Cleaning Windows, Playing in Bands
From Honest Work to Endless Upgrades: The Quiet Cost of Not Feeling Enough
Every now and then a song sneaks past the part of you that manages your image and goes straight to the part that remembers what you wanted before LinkedIn arrived.
Van Morrison’s Cleaning Windows (from his 1982 album Beautiful Vision) is one of those songs.
On the surface, nothing “special” is happening. A young man cleans windows, not the gleaming panes of skyscrapers but the ones on ordinary houses along an unremarkable street. He works with a mate. They joke, they smoke, they haul ladders, they do an ordinary job. On weekends he plays in a band at the “down joint.” The pay is modest cash-for-work, not week by week but day by day, yet it is not quite a hardscrabble existence. The status is negligible. The tone of the song, though, is unmistakable: there is pride, rhythm, and a sense that life is small and somehow right.
For a lot of intensely educated professionals, that feeling has gone missing.
The dignity of “small” work
The narrator isn’t embarrassed by cleaning windows. The day has texture: bacon smells from the bakery, tea breaks, banter, the weather, the simple satisfaction of finishing a pane and seeing clearly through it. The job is not a holding pen for greatness. The job is part of a simple life.
That attitude is quietly radical now.
Modern professional culture trains people to treat any role that does not exploit their “full potential” as an insult. A job that pays the bills, teaches a craft, builds stamina and offers camaraderie is reframed as a failure of ambition. The only respectable answer to “What do you do?” is some version of “something increasingly rare, strategic and optimized.”
Universities and credentialing bodies benefit from that anxiety. The more people feel that basic competence and steady work are never enough, the easier it becomes to market one more degree, one more designation, one more certificate that promises to lift you out of the ordinary. Whole business models rest on the idea that your current self is an unfinished draft.
Psalm 139 quietly disagrees. “Fearfully and wonderfully made” is not a future verdict for the day you finally optimize yourself; it is a statement about who you are right now, in this body, with this history, before you earn one more credential or fix one more “flaw.” If God already sees you as crafted with care rather than cobbled together, then the arms race for improvement starts to look less like virtue and more like amnesia.
The window cleaner in the song never makes that case against himself. He is not pretending the work is glamorous. He is not disgusted by it either. The work is honest. His back may ache, but his self-respect “of a working man in his prime” is intact.
That is what self-acceptance looks like in the wild: not a vow to “love yourself,” just a refusal to despise who you are and how you earn your bread today.
The weekend band as a crystal-clean tell
Then there is the band.
The song makes almost casual reference to playing music at the weekend. No drama. No manifesto. Yet that detail is the x-ray. The narrator is not secretly dying to climb a corporate ladder. The pulse of the week is elsewhere. Weekdays cleaning windows keeps the rent paid. Weekend music keeps the soul awake.
If you listen carefully, you can hear the real longing: practice, performance, a small group creating something alive together. He is not waiting for a talent show or a record deal. He is already doing the thing that matters most to him, on a small scale, with real joy.
In career language, the band is what I would call the suitability signal.
Many of the people I meet can tell you their job title, their reporting lines, their assets under management. They hesitate when asked what their equivalent of that weekend band might be. Somewhere along the way, the part of them that wanted something particular – to write, to build, to teach, to fix broken systems, to explore – was turned into “a hobby” or buried under rounds of exams.
Notice the structure of the life in the song:
Weekday: work that is modest and honest.
Weekend: work that is ambitious and joyful.
That is very different from the modern pattern:
Weekday: work that is prestigious and draining.
Weekend: recovery from a life that looks impressive and feels wrong.
Credentials and the war on “good enough”
A lot of this ties back to self-acceptance.
If you quietly believe you are never quite enough, the obvious response is to collect more proof. More degrees. More letters on the business card. More side qualifications. The problem in your mind is not suitability; the problem is some imagined deficit in your character or brain that can be patched by achievement.
Universities and professional bodies are only too happy to cooperate. Admissions brochures and credential marketing rarely say, “You seem fine as you are; here is one possible next step if you genuinely need it.” The message is closer to “You are at risk of being left behind; climb aboard now before the doors close.”
Self-hatred is easy to criticize, self-love is easy to market, and self-acceptance sits quietly in the corner, earning no revenue for anyone.
Yet self-acceptance is the thing that lets you say, “I have enough credentials for the work I want to do,” and mean it. It is the thing that lets you say, “I chose a simpler path, and I am not going to apologize,” or: “I chose a demanding path, and I am allowed to adjust it in my favour.”
Without that baseline, every success becomes a prelude to the next appetite. You earn your CFA designation and feel inadequate as a non-MBA. You finish the MBA and feel behind the people with PhDs. You get the PhD and feel crude beside the partner who seems to breathe term sheets. Each rung reached reveals new people who seem more polished, more ruthless, more destined.
The narrator cleaning windows is immune to that particular sickness. He is not pretending his work is his destiny; he is also not pretending his work makes him less of a person. He is allowed to be “good enough for today” in both roles: tradesman and musician. He does not need to annihilate one to justify the other.
The apprenticeship we quietly skip
Another thing that song understands is apprenticeship.
He is learning as he goes. The work has a craft to it: the way you move a ladder, the way you angle a squeegee, the rhythm of a day. No slogans about potential. No promises about rapid progression. Just a body learning how to do something properly.
Many professionals I meet never had that phase. They went straight from high performance at school to high performance in a graduate program. Apprenticeship was replaced by acceleration. The aim was not to inhabit the work but to escape the level they were currently at.
That is where a lack of self-acceptance quietly does most damage. When you cannot accept that you are a beginner, you become addicted to environments where you can feel superior. When you cannot tolerate ordinary progress, you keep signing up for extreme difficulty until your nervous system finally gives way.
Van Morrison’s window cleaner is learning to be a musician in the most useful and beautiful way possible: playing in a band in his spare time on weekends with other people and seeing how it feels. No one is demanding a five-year plan. No one is offering him a “music leadership accelerator.” He is apprenticing himself to the work because he likes the work.
There is no shame in that sentence. No panic. Just movement.
The pressure to despise ordinary life
Modern culture hates that kind of calm.
A simple, decent life – manual work, modest earnings, a small passionate pursuit on the side – is treated as a waste of talent if you have any measurable ability. The underlying message is clear: a life is only justified if the graph slopes upward and outward, preferably in the direction of scale, visibility and money.
That contempt for ordinary dignity is one of the reasons highly qualified people end up so confused.
They have been told that being “special” requires a particular shape of life: elite employer, metropolitan city, narrow professional lane, more complex products, more leverage, more responsibility. Admitting that part of them wishes they were just… cleaning windows and rehearsing with a band feels like heresy.
The irony, of course, is that the people most desperate to be seen as extraordinary often feel the most replaceable. In a glass, steel, and marble building full of CFA charterholders, actuaries, lawyers and engineers, another credential rarely makes you distinctive. It merely keeps you eligible.
That is why a humble job in a song can feel so oddly liberating. Here is someone whose outer life is not optimized, and whose inner life feels more coherent than many of the board members I have met.
What the song asks you
If you strip away the early 1980s nostalgia and guitar lines, the song is asking two questions that belong in any serious career conversation:
What is your version of cleaning windows?
What is your version of the weekend band?
Translated into less romantic language:
What work keeps you grounded – honest days, honest pay, clear feedback, no pretence?
What work keeps you alive – the thing you would still do if the applause stopped, the part of the week where time moves differently?
Some people already overlap those two circles. A few are lucky, a few are deliberate, most are somewhere in between. Many have allowed the grounded circle to be colonized entirely by money and the alive circle to atrophy into a guilty secret.
Self-acceptance does not mean giving up on ambition. It means being honest about which circle is starving and what that starvation is doing to you.
For some, self-acceptance looks like admitting that the prestigious job is the equivalent of cleaning windows: necessary, honest enough, but not the centre of the story. Once that sentence is spoken, pressure lifts. You can stop asking a role to provide meaning it was never designed to provide. You can redirect some of your energy to the thing that does.
For others, self-acceptance looks like the reverse: “The band” is a fantasy that never really mattered as much as the story you told yourself about it. The deep satisfaction is actually in the spreadsheet, the negotiations, the risk management, the teaching. Recognizing that moves you away from self-hatred for liking the work you genuinely and sincerely like.
A quieter standard of success
We are used to reading careers as if they were markets: growth good, flat bad, contraction alarming. The song suggests a different chart.
By that standard, a good-enough life might look less like an exponential curve and more like a series of days that can be described without flinching. Work you can name out loud without apologizing. A side pursuit that expresses what you actually care about. Enough money. Enough rest. Enough self-respect.
That standard is quieter and much harder to monetize. No degree-granting body can sell self-acceptance. No employer has much interest in telling you that a modest role done well might be enough. No algorithm makes money when you decide that your life, as it is, deserves less contempt.
Yet that is the kind of ground from which better decisions grow.
Once you accept that you are allowed to be “good enough for today,” you can choose whether another credential serves you or simply extends a war against yourself. You can choose whether a promotion is a genuine opportunity or just another attempt to outrun a feeling of failure. You can step toward work that suits you, rather than work that looks like an apology.
The cheerfully busy and fully alive young man in Cleaning Windows has none of the language we use now: no talk of “mindset,” no declarations of “self-love,” no hashtags. He has a job, some friends, a band, and a sense that, for the moment, that mix makes sense.
For a lot of intensely educated outliers, that small, steady contentment would be a radical upgrade.
The question is not whether you can replicate his exact life. The question is whether you recognize yourself in either part of it: the honest job, the weekend band, the feeling of being, at least for a while, in the right place.
If you do, the next question is simple and difficult at once:
What would it look like, in your world, to move one small step closer to that kind of week – not the fantasy career, not the fantasy self, just a life that feels, in the best possible sense, like being “happy” cleaning windows and playing in a band?
Tired the way humans are meant to be tired
There’s one more quiet rebellion tucked inside Cleaning Windows that is almost extinct now. The man in the song actually stops. He takes a lunch break that isn’t a panic-eaten salad over a keyboard. He goes home to listen to music and reads books, not as “self-care,” but because that is simply how an afternoon breathes. Then he cheerfully goes back to work. The day has a clear shape: manual effort, small rests, a bit of beauty, more effort.
By night, we I can infer from his busy days, he is tired in the way human beings are meant to be tired, so he falls asleep properly. No doomscrolling, no “just one more email,” no low-grade adrenaline keeping the brain half-lit until 2 a.m. Just a body that has done enough, a mind that has had its share of music and air, and a sleep deep enough to carry him to the next morning without drama. In a world where many clever people can no longer remember what real rest feels like, that modest, rhythmic life is not failure. It is the foundation almost everything else is pretending to stand on.