The Price of "Giving the Shirt Back"

I ain't working here no more

By xiong Ju

I ain't working here no more

Take This Job and Shove It is a very famous American country song. Johnny Paycheck was the singer and it has been popular ever since it came out. These are its main lyrics:

Take this job and shove it
I ain't working here no more
My woman done left
and took all of the reasons I was working for
You better not try to stand in my way
When I walk out the door

Take this job and shove it
I ain't working here no more

They'll have you in this factory
From now on for fifty years
All this time I see my woman
Drowning in her tears
I see a lot of people who
Gotta have a piece of me
I'd give the shirt right off my back
If I had the nerve to say
Take this job and shove it

I ain't working here no more

Simple and rough, this song nevertheless contains profound significance.

First of all, this song describes the toughness of life and for this reason it enjoys tremendous popularity. All families have their own trouble to deal with and all workers have their own tough time with their employers. And they are all expected to endure such toughness in order to keep their job. This song speaks out what people have in mind but do not have the guts to do. It is an utter ventilation of helplessness, which is one reason this song is so popular.

Secondly, this song incidentally demonstrates the psychology of America's blue-collar class, who normally enjoys life and are content to what they have. As far as they are concerned, it is far more important to stay with their family members than to go to the bar with their boss, and it is far more important to participate in their kids' after-school activities than to become a model worker. When fall comes, they prefer hunting deer to beating the deadlines; they favor gardening over evening classes; they choose to go to church rather than staying in bed.

Contrasting to the hasty pace of today's Silicon Valley, these people love life and enjoy life. They have strong family value and they have strong neighborhood network, unlike neighbors in California. They work hard, but they are not slaves of money. They are easily contented and ambition has no control over them.

I envy their richness of life. I also envy their leisure lifestyle. Their life reminds me of Tao Yuan-ming's poem:

Put up a tent on this side of the world;
But stay away from urban noise.
Asked how I manage to do that,
My heart is far and my place is lonely.
Picking flowers I come to the east hills,
I see the elegant South mountains.
The scene remains graceful day and night,
As returning birds fly by.
It seems there are revelations hidden behind,
But all has fallen into oblivion.

Such gracefulness can be difficult to comprehend for those who aggressively pursue vanity.

Want to be a slave of your job?

The internet revolution brought forth unforeseen prosperity of the nineties. Backed with huge investments from venture capitalists, dot-com companies quickly came into being. All this stimulated the stock market, which created the so-called "internet bubbles".

Living in such prosperity, many of us worked like crazy. We often spent over 80 hours a week in the workplace. With the fast-pace technological transformation and information explosion, we could hardly find time to breathe, let alone slowing down to enjoy life. A marketing vice president at Google once complained about having to stay in line for shopping or to go to the dentist because these things distracted him from work. Who would have felt regretful, toward the end of their life, for having worked too few weekends throughout their life? This vice president had probably never thought about that.

Living in such prosperity, many of us were full of confidence in our own future and capabilities. Once somebody wrote a biography of Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, the largest software company in the Bay Area. The title of the book was What is the Difference between God and Ellison? The title reflected the presumptuousness of the main character.

Living in such prosperity, many of us began to alienate ourselves from the reality and became a robot. A good example was Mark Ewing, Red Hat's founder who became a billionaire when his company stocks went public. He did not know how to deal with his wealth. When his financial advisor asked about his viewpoint of value, he said he had never thought about it and he did not know how to simulate it with computer.

Living in such prosperity, many of us pursued high-quality luxuries and purchased expensive "toys". They seemed to be very good at choosing toys and they were excellent business people, but they lacked the wisdom of life. They did not know how to choose true valuables and they failed to cover their inner poverty. In the Bay Area, Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park was the headquarter of venture money. Glen Mueller's company was on this street. He seemed to possess everything. His wealth reached 100 million and he lived a happy life. But in 1994 when Jim Clark, founder of Netscape, refused his investment, he fell into extreme despair and he shot and killed himself on his yacht.

Living in such prosperity, many of us ran a rat race. They were not necessarily chasing after their own true dreams, but very often they were chasing other people's dreams. They lived in fear and they fought hard to catch the bandwagon. In short, they fought hard, but they did not know for what and for whom.

In the Silicon Valley, the only thing that did not seem to change was that all would expire, men and things alike. Not a single wave could rush forever and not a single person could prosper forever. Internet bubbles busted in 2000. Easy came, easy went.

Today, the American economy is in recession. The unemployment rate has reached 6 percent. And the impact is especially significant in the Silicon Valley. When our retirement money is no longer safe and our stock options worthless, we begin to feel the danger and our confidence is nowhere to be found. It only takes two years and our mentality has been completely changed.

We begin to say to ourselves: Is it worth to sacrifice our family life and work like crazy?

A silly cat

Dostoyevsky, the renowned Russian writer, had a famous saying: "Man cannot live without meaning." To live without meaning will drive people crazy to the extent that they will lose their mind. A good illustration is a book named Man's Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl the psychiatrist. The book was named one of the ten most influential books by America's Library of Congress. Frankl was a survivor in the Nazi Concentration Camp. Based on his research, he discovered that all survivors shared this in common: that they were able to discover the meaning of life even in the darkest environment possible.

Based on this, Frankl invented the famous logotherapy. Contrasting to Freud's Beyond the Pleasure and Adler's Egocentric individual power, Frankl believed the most important motivation of human life is the will to meaning. No meaning, no life.

Frankl also made an honest statement: "I often advise my students in Europe and America not to take success as their ultimate goal. The more you take success as your goal, the more you are going to move away from your goal. Success cannot be forced, just as happiness cannot be pushed. But if we devote ourselves to a goal beyond individualism, or if we devote ourselves to another individual, success will just come along. Success is an unexpected byproduct." This is indeed the best advice I can offer to those who seek success and happiness from their work.

"Should you then seek great things for yourself? Seek them not." (Jer. 45:5)

"My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water." (Jer. 2:13)

Bob Buford, author of the best-selling Half Time, also said that we should change from seeking success to seeking significance. He maintained that this is the only way for us to live an abundant life.

As we struggle at the lines of gains and losses, our life is overshadowed by our work and all the anxieties from it so that we lose our judgment of values. So raise our heads from our work and move our eyes away from the illusion of immediate profits. Take a step back and ask ourselves what we would choose if we had absolute freedom. What is the true goal of our life? If we were to leave this world tomorrow, what would we want to do the most today?

Unless we courageously answer the call from our inner self and hold ourselves blameless in the mirror, we would be always like a silly cat endlessly chasing its own tail.

St. Augustine said: "Adulthood begins when we start to ask what legacy we will leave behind us."

A famous minister, the late Ray Stedman, mentioned about the 9^th century holy Roman Empire emperor Richmen, a famous emperor indeed. When archaeologists opened up his tomb, they discovered the emperor's skeleton sitting on a chair and his long finger bone pointing to an open Bible on his knee. It was written:

"What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?" (Mt. 16:26)

The current economic recession provides us an opportunity to re-evaluate our value of career. It also allows us to re-evaluate our life in general. If this is really the case, then the recession may well be a disguised blessing. Perhaps we can learn a little bit of art of life from the American blue-collar class.