Work and Life
Alain de Botton’s books have amused me before. I enjoyed Architecture of Happiness and Status Anxiety, and now, this article happens, and I suspect he’s reaching across the Atlantic to kick me in the nuts.
Jon Henley’s contribution is a pretty straightforward if timid-sounding look at our views and expectations of work and how they change in a recession. I suppose the timidity is honest, and he seems to express how a lot of people feel. It feels very superficial and fearmongering to me.
But then the voice changes dramatically, into de Botton’s unmistakable lulling pastel tone, and the article disconnects from reality, dropping into absurdly pastoral descriptions of office life that drip irony so thick and pure that Jonathan Swift would gasp.
Coming off of the tone of the first half, de Botton says the most ludicrous things without setting off many alarm bells. He talks of business cards as convenient definitions of identity, rather than having to discover one through contemplation. He talks about the reversal of civility at work and at home: “How politely we tend to behave at work, next to the insults we throw at one another at home, where there is no HR department to coax us into being more civilised.” He talks about employers’ concern for their employees’ well-being, and how they demand contentment from them, instead of simply beating them into line like they used to. He talks about the bureaucratic passive-aggressive organization, the attempts to obscure the workplace hierarchy… it goes on. At the climax, he even claims that offices are sexy. Right. It’s probably the most brilliant piece of satire I’ve read in years.
Reading this makes me remember the feeling of unemployment. Yes, there was worrying about money and making rent, but more significantly there was a feeling of freedom, that the day was mine to seize or waste as I saw fit. And it reminds me how many of them I wasted.
Office jobs are a tradeoff: your life for steady money. Yes, there’s talk of people pursuing their passions in evenings and on their weekends, but how many people actually do that? You come home from an office, drained, and once you’ve dealt with dinner and cleaned up a bit, you have one or two exhausted hours to attack your passions. Let’s admit that it’s pretty much impossible. No non-trivial pursuit can thrive on such slender resources.
It becomes a matter of what you want out of your life, and what you want to do with it. If you can measure it monitarily, as houses, cars, TVs, vacations, fancy clothes, then an office job might suit you perfectly. The last few years have taught me that I can’t do this, and they did it in a way that leaves no room for argument. I’ve worked for jack all, I’ve worked for mad cash. I’ve had the big TV and leather couch, lived in the posh urban condos and a beautiful house in one of the nicest neighbourhoods in the world, and I’ve lived in a small basement bedroom. My ceilings have been between 7 and 20 feet. It turns out that it made very little difference. If I’m not engaged, I won’t be happy. Repetition doesn’t promote engagement.
I think my office days are numbered, and the number is rather small. I don’t know what will come next, but I’ll be stronger, because the memory of office work will motivate me.
