I don’t know if it’s the on-going, seemingly never-ending pandemic and all of the disruptions to daily life that have followed in its wake, but I have noticed a real groundswell in what you might call anti-work sentiments as of late. Perhaps people have been told to work from home and thus have come to realise what inefficent nonsense their office-bound routine was and how much of a slow soulsuck that daily commute was proving to be, perhaps people have been laid off under controversial and unjust circumstances and realise that The Job saw them only as commodity and never had their best interested at heart.
There is certainly something to this and being on the precipice of unemployment becoming a full time professional man of letters myself I have found myself of late thinking about work and purpose and the role that such things should play in leading a good life.
So using the tried and true on-the-one-hand-this-but-on-the-other-hand-that structure I’m going to sketch out a few thoughts about work and earning a wage and finding a shred of meaning in this strange world of ours.
Only Fools And Horses Work
Centrally sanctioned health data is a shaky footing to begin on, especially in this political climate, but I’m going to begin there nonetheless. Because the numbers are plain. Work kills. They say it takes the lives of around 2 million people per year which is around half a dozen time more than the number of lives lost to both drugs and war combined.
Yet there is no co-ordinated, government approved, media-pushed War on Work. At least not to my knowledge, but then I studiously try to avoid the news as much as possible.
But even in my hermetically sealed little dream world the sentiment leaks through. People aren’t happy. From conversations at the bar (both real and virtual) I gather that people find their jobs to be either stressful and exhausting or tedious and unfulfilling. Or some ghastly abomination of downsides from both of those two poles of experience. People feel undervalued and overworked. People feel as if they are running frantically to only end up in the same spot. Because if the unavoidable open secret of escalating inflation has done one thing it has been to raise the monthly cost of the Misery Tax that all workers feel they have to pay to keep sane and to keep going.
And on top of all of this work robs you of your peak hours and peak energy. The 9-5 routine is an antiquated cruelty and one that I believe unites both the slackers and the strivers in their joint ire of it. Virtually any task outside of Victorian factory work (which of course is where our timetables for both work and school come from) does not require 8+ hours of work five days per week to complete. The human brain can only do a maximum of four hours to honest-to-god sustained maximum effort creative work in any given day for one thing. And, on the other hand, if you have a mammoth organisational, administrative or tech based assignment to complete you are better off tackling it in a single as-long-as-it-takes sprint followed by days of rest.
The 9-5 is the worst of both worlds then. Everythinh ticks along, but nothing ever gets truly done or solved in a way that brings satisfaction and meaning. The world turns and life plods on in a flourescent lit, blue light bathed, slogan mugged swigging succession of monotonous days until the grave.
This is how it is. Or so we come to believe. And this, in many ways, is the decadent, spoiled, Western best case scenario of wage work. This is the solidly middle class, university graduated version. We haven’t said anything yet of the accidents, inhalation of pollutants, heart attacks, alcoholism, drug use and such that come with the kind of on-your-feet, working-with-your-hands, ultra-stressful and dangerous roles that exist outside of the many permutations of the typing letters and numbers onto a screen racket.
Work kills. And so with months on the sofa to mull all of this over you can see why people are thinking about throwing the towel in on the whole business. Like Marla Daniels said in The Wire ‘You can’t lose if you don’t play.’
And so many people are understandably tired of losing in a game that they see as being rigged. There are only so many times someone can roll a loaded dice before they start to cotton on to the kind of game that the House is running.
So down with exploitative work practices, the mandatory and unreflective enforcement of the antiquated 9-5 timetable, and the constant off-hours emails and texts asking employees to go above and beyond out of some one-sided unreciprocated idea of loyalty and the company being like a family. All of that is reasonable and fair.
But then, and this is where we get to the ‘on the other hand’ section people have a way of overcooking such rhetoric to the point where they paint the endgame as being a lethargic state-sponsored layabout and screen addict which is, I believe, the opposite of the Good Life.
On The Dole
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Actually scratch that, it was simply the worst of times.
This was about ten years ago a little less. I had worked a hellish Christmas period as a chef in central London, working virtually every waking hour of the day. For weeks and weeks at a time, cooking turkey after turkey, tray after tray of roast potatoes, parsnips, sausages wrapped in bacon, carving endless x’s into endless brussel sprouts like a ‘Nam vet turned psychokiller carving notches into his homemade bullets.
And then January came and the work ground to a halt as all of the punters tightened their belts and committed to diets and Dry January and all the rest of it. Thenplace was deader than Elvis.
And me being on a zero hour contract found my hours shrink to such a miniscule amount that my meagre, pointless little pay packets wouldn’t even cover my rent let alone pay for luxuries such as food or electricity.
So I asked them to let me go so I could look for something else and sign on to the dole (aka Jobseekers Allowance, aka Universal Credit). They did and so I did.
After a tickbox nightmare down at the Job Centre I was signed on. I got a little sum paid into my bank every two weeks, enough for bare survival. And so there I was with cash enough and an endless abundance of free time.
And soon I was miserable. It was amazing and frightening how quickly my mindset changed from trying to find a job to trying to figure out how to milk this lethargic Dole situation for as long as possible. My life was meaningless it had no structure or purpose in spite of my efforts to manufacture a simulacra of a routine via daily library visits and exercise ane cooking and whatnot.
As much as it pained me to admit (and temperamentally it still does a little) work brought meaning. As long as the work itself wasn’t meaningless and the conditions were at least halfway fair.
We need adequate rest, yes, we need deep sleep and friendships and conversation and adventure. We need far more of what is considered extra-curricular or secondary than what we currently allow ourselves. But we also need honest work. A task. A calling. Something to get us out of bed in the morning and to drive us to move towards mastery.
Writing is mine. And I increasingly believe that if you are anything like me, you have to work for yourself if you are to find this, even if your environment has not prepared you for it.
So this is where I find myself now. Similar to that time nearly ten years ago I am on the verge of being out of work. But unlike back then, I have my path laid out in front of me. I have my real work to be getting on with.
Until next time,
Live well,
Tom.
One thing I find enormously difficult doing my 9-5 is switching to “normal life”, doing *my own* thing, especially, after the working day. The weirdest about it is it’s even worse on the weekend. I rarely write on weekends (usually only edit / publish) because somehow I want to do nothing. Is it tiredness or just a particular desire of rest? I don’t know. All I know is combining 9-5 with writing is difficult but I’m trying to find a proper time for it.
But anyway, great essay as always, Tom. I wish you all the best on your full-time-man-of-letters endeavours. Cheers!
The idea of work bringing purpose is, obviously, controversial, because of the connotations around the word "work", but you're right. And it's because of that, I do wonder about a future where AI, technology and robotics are so advanced that they can effectively and sufficiently provide for the human race, thus leading to us needing some sort of universal basic income etc etc.
But if people live in a world where their basic needs are met (which is obviously great) but they don't have the mindset / context / education / guidance to pursue a task that provides fulfillment... then what will we become? We'll just digest all the cheap dopamine ever more with our increasingly free time.
Just things that keep me up at night.