Work Aversion

An apprentice is likely to be idle, and almost always is so, because he has no immediate interest to be otherwise. In the inferior employments, the sweets of labour consist altogether in the recompense of labour. They who are soonest in a condition to enjoy the sweets of it, are likely soonest to conceive a relish for it, and to acquire the early habit of industry. A young man naturally conceives an aversion to labour, when for a long time he receives no benefit from it. The boys who are put out apprentices from public charities are generally bound for more than the usual number of years, and they generally turn out very idle and worthless.

- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

I like to think that I have fairly good self-awareness. I can recognize defects in myself, tendencies and propensities which are just not good. For the faults that I miss due to personal pride or blind spots, I have a wife well placed to identify such short comings. Thankfully she is often gracious in her assessments!

One such self-identified weakness is, I fear, work ethic. It is not that I am the carbon copy of the sluggard in Proverbs. I have graduated college with a decent GPA, retained jobs, even experienced a small degree of success in my short professional career. But beneath the exterior there lurks in me an aversion to work and a pull towards idleness. This is most apparent in the use of my "free time" which will almost always choose the path of least resistance. Yes, there are things to get done (when isn't there?), but right now I am going to go hunting or fishing, watch Netflix, watch sports, scroll through social media...etc. And while such activities may not stand out among my generation as lazy, they do when we change the criteria beyond our immediate age demographic.

Case in point, my Uncle Kevin. Kevin works. It is what he does. He builds, he fixes cars, he landscapes, he plants trees, he puts up walls and garage doors. And whenever Kevin asks me about my "sometime in the future to-do-list" which includes building a shed or building a deck on to the back of my house, my eyes immediately start to roll. I will say, "maybe later" or "I have been so busy"--but the reality is I am work averse and do not want to take the time to do what is not immediately necessary in the moment. To translate, I am lazy and I do not like my laziness being exposed by someone else's industry.

I am a product of my times no doubt. Being born in the wealthiest nation in history to a middle class family, I did not have to labor as prior generations in different times and locals had to. In pre-industrial, agrarian America, children were employed as soon as they were able as farm hands to support their patriarch father. The principle that those that did not work did not eat was then a reality. The times demanded this, but we have no such demands any longer; and while I did work growing up: raking leaves, mowing lawns, doing janitorial work--a significant portion of my time was employed in idleness. College was not too different, and I look back at some of my time there with regret as I squandered large chunks of hours in video games and sport watching.    

Adam Smith was right in his analysis. We need to work hard and work young. Now that I am a father trying to grow my own work ethic, I want my son to understand "the recompense of labor" as soon as reasonably possible, for "they who are soonest in a condition to enjoy the sweets of it, are likely soonest to conceive a relish for it, and to acquire the early habit of industry." If we do not do this, and our children do not get to experience the reward of their labor at a young age, if they are given everything their hearts desire at that young age as we demand nothing from them in return--they may turn out no different from many of the apprentices in Smith's day: "idle and worthless."

The times are changing. With the rapid increase of technological advancements our society needs to be prepared for the shock of a changed economic landscape. Artificial intelligence and predictions of the future automation of much labor demand that we adapt accordingly. We need to be able to learn new things, try our hand at trades we may not have previously considered, and be innovative in our work.

In short we need to recover anew that old school work ethic.