On Happiness and Hard Work

   Hoeing sugar beets sucks. I mean, taking a sharpened garden hoe and standing in 102 degree heat in June to weed out unwanted plants from rows and rows and rows of planted sugar beets is not something I would suggest for a fun summer vacation. We weren't child laborers. We were paid. A little. We were part of a farming family. Working in the summers, even when it sucked, was just something that we did. Everyone had to help, so we did.
   I had it easier than my older siblings. I was born amidst a change in agriculture. By the time I was of age to really help on the family farm, the beet company had shut down in our part of state and the farmers in our community were struggling to survive. We had recently acquired a feedlot and were planting as much alfalfa and silage corn as we could, in attempts to service the 5,000 cattle we fed each winter. I grew up struggling to place a foot on both sides of the farmer/rancher divide, hating riding horses and loving to drive the 4-wheeler to irrigate after dinner.
   I saw many a farmer lose entire crops to a bad summer storm. I watched ranchers lose herds to terrible blizzards and strange disease. I watched family's come and go - struggling to stay afloat in a world where Agriculture meant imported produce from Mexico and Chile and no one really knew how to pay the bank back the hundreds of thousands of dollars they owed in debt. But, I also saw the simplicity with which these people lived. I saw the happiness on their faces as they watched a small seed grow to a record crop and a bum calf grow to be a prize heifer.
   I ran out after high school, with flames under my heels, determined to get away and "make something of myself". I was determined to make a living for myself outside of agriculture and escape from the chains of debt and small incomes. I ran so far away that I forgot about the smell of sagebrush in the spring, the sound of crickets while irrigating at dusk and the way you could actually see the corn grow in July. I found myself stumbling home the summer after my freshman year of college, working for the government in the most rural areas of Eastern Montana. And I found a sort of happiness in the work of the people that I met. I saw a contentment that I hadn't seen anywhere else. And I envied them for it.
   The older I get, the more I realize how important it is to love your job. On the brink of graduating college and storming the world to find a career, I find myself fortunate to have come from a family where the word "work" and "lifestyle" were synonymous. I was taught to do what I loved, even if it meant I would be poor the rest of my life. And I have never been more proud of where I come from.

   For this project, I have been compiling videos of people from my community concerning their views of "jobs" and "happiness". For research, I have found articles such as Benjamin S. Caunt's "Exploring the Causes of Subjective Well-Being: A Content Analysis of Peoples' Recipes for Long-Term Happiness," and watching Michael Pritchard's "Happy" documentary.