Work, it is ideal in everyday life and ubiquitous in its nature. However we see many challenges when it comes to work, yet also many successes. Everyone has experienced the benefits of work, whether someone has directly worked for themselves or if they are still receive aid from their parents. Work, with a small exception, is essential in today's society and avoiding it would allegedly result in suffering and misfortune. Jobs themselves seem to represent a paradox, a blister in which everyone has but must accept. For some, work is strictly for earning that paycheck that keeps them alive and for this reason some may find their work uninteresting and nearly lifeless. After their shift they assuage their sorrow resulting from the tedious …show more content…
They simply have chose a job that works for a paycheck and not much else. Barbara Ehrenreich in one of her excerpts titled, Serving In Florida, writes about the struggles of working minimum wage and stress-inducing jobs that have little meaning. Her personal story consists of her working two restaurant jobs with little benefits and her competing in order to make ends meet. Ehrenreich, at the start of her journey begins with an optimistic point of view towards the minimum-wage lifestyle as she describes, "I start out with the beautiful, heroic idea of handling the two jobs at once, and for two days I almost do it." (Ehrenreich) Even at this stage of her study she discovers that working in these conditions are rough but as her journey develops even more a rapid change can be noted and she is left with the scarring of an acerbic attitude towards this enduring lifestyle. Ehrenreich's experiment served as a wake up call and allowed for her to realize and understand the adversity of working a job with little meaning. Unfortunately people face this bitter truth everyday when they work jobs like the restaurant jobs Ehrenreich took on. They have become stuck in a monotonous cycle of suffering with work only to receive a skimpy paycheck and their creativity is inevitably …show more content…
Precisely these are the jobs that fall under the category of lacking meaning in their role in the world. For example, in an essay written by Mike Rose titled, Blue-Collar Brilliance, Rose shares the story of his mother Rose Meraglio Rose working as a waitress in a restaurant. As seen in Ehrenreich's excerpt, being a waitress was seen as a job requiring lower intelligence. It is not seen as a respected job and of course it was minimum wage. However, Rose brings insight to how a job as a waitress, or any other blue-collar job can be respectable and meaningful in its own way. Being a waitress, as Rose describes, requires a special "work smart,"(Rose) as his mother learned. His mother had to sequence and group tasks as well as evaluate customer emotions in order to be successful in the restaurant environment. Rose's mother described her daily routine as, "there isn’t a day that goes by in the restaurant that you don’t learn something."(Rose) Rose created an antithesis to Ehrenreich's claim of a restaurant job being strenuous, stress-inducing, and meaningless for its minimum wage, where as a restaurant job could be considered meaningful and enjoyable to a specific person. The work also required a unique set genuine skills that were evolved from the job which could not be taught without first hand experience. With this, Rose creates the concept that any type of work can be