Some years ago, motivational speaker Gavin Sharples visited us in Franschhoek with his well-known presentation, Happyology. I remember him saying that while it is wonderful to be happy at work, it is not the responsibility of your job to make you happy. You should be happy within yourself. That sounds about right, but perhaps it isn’t as easy as that. What is there to say about the happiness / employment balance?
A radio talk show earlier this week reminded me of Sharples’ idea about happiness. Economist Dawie Roodt referred to a global study on happiness. (listen to the RSG programme in Afrikaans). According to the study, the happiest people are generally women, young adults, extroverts, married couples and those with good qualifications. At the age of 46, when you have teenagers in the house and if you are without a job, you are at your unhappiest. Obviously, there is a lot of generalisation here, but when good qualifications make you happier and being without a job makes you unhappy, it tells me that we can’t exclude the influence of our jobs when we talk about happiness.
If that is true, there might be some very unhappy people in Japan at the moment. Have you read about large numbers of unemployed Japanese university graduates in their 30s and 40s? How did this happen? I found a very interesting thread about how Japan’s booming economy and its status as the Economic Tiger of Asia nosedived in the nineties with a stock market crash. (Read more) The economic downturn combined with Japan’s employment culture was devastating for graduates of the early 90s.
According to the articles I’ve read (see listed at the end of the blog), in Japan, your corporate career begins straight after you’ve completed your studies. Once a year, companies hire fresh graduates who are then groomed and promoted within the company so that they stay part of the structure until they retire. These traditional practices are still common today, but although they bring stability, they also mean that the job market is very rigid. If you didn’t get a job straight out of varsity, chances are that you will never get one and that is what happened to many who finished their studies in the early 90s. With the economic downturn, companies didn’t hire new employees and those individuals, despite their tertiary education, have been excluded from the career market, because when the economy recovered, there were new graduates to employ.
While Japan has a very low unemployment rate and although there might be much more to Japanese employment than what some traditional practices suggests, middle-aged Japanese excluded from the career market are staying with their parents and didn’t marry or start a family. They therefore do not really contribute to the economy and although government want to support them in finding jobs to relieve the impact on social security, it might not be that easy. My sources say that some of these men, predominantly between 35 and 44, have withdrawn from society as they couldn’t live up to the expectations of career success and starting a family. They now live as recluses. Save to say, they’re not happy.
In today’s world there might be two aspects of work and happiness: being happy at work or being happy because you have a work!
South Africa has its own employment crisis. According to globaleconomy.com we are the country with the highest unemployment – around 35% – and almost more worrying is the fact that 46.5% of our youth (15-34 years) are unemployed. Do these low employment rates influence our happiness? Globaleconomy.com’s happiness calculator indicates that the average happiness of South Africans in 2021 was 5.19 points. The global average based on 141 countries was 5.57. Imagine you could add job security to our good weather, our vibrancy and colourful nation, perhaps we would’ve been closer to the 7.82 happiness indicator of Finland!
Of course, there is a hierarchy to happiness. When you have your basic requirements covered, you worry about fulfilment at work. If you just want to get bread on the table, any salary might be the reason that you are happier. Even though it is not your job’s job to make you happy and although a toxic work environment might motivate you to rather go penniless, I do think having a job, should make you happier.
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