St Stephen Jobs?
Exegesis -
SD dear SD - I have been working for an Insurance Company for the last few years, and every time I get head-hunted by another firm, the Company gives me a raise in my salary, is this the time for Company loyalty above all things, above all considerations?
“I have shopped all my life, and still have nothing to wear.” As the new face on the music block, Olivia Rodrigo, might say it - the strange paradoxes of work in the modern era - successful at work, lots of perks, but yet somehow still unhappy in the job.
Exegesis. To some a branch of biblical science, giving us the real Jesus and not just lateral flow exegesis. To others a period of experiment in the 1990s and 2000s when companies began to ask their staffs, this was before the cataclysm of covid, to put in the extra mile, to offer the extra tunic, to proffer the extra sandal, in sum to commit totally to the dominant company ideology of the firm, in a scene reminiscent of the movie with Keanu Reeves called The Devil’s Advocate and of scenes in the movie with Tom Cruise called The Firm.
But we should note that though the reader is a strong girl, a good sporting specimen of a girl, good at nets; still, even she feels weak at times when caught midway between the huge tectonic plates of business and philosophy that has recently engulfed the labour market and the wider market for jobs. She yearns for the old certainties of the Steve Jobs Era and the Jeff Bezos Era, but looks around to no avail. Should she stay with her Company, they are offering good money, is she committed to company loyalty with so many nice perks such as company travel, company credit card, company car - is she obligated to stay on, humanly speaking and maybe even morally speaking? A nice, christian girlie who used to be a sporting icon before being head-hunted for the City in town and its vast portfolio. Dubai beckoning though.
And so on, but there is help around the corner, between the two tectonic plates of modern business models, that of China on the one hand, and of America on the other, there is a book written by a young professor from the Southern Belt of the UK, called Tim Jackson and he has written a very perspicacious book brimming with simple pedestrian philosophy, and the book is called After Growth: Life After Capitalism. He asserts that with covid has come the end of old fashioned capitalism and also the end of the reductionist empiricism on which it was all based with its very simple growth of GDP models of the economy. Too many goods were coming onto the market, as a result of the sudden break of the life and work balance, and so certain unmeasurables in the empirical market, such as Health, and Meaning, and Happiness, and Relationships - these were beyond the reductive empiricism that the old business economy models tried to measure and predict.
The world has changed since covid 19 - too many young people have glimpsed death as the tall dark figure of the Grim Reaper knocking at the factory door, and now they want a better life-and-work balance. In the old pre-covid world it was growth, growth, growth; this was all that was hoped for and striven after. but the narrow concept of growth, too often measured by GDP figures, was in fact hurting humanity. Growth had become an unchanging but chaining ideal, and the trouble with growth that can do nothing other than grow is that it itself becomes changeless and ceases to grow. But it must for many young people nowadays in the new labour markets for jobs - there must be a change. This is the new backdrop to the company credit card and company car sort of business that many young people are caught up in - there is bad news and good news though in this market. The bad news is that some things take years to change, but the good news is there is no need for this girl to feel she has to stay on and on and on, just because they throw goods and trinkets and objects at her to buy back her loyalty - the jobs market is fluid now, and there are fewer and fewer people going after the good jobs. The covid revolution has put paid to lots and lots of applicants. It has also meant that companies will have to do better than throw money at their employees. They shall have to fight to keep their brightest and best. And this is only mete. Scripture says - use money that tainted thing to win friends for yourself. Even the Master says it like it is - there is no need to feel obligated to stay in one company and thus imprison yourself in one industry or one Firm when you know deep down you ought to move on and expand and improve the personal Cv. Cv-19 has changed the Cv for ever. The times, they are changing.