How to Defend Your Choices

This rerun suffers from ironic timing, as it is running during the COVID-19 pandemic. It’ll be interesting to see if cruise ships are still a thing a year from now.

I’ve been on four cruises, three at steep discounts and one to take my elderly mother to Alaska, which she’s always wanted to see. I can heartily endorse the experience of going on a cruise. It’s basically like having a luxury hotel that moves from place to place while you sleep. The better cruise companies have the guest experience part dialed in. Now if they can just do something about the environmental impact, tax evasion, and working conditions, they’ll really be on to something.

I’m willing to bet that the cruise ship employees are not paid nearly enough, but I don’t feel that working on such a ship would inherently be a bad job. The isolation from family is a problem, but that’s true for many jobs. It’s just a matter of compensating the employees fairly for it.

On one of the cruises I took I heard another passenger say that they felt bad for the crew because their jobs were “demeaning.” At the time I was a man in his late thirties working as a ride operator at Walt Disney World, another job they probably would have found demeaning. I considered it an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, helping create a product I believed in. (I’m not always a fan of the Disney corporation or its actions, but I am a firm believer in their parks.)  My experience was that the job was only demeaning when the guests deliberately demeaned me.

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