Patience and Hard Work

Today during my consumer education class we were researching possible career paths and their projected income and requirements. While on my computer, I overheard a conversation between my teacher and another student. She was asking him what career he found most appealing. I didn't hear what career he mentioned, however his "con", if you will, to the career was that it took a master's degree and that would take a long time and a lot more school work. Master's degrees can take from one to six years. It certainly would be a much longer time in school and thus more school work then simply graduating from a traditional four-year college. The values that are apparent in the aforementioned conversation are that speed and less work is better. What happened to "patience is a virtue"and not "taking the easy way out"? I think that patience and intense mental labor went out the window when technology became more advanced. This whole idea goes along with Mr. O'Connor's post about the Kindle commercial: "How to Read a Kindle". His interpretation talks much about how the commercial portrays the value of speed by the fact that new books can be bought in "less than sixty seconds" rather than the long period of time it takes to go to the bookstore and purchase a print copy of the book. The commercial also indicates that hard work is bad by the absence of it when the book is purchased over the Kindle. The man has to simply touch a button, rather than walking or driving to the nearest bookstore. Have the american values of patience and hard work changed? Has technology made us crave speed and effortlessness in all aspects of life?

This comic strip I found while surfing the web further demonstrates the negative reputation hard work has recently gotten. A man has just come back from his lunch break and his secretary informs him that he has "a few messages". Actually there's mountain rivaling that of the Himalayas of paperwork. The comic has the reader (looker?) feel sympathy for the poor man who actually has to do the labor. The mounds of paper work seem a tedious task. The sarcasm in the secretary's words, "a few messages", makes it comical because there is more than just a few.