Livin’ the dreamEarly in the chapter the author describes Hannah Arendt’s view on labor and work and the difference between them. She describes labor as the production of goods necessary to live; this includes mostly food, but also some things like medicine or other base necessities for survival. She goes on to describe work as the creation of lasting things. Things like art, music, metallurgy, or as the section repeatedly mentions, tables. The section heavily implies that in order for your life to be meaningful at least one of those two things in your life must be meaningful as well. By this standard, this world is not one worth growing up in. So many jobs, the people’s work, that are available to people today consist of making, maintaining, or managing completely useless things that help nobody. Despite this, some people are still happy, some people still look forward to growing up, some are the same people that are destined for dead-end meaningless careers.
Why?
This question led me to redefine labor. Under my definition labor is what is required for a human being to sustain themselves in their world. In the world presented to us that is our jobs. Our meaningless toil in careers that mean so little to so many people. Work is unchanged. Work is still what we create that will last in the world. This means that for some people their work and labor will overlap. For the carpenter, their table is both their source of income that sustains themselves and their lasting impact on the world. Some may have a labor but no work, such as a professional football player. An example of just work would be a hobby that involves making or altering something.
A personal example of why meaningless labor isn’t equal to a meaningless life is my dad. For a long time, he struggled finding a job and needed to find one more entry level position until he found something more fitting of his experience. He found a job at a call center for a health insurance company. I was young at the time, but from what I remember from his stories this was just about as meaningless and demeaning a job as a person is capable of getting, but given the option he wouldn’t have gone back to fix it. He still had his work, his family and his hobbies that gave his life meaning. If he knew when he was young what waited for him in his career he still would’ve wanted to grow up. An awful job did not make his life meaningless.
Advertising
Another topic that rubs me the wrong way in this section is what the author says about advertising. Neiman describes advertising as creating a false demand for products, invasive, and demeaning. She even goes so far as to say, “The fact that the advertising industry uses the term ‘creatives’ to designate people who spend lives seeking new ways of seeping into our brains in order to convince us to buy things we don’t need is just the cherry on top of a travesty.” (WGU, p. 168)
Many of her points here are true, most modern advertising exists solely to get in your head and make you want their product, but Why Grow Up presents all advertising like this and I don’t believe that that’s the case. At one point before I was a Pro Pilot student, I was a film student, and advertisements were always my favorite to create. To me and the people I worked with they were art, and many professionals are as passionate about it as I was. These people are hired for Superbowl ads, something people are always excited to watch.
Transformers also has a lot to say about worker’s rights.
Another great, and my personal favorite example, is the 1984 TV series Transformers. A TV show invented purely to sell the new toy line that spawned a franchise loved by millions today. The most recent installment, Transformers One, clearly had a lot of love and passion put into the project and was a good movie to boot. All of which came from what was originally just an ad for a kid's toy.
However, there are two sides to this coin. Advertising has at times been invasive, and in my opinion, harmful to the quality of the franchise. In Michael Bay’s 2007 Transformers Chevrolet and GM paid a substantial amount of money to Paramount to ensure that all Autobots (the good guys) transformed into General Motors products excluding trucks too large for GM to have made. The Decepticons (the bad guys) in the same movie all transformed into Fords, but once again excluding the aircraft and trucks too large for GM to have made.
This caused significant character changes to be made from the original, some of which were good, like Bumblebee transforming into a Camaro instead of a beetle causing him to become one of media’s all-time favorite characters. Other characters didn’t adapt as well and experienced the more invasive side of advertising, Jazz turned into a Pontiac Solstice instead of a Porsche which resulted in a complete redesign of the character and his personality, something done repeatedly for what are colloquially known as the “Bayverse” films. The point I’m trying to make with this is that advertising is a double-edged sword. For some it's art, for some it's mindless consumerism.
Every point Neiman presented in Why Grow Up supports the point of the section, “Work” very well and that was that the ruthless consumerism and exploitation of workers makes this a world where people won’t want to grow up. Yet, I did and do want to grow up. I disagree with her based on a different interpretation of the points she made and some examples from my personal life. The question I’d like to ask you is: Based on Why Grow Up and experiences from your own life did you want to grow up? Or if you’re young enough, do you want to?
I think the issue is not whether an individual thinks he wants to grow up, but whether his "adult" behavior is in fact mature and enlightened. A consumer-driven culture, Neiman and others have claimed, infantilizes people whether they think they're grown-up or not.
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