Money is the new secret of a happy job

By Lucy Kellaway

Published: December 14 2008 19:59 | Last updated: December 14 2008 19:59

Last week, I sent an e-mail to a friend who had just lost his job. “I’m so sorry,” I wrote. “Your bosses are morons to have got rid of such a genius as you. I can only suppose a queue will shortly stretch round the block as less brain-dead employers clamour to take you on. Hope you are OK.”

The e-mail was heartfelt except for one word, and that was “shortly”. I don’t expect a queue to form for my friend shortly. Even geniuses are not getting snapped up quickly – unless they happen to be security guards, social workers, accountants or teachers.

In a trice, I had a message back. He said he had had a brief panic about the mortgage and school fees but otherwise was really rather cheerful. Indeed, he was in such high spirits that he even sent me a funny anecdote*.

I could not help comparing the tone of his message with one that I got the very same afternoon from another friend who works for a company that has also been celebrating Christmas with some savage job cuts. Never, she said, had her morale been as bad. The weight of work was crippling as she was now doing the jobs of three people. There was talk of pay cuts. The office was spookily quiet, too; since most of her friends had been sacked, there wasn’t even anyone around to moan to. Worst of all was the fear that her job would be next.

It is tempting to conclude from these two messages that, if there is one thing worse for hitherto successful, well-paid people than being fired, it is not being fired. Those who have been axed don’t need to take the sacking personally, and not working in the days before Christmas can be rather jolly. Whereas for those who have not been fired, the not-so-festive season this year is an orgy of fear and drudgery.

There might be some truth in this now but it is not going to stay true for long. The grimness of the unemployed will get worse as no queues form to take them on, while the grimness of those in work will, in time, start to recede. This is not because the economy will improve – it is because the grimness itself will bring on a sounder and altogether more realistic approach to work.

Over the past decade, the rich, professional classes have developed an increasingly unhealthy attitude to their jobs. We took our jobs and our fat salaries for granted and felt aggrieved if our bonuses were not even bigger than the year before. We demanded that the work be interesting in itself and, even more dangerously and preposterously, that it should have meaning.

The result of all these demands was, of course, dissatisfaction. We had climbed to the very top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and discovered that, at the top of the pyramid, the air was very thin indeed. As an agony aunt, I found that by far the most common problem readers submitted came from rich and senior professionals who had all their basic needs more than catered for, leaving their souls in torment. Help me, I’m bored, they cried. Or, worse: what does my work mean?

In the past few months, anguish of this sort has vanished. When one’s job is at risk and one’s savings are a shadow of their former selves, the search for meaning at work is meaningless. The point of a job becomes rather more basic: to feed and house (and, at a pinch, to educate) one’s family and oneself. If we can do this, then anything we manage over and above this is a bonus. Once expectations have fully adjusted to this new reality and we see earning money as the main reason for work, greater satisfaction will follow.

Low expectations have an awful lot to be said for them. In surveys women turn out to be more satisfied at work than men, in spite of earning less for the same jobs and doing most of the work at home too. The reason is simple: women’s expectations of working life are lower. Similarly, Denmark is the happiest country in the world in spite of having a cold, dark climate and a top tax rate of 68 per cent. The stoical Danes do not expect so much of life and, expecting less, find what little they have rather nice.

The last two years of the decade while Europe enjoyed a rich fat afternoon, were the quietest. Nineteen-ten was peaceful and prosperous; with the second round of Moroccan crises and Balkan wars still to come. A new book, The Great Illusion by Norman Angell, had just been published, which proved that war was impossible. By impressive examples and incontrovertible argument Angell showed that in the present financial and economic interdependence of nations, the victor would suffer equally with the vanquished; therefore war had become unprofitable; therefore no nation would be so foolish as to start one. Already translated into eleven languages, The Great Illusion had become a cult. At the universities, in Manchester, Glasgow, and other industrial cities, more than forty study groups of true believers had formed, devoted to propagating its dogma. Angell's most earnest disciple was a man of great influence on military policy, the King's friend and adviser, Viscount Esher, chairman Of the War Committee assigned to remaking the British Army after the shock of its performance in the Boor War. Lord Esher delivered lectures on the lesson of The Great Illusion at Cambridge and the Sorbonne wherein he showed how “new economic factors clearly prove the insanity of aggressive wars.” A twentieth century war would be on such a scale, he said, that its inevitable consequences of “commercial disaster, financial ruin and individual suffering” would be “so pregnant with restraining influences” as to make war unthinkable. He told an audience of officers at the United Service Club, with the Chief of General Staff, Sir John French, in the chair, that because of the interlacing of nations War “becomes every day more difficult and improbable.”

Germany, Lord Esher felt sure, “is as receptive as Great -Britain to the doctrine of Norman Angell.” How receptive were the Kaiser and the Crown Prince to whom he gave, or caused to be given, copies of The Great Illusion is not reported. There is no evidence that he gave one to General Von Bernhardi, who was engaged in 1910 in writing a book called Germany and the Next War, published in the following year, which was to be as influential as Angell’s but from the opposite point of view. Three of its chapter titles, “The Right to Make War,” “The Duty to Make War,” and “World Power or Downfall” sum up its thesis.

[pp. 24-25 THE GUNS OF AUGUST, Barbara Tuchman]

"Personally, if I do get a nuke or several dropped on or near me -
which is reasonably likely if I don't relocate off Oahu - and if I'm
not, y'know, vaporized - I'll use broken glass to sever an artery.
Once thing about suburban rubble, you'll be able to find shards of
broken glass, and it's the sharpest edge there is; it's what they use
to cut cells in half for electron microscopy. Broken plate glass has
a single-molecule edge, I think. And I can attest that bleeding to
death is not only painless, but even slightly euphoric - I lost 60+%
of my blood once to an arterial bleed."

-DJ

A youth must have seen his blood flow and felt his teeth crack under the blow of his adversary and have been thrown to the ground twenty times. Thus will he be able to face real war with the hope of victory. Without practice the art of war [does] not come naturally when it [is] needed.

- Roger of Howden, 12th Century

"I'm in show business, why come to me?"

"War is show business, that's why we're here."


- "Wag the Dog" (1997 film)

‘People skills’, by the way, just means they smile while they lie.

- Elberry

Have a helluva dieoff everyone.

- Richard

Export Land Model of Oil production. Everyone knows about it but look at the ramifications

In just 5-10yrs we could be looking at an almost total cessation of oil exports. And from what I've read the US might only be producing 3MMBD instead of the current 5MMBD.

That is the end of America. Period.

And people here argue about whether there will be war soon. You can bet your firstborn there will be war. BIG WAR. When this fucker kicks off it will be the last BIG war of mankind. Nukes and all. Everyone will give it all they got because whoever is left standing at the end will get the prize....oil. The losers will starve.

- Korg

One of my favorite books on remote viewing was written just three years later (1930). This book is titled Mental Radio and was written by the American novelist and social activist, Upton Sinclair. It describes a series of experiments he conducted over a period of three years with his psychic wife, Mary Craig Sinclair (MCS). Although the Sinclairs refer to the phemonenon they studied as telepathy, modern readers will recognize it as pure RV. Mental Radio has descriptions of over 100 sessions the Sinclairs conducted. Chapter 21 of this book provides a detailed description by MCS on her method for remote viewing. It can be summarized simply as relaxing the mind and body and entering a slighty-meditative state and then simply describing the mental images one develops.

Some of the best remote viewers involved in the early RV research at SRI and the government's RV program--Pat Price, Hella Hammid, and Joe McMoneagle--all used unstructured methods. Russell Targ, both in his books (such as Mind Race and Limitless Mind) and workshops (which I have attended twice) strongly advocates a "keep it simple" approach, stating "All that is necessary to remote view is to quiet the mental chatter and describe the images which come to mind."

- Banded Krait

Now when you have that power, the best technique is to ignore all of that discussion, ignore it totally, and to eliminate it, by the simple device of asserting the opposite. If you assert the opposite, that eliminates mountains of evidence demonstrating that what you're saying is false. That's what power means.

- Noam Chomsky

What I took away from this book: The beautiful ugliness with which the CIA and FBI operate. One of the things Sander's book intentionally highlights is the usage of moles and spies who already have questionable histories. It's something that never occured to me, but it explains alot--why people who naysay the government wind up in jail, or easily ridiculed. It's because even though they may be telling the truth, they were all screwed up people to begin with! On the FBI and CIA's part, it's a beautiful scheme.

- somebody's amazon book review

“It has no existence as an independent concrete entity. It designates a highly developed category of Western covert operations designed to secure destabilization through the creation, multiplication, mobilization, and manipulation of disparate mujahideen groups. The evidence suggests that this was certainly the case on 9-11.”

- Nafeez Ahmed (author: The War on Truth), speaking about Al Qaida

BOXING DQ’S FOR SELF-DEFENSE

Boxing AKA the Sweet Science, as we all know, may be a science but it’s not all that sweet. Let’s face it; what’s sweet about a sport that has as its ultimate goal to render you unconscious via blunt head trauma? As sour-intentioned as the “sweet” science is there is an even more unsavory side—the area of illegal blows, disqualification shots (DQs). These DQs have no place inside the ring (sorry, but you’ve got to keep your teeth to yourself, Mr. Tyson) but for the street, well, that’s another story altogether. Pure boxing, with zero illegal shots added to the mix is already a formidable self-defense art; add the DQs and you’ve got a leaner, meaner street ready animal.

Below we set forth a primer on how to take the already efficient standard boxing arsenal and add the bad intentioned shots back into the mix to make it a street-ready self-defense option. We’ll only touch on a few of the higher-percentage shots; for a great deal more information on this topic see our exhaustive instructional set The Complete Pugilist.

1. Location, Location, Location—Just as in real estate, where you land a blow can spell all the difference between man-stopper and a missed opportunity. You can take any of the blows in the standard boxing arsenal (the jab, cross, hook, uppercut) and target “verboten” areas on your opponent and have a nice effect. Aim for the soft targets of the throat and kidneys; these are far easier to hit than most imagine.
2. Below the Belt—Outside the sport rule-set but no need to exclude it from the street arsenal. A well-placed uppercut south of the border is mighty effective.
3. Rabbit Punching—Blows to the back of the head are particularly damaging and forbidden in the sport of boxing, which means this is a prime tool for the street-boxer. Rabbit punches are best delivered while engaged in a clinch. To deliver an effective rabbit-punch, think of a short choppy hook hitting your opponent directly on the back of the head or neck. BTW—The term rabbit punch comes from a technique used to kill rabbits caught in traps. Once the live rabbit is removed from the trap a sharp blow to the back of the neck and our live rabbit is now a past tense live rabbit.
4. Roughing Inside the Clinch—Once two boxers are clinched the fight is strictly regulated for the sportsman, but for the street-boxer a whole new world of hurt opens up. We’ve got the previously mentioned rabbit-punches, knees to the groin and/or thighs, foot stomps, short-choppy head-butts, you’ve even got Mr. Tyson’s ear lobe hors d`oeuvres available. There is a wealth of mayhem to be inflicted inside the clinch; dish it out well.
5. Thumbing—Modern boxing gloves are manufactured with the thumbs attached to the body of the glove to prevent “accidental/incidental” thumbs to the eyes. The street-boxer has no such glove restricting his fifth digit so; he should utilize this opposing appendage with extreme prejudice. Thumb the eye while roughing inside the clinch, fire your jabs with an open palm and your thumb extended targeting the eyes and/or throat. Another nice little roughing use of the thumb inside the clinch is to jam it hard up and into your opponent's armpit—it won’t stop the fight but it’s just one of the many disconcerting multiples you can throw.
6. Combinations, Combinations, Combinations—The best of the best in the sport of boxing throw combinations; the street-boxer would be wise to emulate that tactic. Be overwhelming in your offense—be overwhelming in your defense. Be overwhelming in your counters. Do not look for the Sunday punch or the KO, instead strive to be the proverbial buzzsaw, strike fast, strike often, and then strike again.

There are many (many) more illegal shots/inserts that we can cull from the boxing arsenal but these half dozen will serve you well when the game is not inside the ring, there is no referee to stop the fight and the stakes are higher than a mark on your record. Train hard; train safe!

Thanks everyone and have a great weekend!

Mark Hatmaker

That this social order with its pauperism, famines, prisons, gallows, armies, and wars is necessary to society; that still greater disaster would ensue if this organization were destroyed; all this is said only by those who profit by this organization, while those who suffer from it – and they are ten times as numerous – think and say quite the contrary.

- L. Tolstoi

I agree with Scott on this matter.

5 million, or 5 billion people mean nothing, nada, zip to TPTB. They
can control the masses.

It is not even necessary to 'handle' them with all these messy
stuff. Just block the exits and keep the supplies from reaching in.
5 million or 5 billion, the masses die on the vine.

In ancient China, when the pesky peasants rebel every year because
they were hungry, the Chinese Emperor hired Mongol horsemen to quell
them.

And, as I have mentioned before, when the Taiping peasant rebels
tried to overthrow the Manchu dynasty, the Manchus called up Western
troops to silence the masses.

There are lots of trained soldiers around the world who will kill
someone for $5 a pop. TPTB will have no difficulty to find someone
to shoot to the mobs.

P. Kwon of Cal.

“Whereas the prices of oil and wheat measured in dollars have soared over the course of this decade, they have, on the other hand, been remarkably stable when measured in terms of gold — gold having been the foundation of the world’s monetary system until 1971. It is, therefore, reasonable to conclude not that we are experiencing a commodities bubble, but, rather, the end of what might usefully be termed a ‘currency bubble.’”
-George Soros

> This assures a constant motivation for action of some sort and
> with a small amount of discipline the action can be directed
> towards a productive result. Naturally, those having superior
> abilities would tend to rise in rank.

This is not true. The ability to gain and hold power over others is
itself a skill and does not require any other ability. I suggest you
become active in local politics and watch closely.

Jay Hanson

It is inseparable from human nature to HOPE and FEAR. In speculation, when the market goes against you, you hope every day will be the last day – and you lose more than you should had you not listened to hope.

The successful trader has to fight these two deep-seated instincts. He has to reverse what you might call his natural impulses. It is absolutely wrong to gamble in stocks the way the average man does. Instead of hoping he must fear; instead of fearing he must hope.

He must fear that his loss may develop into a much bigger loss, and hope that his profit may become a big profit.

-Jessie Livermore

"I have never seen a wild thing feel sorry for itself. A little bird will fall dead, frozen from a bough, without ever having felt sorry for itself."

—D.H. Lawrence

If one first sees with the eyes, then thinks of it again in the mind, and then launches the counter-attack towards the enemy, it is very seldom that one will not get beaten up.

-Wang Xiangzhai

Whatcha gonna do with 6 or 7 billion hungry people who can't get along under the best of circumstances?

Set them to war against each other.

- Jed Turtle

"I do think that many mysteries ascribed to our own invention have been the courteous revelations of spirits; for those noble creatures in heaven bear a friendly regard unto their fellow creatures on earth."

- Sir Thomas Browne

"It's not steroids that are the problem, they are a side effect of being American."

How To Impress Women?

Smile at them as you open your wallet, say a kind word as you open your wallet, extol their finer points as you open your wallet, recite poetry as you open your wallet, promise the earth as you open your wallet, to save time just open your wallet, if you don’t have a wallet, gee that’s tough. Whatever you do, don’t wear a waistcoat.

- Malty

Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.

-Aldo Leopold

The only way to escape the treadmill is to escape Capitalist
propaganda and advertising, because beads and trinkets attract women
better than anything else. It's genetic.

-Jay Hanson

Humans are NOT the "intelligent" animals they are purported to be,
they are little more than lizards walking around on their hind feet.
Although fantastically complex arguments are given for doing this or
that, it's really quite simple. A binary decision switch is thrown
subconsciously and then sometime later (from seconds to as long as it
takes) a plausible excuse is invented to rationalize the decision.

- Jay Hanson

One of the oft cited premises of the 9/11 Truth movement is that the attack on the towers was the pearl harbor-like event that the neocons anticipated would be necessary to move the US to embrace the aggressive militaristic tactics manifested in Iraq. Here, we have Rumsfeld casually joking about it—not a smoking gun, but, perhaps, a clear “tell” in poker parlance, indicating ready ability to think in these terms.

"Humans do not really think. It's a fiction. Humans perform
"displays" to gain political power just like other social animals.
It's all about the body language, no thinking required -- or even
possible."

Jay Hanson

Mais l’orgie et la camaraderie des femmes m’étaient interdites. Pas même un compagnon. Je me voyais devant une foule exaspérée, en face du peloton d’exécution, pleurant du malheur qu’ils n’aient pu comprendre, et pardonnant! – Comme Jeanne d’Arc! – ‘Prêtes, professeurs, maîtres, vous vous trompez en me livrant à la justice. Je n’ai jamais été de ce peuple-ci; je n’ai jamais été chrétien; je suis de la race qui chantait dans le supplice; je ne comprends pas les lois; je n’ai pas le sens moral, je suis une brute: vous vous trompez…’

But orgy and the comradeship of women were forbidden me. Not even a companion. I could see myself in front of an angry crowd, facing the firing-squad, weeping with the unhappiness which they would not have been able to understand, and forgiving them! - Like Joan of Arc! - ‘Priests, doctors, masters, you are mistaken in handing me over to justice. I have never belonged to this people; I have never been a Christian; I belong to the race which used to sing under torture; I do not understand the laws; I have no moral sense, I am an animal: you are making a mistake…’

(Rimbaud, Une Saison en Enfer, tr. Oliver Bernard)

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

~George Santayana~

"A second result of man's animal vulnerability to death and his
symbolic consciousness of it is the struggle to get power to fortify
himself. Other animals must simply use those powers that nature
provided them with and the neural circuits that animate those
powers. But man can invent and imagine powers, and he can invent
ways to protect power. This means, as Nietzsche saw and shocked his
world with, that ALL MORAL CATEGORIES ARE POWER CATEGORIES; they are
not about virtue in any abstract sense. Purity, goodness, rightness—
these are ways of keeping power intact so as to cheat death; the
striving for perfection is a way of qualifying for extraspecial
immunity not only in this world but in others to come. Hence all
categories of dirt, filth, imperfection, and error are vulnerability
categories, power problems."
~Ernest Becker

When I was bombing cities in Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and France in the Second World War, the moral justification was so simple and clear as to be beyond discussion: We were saving the world from the evil of fascism. I was therefore startled to hear from a gunner on another crew -- what we had in common was that we both read books -- that he considered this "an imperialist war." Both sides, he said, were motivated by ambitions of control and conquest. We argued without resolving the issue. Ironically, tragically, not long after our discussion, this fellow was shot down and killed on a mission.

- Howard Zinn

Great Letter!

I was on the scientific faculty of a "well-known American university" for 10 years. Academic freedom is a fairy tale, and universities are essentially corrupted by their funding. Here's why:

- A faculty member is a nobody if he/she doesn't pull in enough grant money. To get, say, $100,000 in grant funding, we had to get $167,000, of which the administration immediately took away $67,000 ('overhead'). This 'overhead' determined your stature with the boss ('dean').

- 90% of the grants in my department were with either federal agencies or the military.

- The administration's evaluations of faculty were largely based on grant income (not teaching or research). Untenured faculty without grants were fired, period.

- Even tenured faculty were considered 2nd-class citizens (low pay, lousy assignments) if they had no grants. It was a grim fate.

To promote 9/11 Truth, a professor would have to throw it all away: no grants, no research, low pay, crappy treatment. Also, his administration would desperately try to shut him up, out of fear of losing university-wide grants.

This is why so few academics have spoken up, and amounts to corruption of what should be a free-thinking part of society. One has to admire the courage of people like Steven Jones (and he left BYU, remember?).

Great letter, Christian, and my heart is with you as you rattle the cages at BU. It takes guts to do what you have done.

I am also aware how the points I am making above can readily be explained away with references to my ego, ignorance, lack of commitment, wrong priorities, etc. All that is fine. Things be as they may, the fact is that this is how I feel currently and this is the action my heart propels me to do. That is the same heart that brought me into Art of Living in the first place. I have nothing else to trust.

“Take stock of those around you and you will...hear them talk in precise terms about themselves and their surroundings, which would seem to point to them having ideas on the matter. But start to analyze those ideas and you will find that they hardly reflect in any way the reality to which they appear to refer, and if you go deeper you will discover that there is not even an attempt to adjust the ideas of this reality. Quite the contrary: through these notions the individual is trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of his own very life. For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his "ideas" are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality.”

~JOSÉ ORTEGA y GASSET

"How much lipstick can you put on the pig without poisoning the poor thing?"

- some net person

"The illusion of freedom [in America] will continue as long as it's
profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion
becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the
scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables
and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back
of the theater."

~Frank Zappa

A tapeworm injects chemicals into a host that causes the host to crave what is good for the tapeworm.

- Catherine Fitts

"Any individual who rises to the national political level is, of necessity and by definition, committed to the authoritarian-corporatist state. The current system will not allow anyone to be elected from either of the two major parties who is determined to dismantle even one part of that system."

- Arthur Silber

Counting Crows

One for sorrow,
Two for joy,
Three a wedding,
Four a boy,
Five for silver,
Six for gold,
Seven a secret that's never been told.

(Folklore of Birds)

I bow down before you,
I honor your role in my journey to God.
I have no more karma to burn with you,
I desire no more karma to incur with you.
I release you, I release you, I release you.

Om Namah Shivayah

You are just jealous, cuz the voices speak only to ME!!!

Only after the last tree has been cut down; Only after the last fish has been caught; Only after the last river has been poisoned; Only then will you realize that money cannot be eaten.

/Cree Indian Prophecy

"There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution."

Aldous Huxley, Tavistock Group, California Medical School, 1961