Work is not all about the money

MY attention was caught by two different articles I saw online yesterday. The first was on tropical forest conservation and the second was about how, in the United States, more and more elderly people were being “forced” to work rather than opting for retirement.

My sad observation was that both articles looked at the situation negatively purely because of the money aspect. The writer of the first article criticised the tourists and boat operators for spoiling the environment with their action. Apparently, the ripples in the water created by the engine-operated boats damage the surrounding flora and fauna.

In the second article, the writer felt pity for old people who are still working, presumably because they need the money. According to him, the elderly should stay at home and be taken care of by one of the children or go and live in a nursing home which would be paid for by the government or the person’s savings. I wondered if it even occurred to the writer that older people may simply enjoy working and that they find pleasure and fulfilment in having a job to go to in the morning and keeping up with a routine.

I am currently reading a book titled Being Mortal by American doctor and surgeon Atul Gawande. In the book, he vividly describes what it is like to be old in the US and the challenges faced by both patients and doctors who need to deal with the branch of medicine called geriatrics or the care and management of old age.

US citizens are by nature a very proud people. They seek independence and become extremely unhappy when they are forced to depend on others for their physical and financial well-being. Therefore, the elderly will seek employment rather than pity or charity from others, and even their own family members.

We know that life expectancy has increased but governments all over the world are not prepared to deal with the situation. As Gawande states: “Few societies have come to grips with the new demography. We cling to the notion of retirement at 65 as a reasonable notion when those over 65 were a tiny percentage of the population but increasingly untenable as they approach 20%. People are putting aside less in savings for old age now than they have at any time since the Great Depression. More than half of the very old now live without a spouse and we have fewer children than ever before, yet we give virtually no thought to how we will live our later years alone.”

Considering the above, what other solution can there be for the person to try and stay healthy and continue working for as long as possible?

“There is apparently no better time in history to be old... Modernisation did not demote the elderly... it demoted the family. (The veneration of the elderly) has been replaced by the veneration of the independent self,” Gawande writes.

Indeed, life is now an opportunity to realise yourself, put your inner talent to the service of God and humankind and make both yourself and humankind happy and fulfilled.

Besides the money aspect, work also gives people satisfaction. I again quote Gawande: “You become a doctor for what you imagine to be the satisfactions of the work, and that turns out to be the satisfaction of competence.”

This statement is meaningful because it is indeed not possible to do a good job and earn your salary unless you are competent at what you do.

Today, Malaysian employers use various reasons to refuse prospective employees – their gender, religious belief, skin colour, political affiliation, age, education level and so on. In the process, they lose precious talent. Ideally, the only question an employer should ask is: “Can this person in front of me do the job I have available?”

When the right people are employed to do the job, they can last quite long in that position. On the other hand, when you give a person a job merely to earn a salary, the results sometimes would be completely unsatisfactory.

All data point to the fact that there will be more elderly people in the workforce in the future, and that these people will not seek pity but simply a fair chance to earn their keep.

This does not in any way mean that those who wish to retire should not be allowed to do so, but the elderly person must look at the young before him or her. Is it logical to think that they will want to work when you yourself refuse to work? It is the elderly who give hope and direction to the young.

One final observation concerns those who want to save the earth. This is our home and we should take the best possible care of it. However, we must never think that man has full power over the earth. There is only so much damage that God will let us do. Thus, the boatman is indeed after his pay but he also enjoys his day’s work and constant contact with the beauty of nature. Give that to him and he might be inclined to take better care of the environment.