The Sorrows of Work Read online

  The Sorrows of Work

  Other books in this series:

  Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person

  On Confidence

  How to Find Love

  Why We Hate Cheap Things

  Self-Knowledge

  The Sorrows of Love

  The Sorrows

  of Work

  The School of Life

  Published in 2017 by The School of Life

  70 Marchmont Street, London WC1N 1AB

  Copyright © The School of Life 2017

  Designed and typeset by Marcia Mihotich

  Printed in Latvia by Livonia Print

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without express prior consent of the publisher.

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  The School of Life offers programmes, publications and services to assist modern individuals in their quest to live more engaged and meaningful lives. We’ve also developed a collection of content-rich, design-led retail products to promote useful insights and ideas from culture.

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  ISBN 978-0-9957535-1-8

  Contents

  I Introduction

  II Specialisation

  III Standardisation

  IV Commercialisation

  V Scale

  VI Competition

  VII Collaboration

  VIII Equal Opportunity

  IX Meritocracy

  X Conclusion

  I

  INTRODUCTION

  There is no more common emotion to feel around work than that we have failed. We have failed because we have made less money than we had hoped; because we have been sidelined in our organisation; because many of our acquaintances have triumphed; because our schemes have remained on the drawing board; because we have been constantly anxious and, for long stretches, tired and bored.

  We tend to meet our sorrows personally. We believe that our failures are tightly bound up with our own character and choices. But the suggestion here is that the single greatest cause of our professional failure lies in an area that self-aware, moderate and modest people are instinctively loath to blame: the system we live within. Whatever our natural hesitancy, it seems we deserve to recast at least some of the explanations for our woes away from intimate experience and towards large-scale historical and economic forces. Although on a daily basis we are enmeshed in problems (inadequacies, desires and panics) that feel as if they must be our responsibility alone, the real causes may lie far beyond ourselves, in the greater, grander currents of history: in the way our industries are structured, our values are determined, and our assumptions generated. For a long time now, capitalism has been a confirmedly tricky system in which to retain equilibrium, make peace with ourselves, find fulfilment in our work – and cope. It’s not quite our fault if, rather too often, we feel like losers.

  This isn’t to make a particular dig at capitalism, or to suggest that there may be easier alternatives at hand. Every economy that has ever existed has been bound up with multiple sorrows. Organising an equitable system of incentives, goads and rewards is as yet beyond us. We should be allowed to level criticisms, not in the name of arguing for an alternative utopia, but in order to depersonalise our sense of failure.

  Work disappoints us, not by coincidence but by necessity, for at least eight central reasons:

  1. The demand for specialisation limits our potential.

  2. The concentration of capital squeezes out personal initiative.

  3. The extent of consumer choice forces us to commercialise our work beyond what feels tolerable.

  4. The scale of industry robs us of a sense of meaning.

  5. Competition generates a state of perpetual anxiety.

  6. The requirement for collaboration maddens us.

  7. Our high aspirations embitter us.

  8. The notion that the world is meritocratic imposes a crushing burden of responsibility on us for our defeats.

  Understanding the sorrows of work will not magically remove them, but it at least spares us the burden of feeling that we must be uniquely stupid and clumsy for suffering them.

  II

  Specialisation

  One of the greatest sorrows of work stems from a sense that only a small portion of our talents has been taken up and engaged by the job we have signed up to do every day. We are likely to be so much more than our labour allows us to be. The title on our business card is only one of thousands of titles we theoretically possess.

  In his ‘Song of Myself’, published in 1855, the American poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892) gave our multiplicity memorable expression: ‘I am large, I contain multitudes’ – by which he meant that there are many interesting, attractive and viable versions of oneself, many good ways one could potentially live and work, and yet very few of these are ever properly played out in the course of the single life we have. No wonder that we are quietly and painfully conscious of our unfulfilled destinies, and at times recognise, with a legitimate sense of agony, that we could have been something and someone else.

  The major economic reason why we cannot explore our potential as we might is that it is much more productive for us not to do so. In The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, the Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith (1723–1790) first explained how what he termed the ‘division of labour’ was at the heart of the increased productivity of capitalism. Smith zeroed in on the dazzling efficiency that could be achieved in pin manufacturing, if everyone focused on one narrow task (and stopped, as it were, exploring their Whitman-esque ‘multitudes’):

  One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, all performed by distinct hands. I have seen a small manufactory where they could make upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they could have made perhaps not one pin in a day.

  – Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Chapter 1, Of the Division of Labour (1776)

  Adam Smith was astonishingly prescient. Doing one job, preferably for most of one’s life, makes perfect economic sense. It is a tribute to the world that Smith foresaw – and helped to bring into being – that we have ended up doing such specific jobs, and carry titles like Senior Packaging & Branding Designer, Intake and Triage Clinician, Research Centre Manager, Risk and Internal Audit Controller, and Transport Policy Consultant. We have become tiny, relatively wealthy cogs in giant, efficient machines. And yet, in our quiet moments, we reverberate with private longings to give our multitudinous selves expression.

  One of Adam Smith’s most intelligent and penetrating readers was the German economist Karl Marx (1818– 1883). Marx agreed entirely with Smith’s analysis; specialisation had indeed transformed the world and possessed a revolutionary power to enrich individuals and nations. But where he differed from Smith was in his assessment of how desirable this development might be. We would certainly make ourselves wealthier by specialising, but – as Marx pointed out with passion – we would also dul
l our lives and cauterise our talents. In describing his utopian communist society, Marx placed enormous emphasis on the idea of everyone having many different jobs. There were to be no specialists here. In a pointed dig at Smith, Marx wrote:

  In communist society . . . nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes . . . thus it is possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner . . . without ever becoming a hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.

  – Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1846)

  One reason why the job we do (and the jobs we don’t get to do) matters so much is that our occupations decisively shape who we are. How our characters are marked by work is often hard for us to notice, as our outlooks just feel natural to us, but we can observe the identity-defining nature of work well enough in the presence of practitioners from different fields. The primary school teacher treats even the middle-aged a little as if they were in need of careful shepherding; the psychoanalyst has a studied way of listening and seeming not to judge while exuding a pensive, reflexive air; the politician lapses into speeches at intimate dinner parties.

  Every occupation weakens or reinforces aspects of our nature. There are jobs that keep us constantly tethered to the immediate moment (A&E nurse, news editor); others that train our attention on the outlying fringes of the time horizon (futurist, urban planner, reforester). Certain jobs daily sharpen our suspicions of our fellow humans, suggesting that the real agenda must always be far from what is being said overtly (journalist, antique dealer); other sorts intersect with people at candid, intimate moments of their lives (anaesthetist, hairdresser, funeral director). In some jobs, it is clear what you have to do to move forward and how promotion occurs (civil servant, lawyer, surgeon), a dynamic that lends calm and steadiness to the soul, and diminishes tendencies to plot and manoeuvre. In other jobs (television producer, politician), the rules are muddied and seem bound up with accidents of friendship and fortuitous alliances, inspiring tendencies to anxiety, distrust and shiftiness.

  The psychology inculcated by work doesn’t neatly stay at work; it colours the whole of who we end up being. We start to behave across our whole lives like the people work has required us to be. This tends to narrow character. When certain ways of thinking become called for daily, others start to feel peculiar or threatening. By giving a large part of one’s life over to a specific occupation, one necessarily has to perform an injustice to other areas of latent potential. Whatever enlargements it offers our personalities, work also possesses a powerful capacity to trammel our spirits.

  We can offer ourselves the poignant autobiographical question of what sort of people we might have been had we had the opportunity to do something else. There will be parts of us we have had to kill (perhaps rather brutally) or that lie in shadow, twitching occasionally on Sunday afternoons. Contained within other career paths are other plausible versions of ourselves – which, when we dare to contemplate them, reveal important, but undeveloped or sacrificed, elements of our characters.

  We are meant to be monogamous about our work, and yet truly have talents for many more jobs than we will ever have the opportunity to explore. We can understand the origins of our restlessness when we look back at our childhoods. As children, in a single Saturday morning, we might put on an extra jumper and imagine being an Arctic explorer, then have brief stints as an architect making a Lego house, a rock star making up an anthem about cornflakes and an inventor working out how to speed up colouring in by gluing four felt-tip pens together. We’d put in a few minutes as a member of an emergency rescue team, then we’d try out being a pilot, brilliantly landing a cargo plane on the rug in the corridor. We would perform a life-saving operation on a knitted rabbit, and then we’d find employment as a sous-chef helping make a ham and cheese sandwich for lunch. Each one of these ‘games’ might have been the beginning of a career. And yet we have to settle on only a single option, done repeatedly over the next 50 years.

  Compared to the play of childhood, we are leading fatally restricted lives. There is no easy cure. As Adam Smith argued, the causes don’t lie in some personal error; it is a limitation forced upon us by the greater logic of a productive, competitive market economy. However, we can allow ourselves to mourn that there will always be large aspects of our character that won’t be satisfied. We are not being silly or ungrateful; we are simply registering the clash between the demands of the employment market and the free, wide-ranging potential of every human life. There is a touch of sadness to this insight. But it is also a reminder that this lack of fulfilment will accompany us in whatever job we choose: we shouldn’t attempt to overcome it by switching jobs. No one job can ever be enough.

  There is a parallel here between our experience around work and what happens in relationships. There is no doubt that we could (without any blame attaching to a current partner) have great relationships with dozens, maybe hundreds, of different people. They would bring to the fore different sides of our personality, please us (and upset us) in different ways, and introduce us to new excitements. Yet, as with work, specialisation brings advantages: it means we can focus, bring up children in stable environments, and learn the disciplines of compromise. In love and work, life requires us to be specialists even though we are by nature equally suited for wide-ranging exploration.

  We carry about within us, in embryonic form, many alluring versions of ourselves that will never be given the proper chance to live. This is a sombre thought, but also a consoling one. Our suffering is painful, but has a curious dignity, because it does not uniquely affect us as individuals. It applies as much to the CEO as to the intern; to the artist as much as to the accountant. Everyone could have found so many versions of happiness that will elude them. In suffering in this way, we are participating in the common human lot. We may with a certain melancholic pride remove the job search engine from our bookmarks and cancel our subscription to a dating site in due recognition of the fact that, whatever we do, parts of our potential will have to go undeveloped and die without ever having had the chance to come to full maturity – for the sake of the benefits of focus and specialisation.

  III

  Standardisation

  The sorrows of work are not limited to the likelihood that we will be somewhat unwillingly tied to a single field throughout our careers; even worse, our chosen field may turn out to be boring. We are liable to think that this fall into a tedious role must be our fault; a sign of our exceptional ineptitude. However, looked at dispassionately, boring jobs are an inherent and often unavoidable part of the modern economy.

  When we speak of the opposite sort of job – an interesting job – we tend to refer to work that allows for a high degree of autonomy, personal initiative and (without anything artistic being meant by the word) creativity. In an interesting job, we won’t simply be following orders; we will have latitude about what path we select to meet an objective or what we think the right solution to a problem might be. A good job, defined like this, is one that allows for a good measure of personalisation: we have an opportunity to directly imprint who we are in the work we produce. We end up seeing the best parts of our personalities in the objects or services we generate.

  A lot of the writing about the nature of work produced in Europe and the United States in the 19th century can be read as an attempt to understand how personalisation disappeared from the labour market, even as wages rose. The English art critic and social reformer John Ruskin (1819–1900) proposed that the medieval building industry had been marked by a high degree of personalisation, evident in the way that craftsmen carved gargoyles (grotesque animal or human faces) in distinctive shapes high up on cathedral roofs. The stonemasons might have had to work to a fixed overall design, and their toil was not always easy, but the gargoyles symbolised a fundamental freedom to place their own stamp on their work. Ruskin added more ruefully that the new hous
ing developments of the industrial age were allowing no such freedom or individualism to flourish in the workforce.

  Ruskin’s most devoted disciple, the poet and designer William Morris (1834–1896), extended the range of this idea of personalisation to a discussion of the making of furniture – his own area of expertise. Morris argued that the traditional way of making chairs and tables allowed artisans to see parts of themselves reflected in the character of the things they made. Every chair made by hand was as distinctive as its creator. In the pre-industrial age, thousands of people had been actively engaged in designing chairs, and every worker had been able to develop their own nuanced ideas about what a nice chair should be like.

  Gargoyle, Sailsbury Cathedral Art critic John Ruskin celebrated the latitude that medieval craftsmen had to create work imbued with their own unique style.

  William Morris, Sussex chair, c. 1860 Morris believed that the process of making artefacts by hand imbued the piece with the unique character of the maker.

  However, an inevitable part of capitalism is a process of concentration and standardisation. There is a tendency for money, expertise, marketing clout and sophisticated distribution systems to be pooled together by a few big players, who outcompete and crush rivals and so achieve a daunting position in the marketplace. Barriers to entry rise exponentially. A well-financed operation can cut costs, assiduously research the preferences of consumers, marshal the best technology, and provide goods that can be of huge appeal to consumers at the best possible price. As a result, the artisanal mode of production cannot possibly compete – as Morris himself discovered when the traditional workshop that he established to make chairs for the Victorian middle classes was forced into receivership in the wake of a price war.