Fuck work Flashcards
Work means everything to us. We’ve believed that it builds character. We’ve also believed that the market in labour has been relatively efficient in allocating opportunities and incomes. And we’ve believed that a job gives meaning, purpose and structure to our everyday lives.
These beliefs are no longer plausible. In fact, they’ve become ridiculous, because there’s not enough work to go around.
Is having a job a self-evidently good thing, no matter how dangerous, demanding or demeaning it is?
Oxford economists who study employment trends tell us that almost half of existing jobs, including those involving ‘non-routine cognitive tasks’ – you know, like thinking – are at risk of death by computerisation within 20 years.
This Great Recession of ours is a moral crisis as well as an economic catastrophe. It’s also an intellectual opportunity: it forces us to imagine a world in which the job no longer builds our character, determines our incomes or dominates our daily lives.
What would you do without your job as the external discipline that organises your waking life ?
What would you do if you didn’t have to work to receive an income?
If you were raised to believe that work is the index of your value to society – as most of us were – would it feel like cheating to get something for nothing?
When we place our faith in hard work, we’re wishing for the creation of character; but we’re also expecting that the labour market will allocate incomes fairly and rationally.
Character can be created on the job only when we can see that there’s an intelligible, justifiable relation between past effort, learned skills and present reward. When I see that your income is completely out of proportion to your production of real value, I begin to doubt that character is a consequence of hard work.
Everybody has doubled down on the benefits of work just as it reaches a vanishing point. Securing ‘full employment’ has become a bipartisan goal at the very moment it has become both impossible and unnecessary. Sort of like securing slavery in the 1850s or segregation in the 1950s.
Why?
Because work means everything to us inhabitants of modern market societies – regardless of whether it still produces solid character and allocates incomes rationally, and quite apart from the need to make a living.
Though work has often entailed subjugation, obedience and hierarchy, it’s also where most of us have consistently expressed our deepest human desire, to be free of externally imposed authority or obligation, to be self-sufficient. We have defined ourselves for centuries by what we do, by what we produce.
Until now, the principle of productivity has functioned as the reality principle that made the American Dream seem plausible. ‘Work hard, play by the rules, get ahead’, or, ‘You get what you pay for, you make your own way, you rightly receive what you’ve honestly earned’ – such homilies and exhortations used to make sense of the world. At any rate they didn’t sound delusional. By now they do.
Adherence to the principle of productivity therefore threatens public health. By committing us to what is impossible, it makes for madness. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton said something like this when he explained anomalous mortality rates among white people in the Bible Belt by claiming that they’ve ‘lost the narrative of their lives’ – by suggesting that they’ve lost faith in the American Dream. For them, the work ethic is a death sentence because they can’t live by it.
What purposes could we choose if the job – economic necessity – didn’t consume most of our waking hours and creative energies? What evident yet unknown possibilities would then appear? How would human nature itself change as the ancient, aristocratic privilege of leisure becomes the birthright of human beings as such?
Sigmund Freud insisted that love and work were the essential ingredients of a healthy human being. But can love survive the end of work as the willing partner of the good life? Can we let people get something for nothing and still treat them as our brothers and sisters? Can you imagine the moment when you’ve just met an attractive stranger at a party, or you’re online looking for someone, anyone, but you don’t ask: ‘So, what do you do?’
We won’t have any answers until we acknowledge that work now means everything to us – and that hereafter it can’t.
