“I’m just a laborer”

2020 ◽  
pp. 139-160
Author(s):  
Christine Jeske
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Social Ties ◽  
Working Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Productive Labor ◽  
At Home

This chapter investigates how people make meaning of their lives in low-wage, low-status jobs, often by distancing themselves and the good life from work by calling themselves “just laborers.” It defines the word “laborer” as someone who is “working without skill,” “just doing the work,” not doing things that people aspire to do. It adds that treating oneself as just a laborer is a way of demanding a certain bargain, which is saying, I'm in a job that does not offer dignity or a good life, and I will not offer my life to the job either. It explains that for people in disappointing jobs, calling themselves just laborers communicates that their jobs are just a way to earn money; it is not a determinant of their identity, their status, their dignity, or the good life. In some sense, they have strategically estranged themselves from work. They are embracing some degree of alienation by intentionally separating their identity, purpose, and social ties from their acts of productive labor. In doing so, they can define their identity by their communities and interactions at home, not by their working life.

scholarly journals Making a Living: How Middle-Class Couples in Warsaw Start and Practice a Household

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 91-111
Author(s):  
Marta Olcoń-Kubicka ◽  
Mateusz Halawa
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Moral Order ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
The Third ◽  
Relational Work ◽  
At Home

This article is a study of the domestic monetary and financial life of young middle-class couples in Warsaw, Poland, and its suburbs. We use ethnographic evidence presented as case studies to illuminate the practices in which our interlocutors actively appropriate, mobilize, and transform money and finance to pursue moral visions of the good life. The article focuses on the household understood in processual terms of ongoing negotiations between moral and market dimensions. The first section is focused on the ways in which young couples perform relational work aimed at achieving or maintaining moral order. Couples match the diverse possible uses of money at home to their changing notions of the kind of couple they are or wish to become. The second section proceeds from the observation of a widening gap between rising middle-class aspirations and economic possibilities in contemporary Poland and explores the practices of negotiating various forms of assistance from parental households. The third and final section argues that the incursion of technologies into domestic life means that artifacts like software or digital banking increasingly materialize and mediate morality and thus actively contribute to the shaping of the household as a project of a good life.

Home, children and moral standpoints

2011 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 434-450 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanna Helavirta
Keyword(s):  
Child Welfare ◽  
Moral Obligation ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Professional Norms ◽  
Set Up ◽  
At Home

Contemporary adult discussions often set up strong, even unchallenged norms of what things in the home promote children’s well-being and what constitutes a threat to it. This article examines children’s own descriptions of their homes and their standpoints on what is a good and proper life at home. The analysis focuses on the interview talk of child clients of Finnish child welfare. Children’s talk of home is characterized by positiveness, the presence of mother and scarcity of words. Home talk was not tinged with worry and problems. The study shows that children also have personal moral standpoints related to their homes. The children regard their homes as places of reciprocal obligations and responsibilities. Just as the adults have a moral obligation to look after the daily life at home, the children and the livelihood, the children also must look after the adults in situations where the adults have not enough energy, time or capability. The results argue for the need to rethink ‘adultist’ and professional norms of homes as a platform to promote the good life of children.

Tensions Between the Good Life, the Good Profession, and the Good Society

1998 ◽  
Vol 43 (10) ◽  
pp. 667-668
Author(s):  
Isaac Prilleltensky
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Good Society

Is the Good Life the Easy Life?

1999 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christie K. Napa ◽  
Laura A. King
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life

AESTHETICS AND THE GOOD LIFE

1990 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-155
Author(s):  
Esmee Cromie Bellalta
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life

Beautiful Beach Bodies and Muscle Heads

2020 ◽  
Vol 97 (2) ◽  
pp. 112-123
Author(s):  
John D. Fair
Keyword(s):  
Juvenile Delinquency ◽  
Southern California ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Physical Culture ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
The West ◽  
Guise Of The Good ◽  
Beach Boys ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Age Of Aquarius

Uneasily situated between counterculture images projected by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and the dawning of the “Age of Aquarius” a decade later, there emerged a motion picture interlude of innocence on the beaches of Southern California. It was fostered by Gidget (1959) and then thirty “surf and sex” movies that focused on young, attractive bodies and beach escapades rather than serious social causes.The films, argues Kirse May, “created an ideal teenage existence, marked by consumption, leisure, and little else.” Stephen Tropiano explains how their popularity helped shape “the archetypal image of the American teenager” and, reinforced by the surfin' sounds of Jan and Dean, the Beach Boys, and other recording groups, “turned America's attention to the Southern California coastline,” where “those who never set foot on its sandy shores were led to believe that life on the West Coast was a twenty-four-hour beach party.” This study examines a notable film of this genre to determine how musclemen were exploited to exhibit this playful spirit and how their negative reception reinforced an existing disregard toward physical culture. Muscle Beach Party illustrates how physical culture served other agendas, namely the need to address American fears of juvenile delinquency and to revive sagging box-office receipts within the guise of the “good life” of California.

Zeit und gutes Leben

2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
pp. 493-513
Author(s):  
Holmer Steinfath
Keyword(s):  
Internal Structure ◽  
Good Life ◽  
External Factor ◽  
Life Time ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Adequate Understanding ◽  
Gutes Leben

Time is a neglected subject in recent, especially analytically minded reflections on the good life. The article highlights the fundamental role of time and temporality for an adequate understanding of the good life. Time functions both as an external factor with which we have to reckon in our practical deliberations and as an internal structure of living our lives. It is argued that striving for a good life also means striving for being in harmony with the time of one's life. The exploration of this idea allows to link analytical with phenomenological approaches to time and good life.

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