Tribe included a number of thoughts about our working world that I want to highlight today. These insights initially took me by surprise because I wasn’t expecting Junger to discuss work in a book I understood to be more about communities, unity, and togetherness. However, as I reflect on it now I realize that my surprise was misplaced because for many people work represents a significant opportunity to establish the closely-knit tribes Junger’s book is about.
There is an importance to work outside of any additional context for community or unity. Self-determination theory suggests that human happiness is closely linked to three things – being competent at work, living an authentic life, and remaining connected to others. Holding a job where your contributions are valued and respected is a direct way to address one of those three concerns while likely also indirectly improving happiness via the other two measures.
Junger took these thoughts about work and made an important suggestion about how society can do a better job (!) of bringing veterans back into society – give them jobs. It seems to me like we collectively do well to valorize veterans but we often come up short in terms of how we integrate them into the existing institutions and organizations that define civilian life. Bringing veterans directly into the workforce – or providing all the resources needed to prepare a veteran for the workforce – is the critical yet often missing manifestation of the ethos we all speak to when we announce our support for the troops.
Footnotes / correlation isn’t causation
0. Just a coincidence…
Historically, the unemployment rate and the suicide rate have shown a strong correlation. For example, the 2008 financial collapse and its ensuing effect on employment was followed by an increase of almost 5% in the suicide rate. As causation and correlation are two different topics, I thought it best to leave this thought in a footnote, but I do see why someone might look at these figures – as Junger did – and consider it another negative contribution to society by the financial industry.
