The idea of work is strange. We spend eight hours of our day with people we don’t know very well, doing tasks for other people who pay us. We label these tasks ‘work’.
And anything that isn’t work is ‘leisure’ time, or just ‘life’.
Most of us make a clear and rigid distinction between the two parts of our lives. And we go to great lengths to seek out ‘work-life balance’. Which is code for, ‘I’m trying to avoid hating myself and my life by trying to have my work not spill into the time I don’t get paid for.’ And then we’re not sure if this is really attainable because there are several schools of thought that argue that work-life balance is a myth. People who subscribe to the view that work-life balance can’t be attained recommend several strategies to cope with this lack of balance. These strategies include blending, reframing, re-labeling or just accepting that work will consume most of your life.
It has always struck me how work is something we describe as separate from life. Our time at work is the part of our lives we sacrifice in order to lead decent lives. How depressing. And in this spirit, our language around work is peppered with negativity and cynicism. ‘Thank God it’s Friday’ is simply a euphemism for; ‘thank God the working week is over’. Similarly, we have the ‘Sunday blues’ which describes the funk that bleeds into people’s Sunday afternoons at the idea having to go back to the office on Monday morning.
In fact, when we divide work and life, we imply that work starts where ‘life’ ends. Or, work is death. Yep, you heard it here first. Mull on that one for a few moments.
Work as punishment
Work in the Bible is described in two contexts. In one representation it’s the opposite of leisure. Genesis 2:3 states, “So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.” And as punishment in the second context. Genesis 3:19 states, “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground…’ This is how God punishes Adam and Eve (and all of humanity for that matter) for eating from the tree of knowledge. I haven’t met Adam or Eve, but if I ever do I fear I might be a little prickly towards them.
It is also this trope of sweating while working that delivered us a hierarchy of work. The more manual and physical the labour, the less desirable it was. From the Bronze age until very recently, manual labour was apportioned to slaves or subjects, while the aristocracy and the wealthy engaged in higher pursuits, such as commerce and trade. And as the concept of slavery grew morally unpalatable we looked to our penal system to deliver us men and women to do the work we didn’t want to – hello chain gangs and labour camps.
And then there was the Industrial Revolution
With the industrial revolution and the advent of mechanisation we were able to do more work and to produce more goods, more quickly. However, in order to have businesses grow, industries needed to sell more of their products and to do that, they needed to create demand for these products. So they employed agrarian workers to work on their factory lines and paid them a small wage. These workers, in turn, were then able to go out and buy goods with their earnings. And this cycle of labour and consumption brought about the most prosperous time in this history of humanity (I’m glossing over a lot of suffering, but bear with me). Industrialisation lifted more people out of poverty than ever before. And human life expectancy more than doubled between 1860 and 1990.
And yet, with the advent of industrialisation, increased wealth and greater consumption we saw the introduction of a whole new field of medicine – psychiatry, counselling and psychotherapy.
The role of work in our lives
Capitalism in the 19th Century started dominating society and with this the principles of science started to unseat religious values. This change coincided with more people moving to cities in order to find work. Which, in turn, caused a fundamental shift in how people related to one another.
George Albee, a pioneer in clinical psychology in the 1970s, said:
Capitalism required the development of a high level of rationality accompanied by repression and control of pleasure seeking. This meant the strict control of impulses and the development of a work ethic in which a majority of persons derived a high degree of satisfaction from hard work. Capitalism also demanded personal efforts to achieve long-range goals, an increase in personal autonomy and independence . . . The system depended on a heavy emphasis on thrift and ingenuity and, above all else, on the strong control and repression of sexuality
George Albee, 1977
The move from relatively small communities where people knew one another to urban areas where people were basically anonymous, had a real impact on how people related to one another. People were forced to work longer and harder than they ever had before, doing menial work, alone, while being expected to derive self worth and satisfaction from their hours in a factory.
In the US, capitalism found a far more receptive audience and took a firmer grasp on people’s psyche than it had in Europe. For instance, the definition of success became very singular and inextricably linked to wealth. And people were convinced that this type of success was within everyone’s grasp. All you needed was the ability to sell. You needed to be able to sell products, services and, most importantly, sell yourself. Towards the end of the 20th Century self improvement books and pamphlets were incredibly popular. However, for those who had money to invest, psychotherapy was the most effective means by which to change and achieve the ‘right’ personality to grow rich and be liked.
Work before COVID
How we work and the type of work we do has changed radically over the past 200 years. However, how we think about work, and our relation to it still has it somewhere between a punishment and an inescapable unpleasantness – for most of us anyway.
We are working more hours each day. We see little of our children, and spend more time with our colleagues each week than we do with our spouses. Again, this to me is quite odd. We choose the people we want to spend the rest of our lives with and marry them. And then head off to spend most of our waking hours with strangers whom we rarely get to choose.
How did this happen?
At the same time our job security has grown more precarious. We have more anxiety now about losing our jobs than we did fifty years ago. And we believe that success comes from being seen to be working harder, delivering more with more commitment than the person next to us. The workplace for many people feels like gladiatorial arena where survival means beating the person next to you.
And then there is the type of work we do. Alan Watts said about work; ‘Work is something that everybody does and you get paid to do it because nobody could care less about doing it‘. I wrote a post about bullshit work a while back. That post has become one of the most popular posts on this site. I have come to realise that there are many people doing work that they don’t feel adds up to much. The combination of feeling isolated and threatened, synthesised with uncertainty and meaninglessness is what makes work something that most of us want to segregate from our real lives; keep away from our loved ones.
Work today
During the pandemic the way we work changed. We learnt that avoiding commutes allowed us the time to exercise and take our kids to school. And we were surprised by the fact that we could be genuinely productive when working from home. Today many businesses are looking to adopt remote working practices long term. And most workers have taken stock of what’s important and have decided to prioritise life over work. Personally, I still wonder how long this new reality is going to last.
However, I have been thinking about this for some time now. What if we have work all wrong? What if we thought of work as a means to making real connections with other people? And if the time at work was about establishing genuine friendships while achieving great things as part of a team? Wouldn’t we then be more open to going back to the office, to making work part of our real lives? I think there can be meaning in the most menial tasks as long as we do those tasks with people we care about. And as long as we are surrounded by people who want to help us get through the day; people who care about us as humans. I’m probably being naïve. But there is something in the idea of making work more about connection and less about advancement.
Work is a strange thing.
Thank you for sharing GW!
“And if time at work was about establishing genuine friendships while achieving great things…” made me think about how people establish great friendships in education years – primary school, high school and uni while learning. I wonder why this dynamic doesn’t move with us into the working world.