The Nature of Work

I'm lucky. For more than 20 years I have been doing work that I like. It is part time but I love it. The money helps me live but if I were rich , I think I would take one day out of the week and volunteer! So it isn't a chore or something I hate.

Aside from work being a four letter word, it means what it means. Work. Work comes in many forms, like manual labor, sitting at a desk, house work. Even taking care of children is work. In reality, a housewife is probably the hardest worker on the planet. They are the ones that keep the house clean, the food cooked, the children fed, the laundry done. And their job is an all day job. From sunrise to sunset. Should a housewife be compensated for their labor? Yes they should. But work these days means plain and simply a slave to the machine. There is no more loyalty in a job today, no matter what it is. We the people are just being used until we are no longer needed. When we hit a certain age, we are deemed to old and therefore no longer productive. But a housewife never gets to retire and will never be fired.

Do they not have a choice of "self employed"? For me, work is what I do to pay the bills, so that I can have and enjoy a "life". Life is all the random other things I do. If you love your work, that is wonderful. I enjoy the work I have been doing lately. I also work online. I believe that work is healthy and necessary for our minds and our bodies, really.

I acutally like going to work....I like everyone I work with...love the customers. Work to me is any job....even if it's at home. LIke I say on my days off I work at home...housework etc. And if that isn't work I would like to know what is!

Why aren't you classified as a farmer? Do your officials have their head up their butt or something? Self-employed business owner at the very least or a partnership. Something. Some work is drudgery such as cleaning. Some work is a joy, such as crafting. Most is inbetween like when I bring someone somewhere in my car.

I love my jobs. I look forward to them. I am dedicated to them. My boss values my input. Have a wonderful day!

I think "work" can apply to lots of things. I guess it is still largely used to mean "going out of the house to a place of work for pay" but, to me, that is just one definition. I understand your frustration with the assumption that you are "unemployed" or a "housewife". Between myself and my two sisters, some would say that none of us "work" because my older sister works from home (doing something she enjoys and doesn't do much because she doesn't have many clients at the moment), I work part-time, mostly voluntary and I do it because I enjoy it and my little sister is a full-time mum. All of these count as work. Just as an aside, I also have trouble filling in forms because I can't fill in more than one option. You see, I do part-time paid work, I also do voluntary work for the same company and I am a student. So I never know which box to tick! And the type of work I do is never listed so I have to put "junior" or "clerical" or something and I am neither! So, sorry, back to the point. :) Yes, work can be anything which takes up your time, to which you have made a commitment. It can be something which you find a chore or tiresome. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of people who think that if your "work" doesn't follow a formula of: 9-5, employed, paid, outside the home then it doesn't count as work. Forgive me if I am making an incorrect assumption but, I'm guessing that your picture shows your child. They are the hardest work (well, sometimes!) yet many people think that if you look after your own child then you're not doing anything. I was surprised at a friend of mine who has a full time office job. She had said she hadn't got time to do something BECAUSE she worked full time, as if people who don't do what she thinks of as work sit around doing nothing with all the time in the world! Anyway, I think I've answered the question somewhere amongst that. :)

I know what you mean. I am not emplyed either, and I am not yet self employed. I am working on getting a business started, but it hasn't happened yet. I'm not a typical housewife either, but I don't just sit around and do nothing. The idea of "work" really needs to be re-evaluated by societies everywhere.

hi greenmoo oh gloy glory whee I am retired, retired , r etired. 85 but still miss working int the library. For 23 years I worked as a page shelving media, books, magazines, cds, dvds, what have you and I really loved my job and the crew. the staff was the best and I think I enjoyed comine to work as much because of the people I worked with as b ecause I felt we helped people in lots os ways. reading,, learning, getting free movies towatch, newspapers, magazines, classes in ha ndicraft, childrens hours, story times, something for ever yone. It was so different from the first part of my life, from 20 to into my fifties Iworked full and part time as a nurse's aide. I loved iknowing I was helping people and also loving the changing demands, especially on the 3 to 11 shift, emergency surgery working in the ER specialing with some private patients, it fulfilled my need to help others,.but when my son was nearly full grown,my husband had to have a colostomy and cancer surgery. He was laid up so I went back to work part time in an entirely new kind of job, working in the library as a page, less strenuous but fulfilling as I love to read myself, and felt I was again helping others too.I never hated what i did as I liked my jobs whether in a hospital setting or in the library. I worked for pleasure and for family as the rent must be paid, food must b e bought so someone had to bring in the money and right then I was the person who was physically able to work.Here in southern California to pay the damned rent just about anyone who was over 17 had to work just to pay the damned high rents. ONe paycheck generally does not cover the rent unless one is a doctor, or lawyer, on maybe Indian chief ha, but seriously rents of 1300 to 1500 are common and few one paycheck will coverthat so everyone in the family has to work. and contribute to the damned rent.

Working, for me, is definitely a chore. Even though I like my job for the most part and I'm well suited for it, I still don't enjoy getting up to go to it everyday. I do it for my family. I spent 8 years as a stay at home mom, and for those 8 years we struggled financially. It was tough not being able to provide my kids with the things they needed, and I always felt rather useless. I stayed home mostly because I had to. I couldn't afford child care and didn't really have anyone who could watch the children for me for cheap or even free. On occasion I would try various scenarios. I tried having my mother watch them for me, but she lived 1/2 an hour away on a bad side of town, and doesn't drive. So I'd have to drive for an hour before and after work just for a babysitter. I tried working overnights, but got so exhausted. Normally I'm a light sleeper and I thought I'd be okay snoozing on the sofa while the kids played nearby and I'd hear anything they got into. Nope.. I'd wake up to see they'd gotten into the fridge and it's entire contents was all over my house! More stress than it was worth! I tried having the in-laws babysit, but they weren't always reliable and I was almost constantly 5 minutes late for work every single day. About a year ago when I started working at Subway I was having my FIL babysit, and that wasn't exactly perfect either. My kids stressed him out too much. I'd come home and hear about how they'd been wild and crazy the whole time and didn't listen to him, etc. In the end I started slowly working on teaching my oldest how to babysit. I started by leaving them alone just while I ran to the store. Then I'd leave them for an hour. Then they were left alone while I went to work and we called every 1/2 hour to check on them. He'd take turns with FIL.. he'd watch them some nights and FIL would watch them some nights. It seemed to work out for the most part until FIL got too sick to watch them anymore and it was all on my son. Thankfully now I'm working a day job. I have my youngest in full time day care which is expensive but worth it. I get home usually within an hour or so of my kids getting home from school, and the oldest will watch them until I'm home or on days they have no school. Ok, so that wasn't the point of this.. but I felt like sharing! LOL

We earn most of our money from rentals, so my retired husband classifies himself as a self-employed property manager. He definitely has to work hard at it, and not only when it's convenient for him. I just classify myself as self-employed and my occupation as Internet Bookseller. I'd love to switch that to Freelance Writer someday, but I'm not making enough to eat on yet -- just enough to fund a few political donations I could not make otherwise. I believe my writing has more potential to do good than my bookselling, which I'd love to retired from. I get paid very little for what I really enjoy doing, and although it is work, it doesn't seem like it. The book selling does seem like work -- work I'll never finish. As far as housework goes, I don't get much beyond cooking, cleaning up afterwards, laundry, and occasional other chores. fortunately my husband has hired someone to do the heavy stuff. I have only really enjoyed one job -- that was my work as a card buyer at Logos of Westwood for nine years. You can read about those years and see pictures of my kingdom" here: http://www.squidoo.com/my-life-in-greeting-cards- I did not consider that job work. In fact, before they hired my I volunteered for a few weeks, since it was a nonprofit organization. For me, work is something I have to do that I would rather not do. Thus, cooking is sometimes work and sometimes not, depending on how I feel at the moment and what I'm giving up to do it.

How you look at work depends on what you do and where your work. I work with a network marketing business, and I had a lot of speed bumps. There were people saying that they aren't looking for an extra stream of income and them saying that I needed a real job. Even if I'm doing that work-from-home kind of smarm, I am looking for a real job on the side or if there are no places for me to work at a place for me to do volunteering. Voluntary work mostly does not pay, but the rewards trump all fields of work, even network marketing. As well as actually working, I'm also helping others by volunteering. As a network marketer myself, it provides me with an ample opportunity to meet new people and find new sponsors or customers. But I cautioned myself: I should ask them common questions about their lives and hand out contacts (in the form of paper notes or business cards) first. That way, they'll get warmed up to see what I do in the business. So there you have it - the nature of work is variable. How you view it determines whether it's bad work or good work. I'm going to work in two fields: at home and voluntary.

Well, I think a "housewife" is also classified as an occupation. Not many women can be a good housewife, just as not many people can be a good employee. I've always wanted to be a housewife after I get married. Taking care of family can be challenging. I believe educating children is the hardest work ever. So don't be so hard to yourself. Heheh... I think a "work" is something that we have to do because we love it, and because we can also learn from it.

My personal opinion is that work is something that people do only because they have to. To pay the bills, to use one of your options. They 'work' because that's what gets them the basic needs for survival. Most office-going people would consider their work/job a chore. I wouldn't call it 'work' if you enjoyed it. Even if it was paying me, I would think of it, well, as a fun activity. Take myLot for example. We earn but we have fun as well. That can't be called work, can it? None of us say "Don't stay up , I'll be working" when we're on myLot, right? In my opinion, all 'work' that people do should be like that. You shouldn't have to drag yourself to office. I think the chances are that 'work' as we see it will soon be drastically redefined globally. We may even, in time, be 'working' from home.

So true, our society is designed so that you are only counted as productive if you work for money, any other form of work of labour no matter how beneficial is regarded as worthless. I found the same thing when I graduated university, I was astonished that even University employers regarded my time spent working hard to earn a good degree were worthless because I had not worked for money. In their eyes I was no better than someone who had been unemployed for years. I was so shell-shocked at the time that I became quite depressed; in fact it took me a couple of years to break the depression. In my mind I had changed from a very ordinary student to achieve a good honours degree and now I was being told that all that work and achievement was worthless and worse than that by a University employer who should have understood and appreciated the achievement. They thought I should have worked for money as well as studied full time although I have no idea where I would have found the time to hold down two jobs. The biggest insult was being asked if I knew how to set an alarm clock and get up in the morning. I had worked full time for a few years before going to Uni and I was in my late twenties at the time so I took the comment to be seriously insulting. I think there is something fundamentally wrong with our method of evaluating work as only something that you do for money. I would regard you as self employed, not unemployed.

Fortunately for me, I spent large periods of my life as either a musician or a cook, and since I love both professions I usually enjoyed what I was doing. I suppose I would draw a line between work and drudgery, and when a job became drudgery, as some did even in those periods, I walked, and to hell with the economic ramifications. In the same way I consider that professionalism has nothing to do with whether you get paid for what you do, it has to do with how well you do it. Lash

These days, my work, or my job is something I go to which I've classified as a chore. I have a small online business which I (kinda) like doing but I've found that for the effort that I put in, the return isn't much (maybe it'll pick up soon). I've been wanting to switch careers. I wanted to be in a field where I can help people, while still earning enough for me and my family. If I can find such a job, then I wouldn't call it work anymore.

its very important think to work in life........