We speak of work mainly as a threat. To our rights (bad, exploitative employers) and our well-being (Poles work their fingers to the bone). Or the reverse: we’re afraid to lose it and fear that Artificial Intelligence is taking our jobs. But maybe, for a change, let’s talk about how work gives our life value and meaning. And that many of us like what we do.
Małgosia is really good at what she does. She can cure bed sores and amuse and liven up pensioners. They stroll arm-in-arm with her, without walkers or wheelchairs, tearing their soupy gaze from the television—they chat and smile. But the work is hard. Twelve-hour shifts, with no full-time contract. Short vacations because when one caretaker rests, the other works twice as hard. There are few takers for this job, which is so necessary in an aging society, yet is poorly remunerated. It is mainly handled by older women, with plenty of emotional fortitude, but sometimes lacking the physical strength to match.
There are ten seniors to every caretaker. You have to lift and turn their incapacitated bodies, wash them, give them food and drinks, do their hair, find their favorite sweater in the wardrobe, brush their dentures. You have to explain the same things multiple times, ignore the fits of anger, frustration, aggressive dementia, or forgetfulness. You have to keep on caring, despite the lack of improvement, or even with the guarantee that things will get worse. One might say this of accompanying people through their old age and demise: it is hopeless work. But Małgosia likes it. It is plain for everyone to see—in her tenderness when she talks to the seniors, in the hugs and kisses, in their shared smiles, the commitment with which she seeks ways to improve their health and mood. Clearly, she was made for this. It is generally considered one of the more difficult professions. Hard to imagine one would choose it, let alone have passion for it. And yet.
My accountant Beata seldom speaks up. There is not much to say about her except that she is remarkably modest, though highly competent. She counts quickly and precisely and, it seems, makes no mistakes. She advises well and accurately. Compared to others to whom I’ve entrusted my finances, she has always been more scrupulous and conscientious, and, in my best interests, demanding. For as long as she did my accounting, the tax department and medical insurance had no cause to complain. We saw each other sporadically. She spent the days in a tidy, quite plain office on the far side of town. I was surprised she chose this place. She simply explained that she liked it there because it’s peaceful and quiet; it’s easier to concentrate. I sometimes brought her books to thank her for being so careful. She repaid me with a smile, though I don’t even know if she likes reading. I once asked why she did this work. She raised her arms and, tilting her head in a shy way, she replied: “I really like accounting.”
More than Money
It’s not easy fixing an appointment with Darek. He’s got a reputation. And three hair salons, which he and his wife founded eighteen years ago. They now employ over 130 people, and during the COVID-19 pandemic they did not fire a single one. I ask how much that cost him. He smiles and waves a hand. Hairdressers, colorists, assistants, receptionists—they’re all almost like a family. They’re close-knit, they’ve been through a lot, and many learned the ropes here and have stuck around since. Compared to that, money means nothing. I met Darek twenty-five years ago, when he was training in a small salon in a windowless basement. I had come to dye my hair before graduating high school. For my next visit he unexpectedly gave me a cropped style and that ended twenty years of bad haircuts. Ever since then, we’ve seen each other regularly, we’ve become friends. But what keeps me going back is that he’s a real professional. He cuts so that my hair still looks good six weeks after leaving the salon. He must also be a good employer, given that the same guys who were washing hair and pinning on smocks fifteen years ago are now his grown-up hairdressers servicing regular clients. And for the young group of more avant-garde stylists he’s set up a separate salon: “Maybe my wife and I are too classic. Let the kids go nuts,” he says, half in jest, because he’s never stopped training. When they travel, they go out scouting together, getting a look at the changing ideas in the most fashionable salons. Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I sent him photos of Asian streetside barbers, where you get a free head massage with your quick cut and shave—and a conversation to boot!
The lighthearted exchange of jokes and travel stories Darek and I have shared for a quarter century is at the heart of his work. People go to a hairdresser for a haircut, obviously, but also for someone to hear them, to listen—as they do with a physiotherapist, cosmetician, doctor, barkeeper, or manicurist. We leave behind stories and a great load of baggage and we get not only a new look but a better mood, prescriptions and cures, as well as a lot of attention and care. Sometimes we tell a manicurist or massage therapist things our loved ones don’t know, or what others might pay a qualified therapist to hear. We bond with them, spend time and relax.
Few of us realize how much they carry. Or how quiet they are after twelve hours of listening to people. When their loved ones at home ask, “How was your day?” they give one-word answers. They are full to the brim. Particularly in November and December, because that’s when life is bursting—with pain, important matters, a search for relief. During that season, business is booming, and it can be hard to make an appointment.
An Effort That Makes a Difference
Medical caretaker, hairdresser, and accountant are not traditionally known as prestigious occupations. We might say the same of many others, summarily deprecating both the profession and the decisions of those who pursue it. They have chosen it, learned it, and finished years of school and courses, polishing their craft through experience. They do this by choice—often with skill, seriousness, and a sense of responsibility. How can we not admire them? And where would we be without them?
And yet we live in a culture that puts other jobs on a pedestal, giving them disproportionate significance. We may well go through life without ever needing a director of operations, fashion designer, or chair of a corporate affairs council. Even HR managers, writers, senior specialists for business clients, or opera directors are not indispensable. Business and culture give them significance. Yet only four years ago, we all experienced a pandemic which temporarily reminded us of the real value of truly essential professions. On a daily basis, those to whom we once gave no special esteem turned out to be key to our lives, health, and essential needs. Salespeople and shopkeepers, couriers, pharmacy workers, nurses, producers of food and protective masks. And neighbors, who, given limited access to hairdressers, cosmeticians, barbers, and manicurists, listened to our litany of anxieties. That time gave rise to the Big Quit movement, the wave of job resignations in the Western world, but also a widespread reflection on the essence and value of work. For many, this was a chance to ask some hard questions: What do I spend my days doing? What do I devote my time to? How meaningful is it? Many jobs, suddenly exposed to the household out of necessity, revealed their drudgery and dreary side. There were jokes about kids who were disappointed to discover their father, who previously vanished all day to do allegedly important things, sitting in his shirt, tie, and underpants before his computer screen and tapping away at his computer all day or “hung up on calls.” My friend the psychotherapist had to shut herself up in her room all day, only coming out for short breaks between sessions. When asked what her mom did at work, her daughter said disappointedly, “She just prints out receipts.”
In all seriousness, many people realized that they were doing what anthropologist David Graeber, in his famous book of 2018, called “bullshit jobs.” They were pointless shams, involving actions that had no significance. Over time, fake work has an adverse effect on those who do it. Neither money nor a sophisticated nomenclature are capable of obscuring the void they contain. It reminds me of the days when, back when I was a waiter, I felt irrelevant, unimportant, and almost worthless on days when our restaurant was empty and we would spend hours killing time. We were discouraged and exhausted. We felt much better when there was a “rush” and we were stormed with customers. Despite the tiredness, we had enough energy to laugh and grab a beer together after work. That’s the work I remember best. After the night shifts, I wanted to saw off my legs, they hurt so badly; I changed my shoes every month because I’d worn out the soles, but I still went to work with a song in my heart. It was only many years later, creating a small foundation from scratch, which meant sometimes we had to all join in lifting, pounding nails, painting, scrubbing on our hands and knees, or missing out on sleep, that I felt the same joy from joint effort and cooperation. Our team was short on everything—money, materials, people—but we did have enthusiasm and a sense of purpose.
Better Together
No one wants to be alone. Almost no one, ever. This simple statement reflects the essence of human nature—we are social creatures, and one of the deepest expressions of this is shared projects, teamwork, and the exchange that has been decisive for our species’ advantage over other inhabitants of the earth throughout history. It gives us a daily sense of fulfillment and purpose, it organizes our lives. In human terms: work and other people are reasons why we get out of bed in the morning. If workers surveyed in the pandemic missed one thing, it was contact with their friends from the office; those moments between actual professional duties, atmosphere, a pretext to dress better for a social situation, to get a change of scenery and talk about things that don’t get mentioned around the house.
People are far less egotistical than many old notions would have us believe. Studies on daily life, such as those described by social researchers Rutger Bregman and Claudia Hammond, confirm that people are generally driven by kindness—they are prone to making sacrifices large and small and to holding onto relationships. This comes to us naturally; we get the most satisfaction and pleasure from what happens between us and what we share. Science has recently begun trying to prove something most of us know from our own experience: individual successes we experience alone in front of our computers please us less than ones we have as a team. Every freelancer sometimes longs for a work environment—a context, support, and competitive stimulation—and no Zoom meeting gives rise to as many innovative ideas as a casual chat over coffee in the staff kitchen. Even the daily commute to work, which can be a time-consuming drag, can be a chance to take a moment by yourself, or to form a community with new people who are also stuck in a traffic jam or packed into trams. This awareness gives us an important sense of our shared fate. Whatever we experience, we are not alone.
Our Place in the World
And yet work, and the effort it invariably entails, has become an easy target. It is remarkably difficult to find examples of it being treated holistically. The discourse on the subject boils down to journalism about the job market: the system of wages, the kinds of employment and contracts, the unemployment rate, and the endlessly reiterated “job apocalypse” that will come with Artificial Intelligence—destroying the futures of all occupations, even the most creative ones. No one is safe; technology is a bulldozer that crushes everything. Perhaps. For the time being, my brother-in-law, working at a car factory in a team of several people, is servicing the human robot assistants, and not the other way around. The machines are always breaking down, and the people are afraid to touch them, lest they damage them more. They prefer to roll up their sleeves and get down to work. Meanwhile, the humanoid robots that are supposed to replace Małgosia one day in taking care of seniors are only in the testing phase. And I would hazard the thesis that, while they are helpful and even essential, they will never be able to hug or amuse patients like she can. Incidentally, in the panicky visions of intelligent systems causing mass layoffs, I see a chance to start a real dialogue about the value of work. Since we are afraid to lose it, not only as a source of income but also as part of our identity, then maybe we depend on it? Maybe we should talk sincerely about how much we owe to it and what a sense of meaning we get from our professional lives?
I would not deny the importance of discussing the national minimum wage or linking employment with social security, yet constantly concentrating on the financial aspects of work—portrayed as a system of violence and exploitation of the weak (employees) by the strong (employers)—seems harmful and does not do justice to the complexity of the issue. Reading research on why people take up or change their jobs means orbiting around the same concepts: the desire for a full-time contract and higher wages, then somewhere after that, prestige or personal development. If we believe these parameters, we are all the same: we want to earn well, have a steady job and a solid pension. But this is a one-dimensional perspective because we work—and complain—for a variety of reasons.
Work Isn’t All Bad
According to research from the Center for Public Opinion in 2021, a whopping 84 percent of Poles are satisfied with their jobs. We like them not only for our earnings, the medical insurance, or the paid vacation. The vast majority of us work in micro, small, or mid-sized companies—in other words, we make work for ourselves and our coworkers. According to Polish Agency of Business Development reports from 2009, the number of national businesses is always on the rise (it has gone up by 2.3 percent in the last two years). This is, on the one hand, a quality of our economy; on the other, it is proof of a vital spirit of entrepreneurship. Seventy-two percent of the Polish Gross Domestic Product is created by businesses. I often hear that this structure is the scourge of our job market. There are too few large companies and businesses offering employment with social security packages, too many people forced into self-employment, self-employment agreements, and contracts. But even if we accept that Polish entrepreneurship is born of necessity, maybe we ought to have a look at its bright side? Many creators of our micro-enterprises, from actors to cleaning women, value their independence. They see its advantages. Putting aside the endless disputes between liberals and those who prefer social solutions, let us ask another question: What changes once you start working for yourself? When and how does work bring pleasure? What makes us want to do it well? In what tasks do we see a purpose? What do we see as most valuable, and can we eventually turn it into a decent living? Maybe we believe rangers should earn as well as miners? Maybe geriatrists should be paid more than surgeons because our society prefers to nurture the elderly, not cover them up? Let us talk about work as though our sense of happiness depends on it, because . . . to a large extent, it does.
There is a lot of truth in the statement that what we do for ourselves—for our reputation, our brand, our name—we do more carefully, with more commitment. Experience tells us that work in large institutions, from corporations to ministries and offices, involves a lot of passivity and ticking off tasks. This is not, of course, a hard-and-fast rule. There are churlish and rough taxi drivers who are self-employed, mediocre writers who hand out invoices, and kind and helpful post-office clerks. Yet doing business is more motivating and requires a firm foothold in the real world, which only means that a person who runs a company on a daily basis knows exactly how much they pay in taxes, what breaks they get, and how much they pay their suppliers and subcontractors. Everything goes through their wallet, and every holiday or sick leave is felt in the owner’s mind and the company’s spreadsheets. In this way of life, you can’t leave work outside the home and there’s an endless sense of responsibility. But it is also a life on your own terms, doing the work you choose, not which you are assigned, and that builds a sense of independence, self-reliance, and greater self-esteem. It is doubtless harder for the Polish entrepreneur to rest and get a good night’s sleep, but that goes with a deeper knowledge of the law, how the state truly works. We might see their situation as burdensome, or decide they have valuable skills for living in society.
After all, work is also about building wider relationships. Providing services, supplying goods, employing and commissioning—all these actions weave a network of trust. If we did not trust each other, we would not go to hairdressers’, to lawyers’ offices, or to pharmacies. If we did not trust the word and the honesty of others, we would not buy used bicycles on the internet or order packages from across the world. Economics is the sum total of honesty and kept promises; a social network in which every meal appears on the table, a porcelain crown on your tooth lasts fifteen years as the dentist promised, and your coat is ready to be picked up from the cleaners when they said it would be. Small companies have a major advantage here—they can make first-hand connections with their clients, even if the service is long-distance. Work with no account for responsibility swiftly suffers in quality. To take a mundane example: there is no way to complain about a mediocre social networking app. Zuckerberg or Musk cannot amend negative opinions about their companies because their business is not based on our contentment. My hairdresser, on the other hand, still has a sense of responsibility and will fix a dye job for free. Not because he is afraid of getting thrashed on the internet, but because of our years of mutual commitment and human decency.
A Clash of Civilizations
Anyone who tells me that this is an old-fashioned view of work that is slowly dying off, because services are increasingly impersonal, is no doubt correct. This is partly because young people are the most mobile on the job market, meaning they most often change employment. Stories are already afoot about the fluidity, instability, and inadaptability of “Gen Z” to the very idea of work. Apart from sociological research, we also have a situation in which Gen X, which I represent, is facing off with people born in the new century, in the virtual world, convinced that achievements are only a click away. This is a true clash of civilizations: twenty-somethings enter the job market and are astonished to discover the weight of the real expectations and consequences, tangible pressure, demanding hours, actual duties and results. The world has changed greatly, but income and costs can still be counted in Excel spreadsheets and cannot be adjusted to suit your desire for spending your time at work in one way or another. And this is how the younger generation understands work—primarily as an experience, a lifestyle, and an interesting way to fill up their days. The Generation Z on the Job Market—Attitudes, Priorities, Expectations report published by the Polish Agency for the Development of Entrepreneurship (PARP) in 2023 showed that two-thirds of young people change their job over the course of a year. For half of them, what counts is independence and freedom, and for 56 percent, the chance to realize their passions.
The representatives of analog-based or hybrid generations who hire them encounter a problem we might call a communication breakdown. This comes down to a radically different experience that is hard to explain to each other. Those born before the system change (or in the early phase of capitalism in Poland in the 1990s) operate in a different paradigm and work ethic. In sum: they understand that value is earned and is brought into a company or institution through personal effort. Also, they perceive work as a long-term commitment, in part toward their coworkers. Gen Z, as I have had a chance to see first-hand, does not think about holding a profession, and gets involved in work from an individual perspective, looking to meet their own needs. If these are not quickly satisfied, they decide to change, clicking onward to find other options. Experience from virtual reality is quite significant here. The older generations recall job market crises, including high unemployment rates, which is why they also see a job as a privilege and a limited resource. The internet gives younger workers a conviction of the world’s abundance, the existence of inexhaustible possibilities. If not in this city, in another, if not in this country, in another, if not in this line of work, another. Even the point of departure is totally different, even if it is illusory. For the job market is still ruled by demand, it is schematic, it values long-term commitment. In the large companies, however, we can see a submissiveness and flexibility toward the “faithless” employees of the new generation. Managers study sociological articles, trying to understand the expectations of the “Zs,” less and less confident that the young people will adapt to existing circumstances.
Professional Development Included
Yet reality once again proves to be more complex. Few can still afford to change jobs and think of a career as their passion. Financial support from the family has to be somewhere in the background, a cushion diligently provided by their parents, inheritors of twentieth-century traumas, poverty, and loss of property through war and political turmoil. Past generations worked in constant uncertainty and tempestuous times. For today’s Polish “Zs” to have the comfort and right to be laid-back, their parents worked hard in wild capitalism, conscious of having to catch up after socialism, to create an economic buffer to keep the shortages from returning, so their children and grandchildren could live a better life. On the one hand, we can speak of success, as shown by the lack of stress with which some young people now approach their job prospects. They have gained an education, they feel no fear.
Still, economic pressure is going strong: we have had high inflation for several years, owning your own apartment is an unattainable luxury for young people, and the job contracts lauded by various journalists and in political speeches remain hard to find. This is why plenty of “Zs” are doing work a far cry from their dreams or ambitions. They take what they can. This brings us back to an evident truth—the main motivation for work is getting paid. Yet the question is: how do today’s young baristas, shopkeepers, bureaucrats, emerging musicians, programmers, or biochemists find justification and a sense of meaning if they are doing simple tasks, for low salaries, perhaps below their skill levels? Finding themselves in this initial phase, do they assume, like my peers did, that they are pursuing their dreams, and by gaining this experience they will soon be able to have higher expectations? Or maybe they feel a great and immediate disappointment, which is why they are inspired to click away and switch jobs? Why are they so affected by judgments, including indispensable criticism? (Antefamaphobia—the fear of being judged—is a plague among young people in the twenty-first century). And why is a distant prospect of promotion or gradual development so unappealing to them?
As a person whose profession involves describing things and telling stories, I seek explanations in narratives from my generation and those younger than me. Gen Z sees the world in segments. Their thinking reflects the fragmentation they know from Instagram or the flash videos on TikTok. On the internet everything is now, and only for a second. Continuity, cause-and-effect relations, or action/reaction connections have no place on the Internet. Meanwhile, my generation remains more tied to multilinear novels, in which decades can pass from desire to fulfillment, with changes and unforeseen events along the way. From day one on the job, I wanted to learn, develop, and advance as a reward. For this goal, I was and still am prone to sacrifice a few or even a dozen hours a day, without regularly checking to see if it paid off. For many “Zs,” this is a textbook case of workaholism or foolishness.
We might also sum up my story—and my generation’s—as the sickness of the children of the Leszek Balcerowicz epoch; a dependency of the senses groomed by the big corporations and the ideals of early capitalism. The work ethic in Poland did indeed experience a major shock with the transformational shift. My experience was entirely different from the professional lives of my parents, born after World War II and holding down one, maybe two jobs in socialist Poland. From the early 1990s we were trained to be flexible, to acquire many skills, which might come in handy for the new, American-style job market. We were a generation of capitalist pioneers, and we approached our experiences with historical enthusiasm because we were tasked with rebuilding the economy from scratch. We invented services, products, and work methods that had not existed before us. Fascination blended with effort, and it is hard to give up that heady mixture. Yet despite the professional mobility that was forecast for us, most of my peers still do the same job, and if they’ve changed, they do something related. There are few tales of exotic transformations and job swaps, much as few of us are swimming in cash like the Carrington family in Dynasty, which was more or less the image of success at the time.
Married to Your Job
I’ve had plenty of chances to change jobs. And yet I’ve never juggled professions. Maybe because we all have our limitations and are incapable of reinventing ourselves every season. Reality shows us that we grow attached to our roles, tasks, and coworkers. Adapting to a new job takes an average of two years. We point to getting fired as one of the most stressing events in our life, comparable to the death of a loved on. This is why it is worth discussing work as one of our greatest values, the perception of which is radically changing once more as a new generation enters adulthood. When we are professionally active, we decide on one of our life’s most important relationships. One which secures the meaning of our little life on a daily basis. If young people do not want to make a longer-term connection with an employer, or are afraid to do so, we have cause to worry—not about turbulence on the job market (it always finds a way to cope), but that having a negative or demanding attitude to exerting yourself on the job could mean losing something precious.
I was around thirty when I was invited to a meeting with pensioners at the Women’s Congress. A representative of the Ministry of Labor showed us a chart on job and life satisfaction just before retirement and just after. It turns out that the closer we get to retirement, the more tired people feel, they cannot wait for relief. But the joy lasts only a second. Two years later, pensioners declare they’d happily get back to work. When asked, “Who here is in favor of lowering the retirement age?” none of the over one hundred women in attendance raised their hand. And neither did I.
This article is one of the last I will have the privilege of writing for Przekrój. Working here has been most fulfilling for me, and the awareness that I have been among such talented and committed people, working for readers eager to share a world of unusual thoughts, has been the greatest reward. They say that money doesn’t bring you happiness. But work? In my case, it often has. And I wish that for every one of us.
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