Green Room blogger Jon Malesic has a provocative post at The New Republic where he argues that we use the metaphor of job or work for anything that requires effort, including school and the human relationships of marriage and parenting:
Americans struggle to describe worthwhile, long-term activities without turning them into jobs. We can’t imagine a good life that’s free from workplace logic.
This impoverishes our ability, he argues, to understand leisure and even to understand love. Better, perhaps, is the language of vocation, but even that has its problems. The question we should be asking, he concludes, is what values will help society to flourish? Then we should support those, rather than defining everything that helps society to flourish as work. Check it out and let us know what you think.
The Green Room 