probably a hopeless, depressed individual whose sense of self-worth could hardly be lower. Even for the successful, retrospection and self-evaluation often result in despair. Perhaps in our quieter moments of reflection and naked honesty we can identify with the ancient philosopher king who wrote, “My heart took delight in all my work and this was the reward for my labour. Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind---nothing was gained---I hated all that I had toiled for under the sun, because I must leave them to the one who comes after me.” Sobering words from Israel’s richest king who whose name is synonymous with wisdom. (It’s the very dilemma with which Jack Nicholson struggles in the role of Schmidt in the film of the same name.)  I wonder how closely those sentiments are  shared by retirees who see their superannuation funds dwindling in the midst of a stock market slump!

Perhaps it is all summed up by the answer Paddy gave when his friend Michael enquired how much their mutual friend Sean had left after his sudden death… “Everything!” said Michael. And how true it is: our names may live on for a time, longer if we are a John Howard or a Steve Waugh or a Barry Humphries, but for most of us it might just be an epitaph, a family photograph or an heirloom. But irrespective of the recognition posterity may give us, what status we achieve, what income we earn, what influence we wield, ultimately we must say farewell to it all. So why the struggle, why the desire, why the frantic panic to succeed? Even some of this nation’s better known entrepreneurs and CEOs are probably asking that as they experience hip pocket vulnerability where previously they had seemed impregnable.

“Lost in America”, circa 1985, is a film that thoughtfully asks the question, “What are we living for?” unfortunately David and Linda Howard, two high living young professionals, decide the corporate system demands too much of them and so they decide to drop out. They scuttle it all, buy a vehicle, and set off to experience America. “I want to touch Indians” says David. Paradoxically, while they drop out physically, they take their upwardly mobile values with them So it’s only a question of time until the film comes full circle and they wind up right back from where they started. Ring any bells?

Work is an important measure of our achievements and because it is an integral part of most people’s lives those of us who have hope beyond the grave often assume that our work reaps eternal rewards. That is a trap for the unwary. A carpenter once advised his motley group of friends including a tax agent, a fisherman and a revolutionary to work only for food that lasts. As far as they were concerned that sounded a much better proposition than even the latest in fast foods (remember the loaves and fishes?), so they eagerly requested a duty statement: “What have we got to do?” to which he replied that the only work which is acceptable to him and his Dad (the managing director of UNIVERSE UNLTD) starts with believing! Believing what? Believing and acting on the fact that no work of ours earns us a place in his multinational cosmic corporation. We can only become a part of that labour force by first acknowledging and accepting his authority and his son’s finished work outside that ancient city—a work that on first appearances and assessed on any modern criterion of productivity seems to have been a dismal failure, yet a work which took on lasting value three days later. In fact it was the best long term cosmic business plan ever conceived by a trio of brilliant executives and took the opposition completely by surprise.

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David Hayles
MenToday Magazine