It may be a little bit much to call professional businesspeople “wage slaves.” People without university level degrees or similar credentials may get pretty close to the condition of slavery, but professional folks are still given a few more choices. That is to say, we can often pick where and in what kind of industry we will work. At least initially. If you make the mistake of chosing what you want to do instead of what will make money, you might not be in a position to leave that industry without putting yourself and your kin into extremis.
Which also could be said of the more lucrative lines of employ. There’s always a sports car, a house, a Picasso or a Basquiat to be had (cf. “Magna Carta Holy Grail” Sean Carter, 2013.) It’s not to hard to convince oneself that such things are not only pleasant but also necessary (cf. “The Black Album” Sean Carter, 2006.) That to have such things is the cost of doing business in an environment where one must be seen as a player to be able to play. I’m not hatin’ on Jay-Z, I’m actually in a fair amount of awe that one who has become so successful can continue to tap into the creative stream that brought him that success in the first place.
Because for many of us, that stream runs through the middle of Babylon. No one really keeps us there, but as long as we are there, they require from us a song. It’s hard to sing when your voice is constantly being muted by the structural demands of social and economic instutions which are no longer relevant to the context in which they exist. In other words, how can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? It’s not that we’ve been carried off to Babylon. The developers built Babylon right here, for us, and they did good work.
Good enough that it is hard to think of risking access to all this for the sake of singing the song we feel called to. I do think, by the way, that some of us are called to be bankers, lawyers, and insurance salesmen. But for those of us who are not, for those of us who feel the bonds of wages given for less than we are capable and spent on more than we need, how do we trust that we will be ok if we don’t have one of those fancy careers that everybody downtown keeps talking about? Is it safe to take the advice of my friend in Jerusalem who says, “Just quit your job. You know you want to.”
The answer which keeps coming to me from my own experience and the experience of so many people I know is “yes, you can trust.” Sure, it takes a little more courage and a little less false humility to say, “here am I, send me” but the need for someone to go and the support for the journey both continue to be available. I heard someone say “hope is not a strategy,” yet what our world needs today is not so much strategy and plenty more hope.