“No one should ever work.
Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.” — Bob Black, The Abolition of Work
Good morning from a grey, misty Devon.
How was your weekend?
Here we are again (if you’re in this space), another week of molar-grinding, work-induced angst.
I jest but it still escapes me why work is so mightily and effusively praised for its ability to invoke the spirit of our better selves when all it does is crush our souls.
OK, perhaps your experience is very different and you’ve found your one true calling but since when did work — the paid variety — substitute itself for living out a long and meaningful life?
What do I mean?
Well, prior to the industrialisation of work, and here you might consider your indigenous forebears, I can’t imagine any tribe or group of people setting up a faux system of labour and lauding it for its ability to do all the things that those in the OD/HR/Leadership etc. space would have us believe. Sorry to my friends in any of those spaces but I simply don’t accept that we need that level of detailed and microscopic attention to do something which is no more and no less than a means to a financial end.
Does this mean when I’m axe-swinging my lament at the way things are I’m advocating for something much more primitive? Possibly, but then again I’ve zero expectation that we’ll break asunder the link between money, comfort, property ownership, power, growth and all those other things that are the product of work and replace it with something more village-minded or egalitarian. In any event, with 8 billion people now on this planet, it’s impossible to see, unless that number reduces very substantially, how we could ever live a different way.
But that doesn’t and won’t stop me from pouring a little cold water on the often hyperbolic state of the beatific nature of work based on all my years (42) in the trenches.
I realise that I’ve no business doing so and it might be seen that all I’m doing is unnecessarily stirring the pot but I’m gravely concerned not so much for my generation but my kids’ generation about the level of expectation and why no one, or no one I know, is willing to hold the status quo up the anthropocentric light to make the point that work shouldn’t be the apogee of a life well-lived.
If that sounds pretentious (and it might be that the kids already have this figured out) then I make no apology for the fact that if I aspire to be an ancestor worth claiming — and the bar is set pretty high, given how much I’ve allowed to pass unchecked — then it behoves me to try to make my peace with all the time I wasted in devotion to work and a system that was designed not so much as to make me but break me — that damn sandpit of conformity.
I suppose in the end what I’m advocating for is a more honest, grown-up conversation instead of the sickly sweet, holier-than-thou verbiage that passes for sanity. I realise there’s a fine line between outright cynicism and a pros/cons exchange but why shouldn’t I metaphorically put my hand up and ask the question:
In fact, this question is one that I pray in aid routinely when either I don’t understand something or someone is overplaying their hand.
Anyhow, have a good day. Hopefully, it’s sufficiently entertaining so that you don’t think of it as edging you one day closer to retirement, as seems my way right now.
Take care.
Julian
At last my friend, you (sounds like) you will be telling your bosses that you have had enough. It’s a big step but you won’t regret it. Living an undefined finite existence creates more urgency on our time. Needs and wants create bigger pulls than pointless travel to an office where in reality you are just headcount. Best of luck my friend.