Modern questions for flexible workers

So you graduated a few years ago. Did a few boring jobs that were more or less related to what you had studied for. The odds are that you probably joined the proportion of the workforce engaged in precarious labour, counting on irregular hours and short-term contracts to pay the rent. Join the club.

Maybe you don’t like your job. Maybe you feel over qualified for the tasks you have to perform every day. Or maybe this just isn’t how you imagined your work-life to be. Discussing precarity with a bunch of friends who find themselves in the same situation made you realise how your life will be different from the life of your parents, how the flexibilisation of working conditions, a consequence of post-fordism, will condemn you to temporary jobs and instability. Maybe you are dreaming of the day you’ll get the security and the stability of a permanent job, where you’ll be able to start thinking about a future and make plans, where you will be proud of the work you’re doing, where money problems and job hunting won’t be part of the daily agenda.

Somehow, you’ll get there. And strangely, you’ll maybe wonder if this is what you really want, if you are ready to “settle down”, if this is not the end of some of your dreams, if this comfortable stability won’t prevent you from taking some risks or try new things in the future.

I hate to admit it, but flexibility has some good sides. The constant hope for something better to come, the possibility to quit your crappy job or your second-hand apartment for some other project, that long trip you’ve decided to take this year, the opportunity to change environment and meet new people and colleagues, the network you’re building by complaining about your precarious condition with other workers or students, the way it forces you to get intellectual and social stimulation outside work and to keep an open mind for all the possibilities which might come across. But of course, to stay in such state of instability is tiresome, frightening, and often uncomfortable.

Neither side is perfect. It perhaps depends on how you see it and what you want with your life. If you know what that is.