Why do we work?
On idleness, ‘the right to be lazy’, the tyranny of work and ‘bullshit jobs'
If there’s one thing most people agree on, it’s that jobs are good. We should all have a job. Being employed is virtuous and the sign of being a respectable person. Politicians sing the praises of creating “jobs & growth”, climate protestors get told to “get a job”, we rush people who are on parental leave back to work, and people contemplate what they might do if they quit their jobs but can’t imagine how they would fill their days, fearing they might get “bored”.
Our dominant culture is one that sees work as noble and that we should all be working, the more the better. In this piece I draw on quotes from several sources to highlight some counter-cultural narratives about the aggrandisement of work, the ‘bullshit jobs’ that are created so that more people are working, the villainisation of idleness, why we hold work in such high esteem, and what a life less worked could look like.
Here are 20 such ideas:
1. In his 1932 essay In Praise of Idleness, Bertrand Russell makes the case that, with modern technology, leisure could be “evenly distributed throughout the community”, rather than something that is available to “small privileged classes”. He believed that the “morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.”
2. Russell believed “that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached…. the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.”
3. Russell goes on to dispel the notion that people wouldn’t know what to do with their leisure time: “It will be said that while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours’ work out of the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.… Peasant dances have died out except in remote rural areas, but the impulses which caused them to be cultivated must still exist in human nature. The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.”
4. Russell was a proponent of a four-hour work day, believing that this would foster “good nature” in people: “Above all, there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia. The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion…. Ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion…. Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle.”
5. In his book, Bullshit Jobs, the late anthropologist and activist, David Graeber argued “that there are millions of people across the world — clerical workers, administrators, consultants, telemarketers, corporate lawyers, service personnel, and many others — who are toiling away in meaningless, unnecessary jobs, and they know it…. It didn’t have to be this way…. Technology has advanced to the point where most of the difficult, labor-intensive jobs can be performed by machines. But instead of freeing ourselves from the suffocating 40-hour workweek, we’ve invented a whole universe of futile occupations that are professionally unsatisfying and spiritually empty.”
6. Graeber believed that “in our society, often the more useful the work is, the less they pay you…. bullshit jobs are often highly respected and pay well but are completely pointless, and the people doing them know this…. A lot of bullshit jobs are just manufactured middle-management positions with no real utility in the world, but they exist anyway in order to justify the careers of the people performing them. But if they went away tomorrow, it would make no difference at all.”
7. Graeber also challenged our narrow definition of work: “A lot of the value that’s produced in society, like half of the value that’s produced in society, is produced by people who aren’t actually getting paid for it. I’m thinking of people who take care of the home or do important volunteer work or sacrifice in other ways that aren’t rewarded in our current economic system…. People will still need to be paid for doing important engineering work or medical work or scientific work or other necessary jobs, but we have to adjust our values to recognize that there are plenty of ways to contribute to society, and a lot of it doesn’t fall under what we currently consider “work.””
8. In this piece, Graeber goes further, saying that if we want to save the world, we’re going to have to stop working: “If there’s anything left and right both seem to agree on, it’s that jobs are good. Everyone should have a job. Work is our badge of moral citizenship. We seem to have convinced ourselves as a society that anyone who isn’t working harder than they would like to be working, at something they don’t enjoy, is a bad, unworthy person. As a result, work comes to absorb ever greater proportions of our energy and time…. If addressing them seems unrealistic, we might do well to think hard about what those realities are that seem to be forcing us, as a society, to behave in ways that are literally mad.”
9. Bronnie Ware, in her book The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying, tells how her experience as a palliative carer helped her to realise that one of the biggest regrets of the dying is that they wish they hadn’t “worked so hard”. In her experience, people look back on their lives wishing they’d work less, not more.
10. In his book, Civilized to Death, Christopher Ryan recounts the experience of filmmaker Jonnie Hughes who was living with the ‘Insect Tribe’ from Papua New Guinea while they were visiting the United Kingdom: “With every whispered observation, they left us powerless to explain the madness of our own social norms, and when they boarded the plane back to PNG, we were the ones racked with envy – envious of their joyously interdependent communities, their clear understanding of what mattered in life, their rock-solid roles, simple pleasures and ample leisure time, their lack of mortgages and debts, their indisputable “goodness”. Our world appeared an obscene and dysfunctional manifestation of human existence in comparison.”
11. Hughes further recalls that the Insect People “were confused that Mark, the father in the family they were staying with, left early every morning and didn’t return until evening. “Why are you doing this?” … “Why are you going out every day, not seeing the people that you really care about? It doesn’t make any sense at all!”. Mark explained that he had to work to pay for the house they were living in. “How long will you be doing this, to pay for your house?” they asked. When Mark told them about his twenty-five-year mortgage, they looked at him in astonished pity, explaining that when one of them needed a house, they got together with other men of the village and built a house in a couple of weeks.”
12. In her book, Rest is Resistance, Tricia Hersey links colonialism with our feelings of self-worth and grind culture, and with the lack of resistance thus far: “To be colonized is to accept and buy into the lie of our worth being connected to how much we get done… You are worthy of rest. We don’t have to earn rest. Rest is not a luxury, a privilege, or a bonus we must wait for once we are burned out…. I believe the powers that be don’t want us rested because they know that if we rest enough, we are going to figure out what is really happening and overturn the entire system. Exhaustion keeps us numb, keeps us zombie-like, and keeps us on their clock.”
13. In his paper, The Mental Infrastructures of Growth: How Growth Entered the World and Our Souls, Harald Welzer highlights that work, which was previously seen as toil and ended when needs were met, is now seen as noble and has no end, concerned with ceaselessly creating ‘value’ and ‘growth’. In contrast to the early industrial times, we now seek out employment, which is “a libidinous dimension of work that a 19th-century industrial worker would have found downright perverse”.
14. In his 1883 book, The Right to Be Lazy, Paul Lafargue links the Protestant and economic work ethic, urging the working class to reduce their working hours and use their remainder of their day for enjoyment: “But to arrive at the realization of its strength the proletariat must trample under foot the prejudices of Christian ethics, economic ethics and free-thought ethics. It must return to its natural instincts, it must proclaim the Rights of Laziness, a thousand times more noble and more sacred than the anaemic Rights of Man concocted by the metaphysical lawyers of the bourgeois revolution. It must accustom itself to working but three hours a day, reserving the rest of the day and night for leisure and feasting.”
15. In his book, Crimes Against Nature, writer, Jeff Sparrow, shines a light on the way our views of work have changed over time: “Today, we take the wages system for granted. It appears normal, almost eternal, since we can barely conceive of an alternative. It did not seem normal to pre-colonial people. In Australia, as elsewhere in the world, they found capitalist practices utterly horrifying…. Indigenous people, accustomed to an egalitarian ethos and to work carried out for the collective good, saw the authority exerted by employers as tyranny. As late as 1888, a churchman complained of the difficulty he had in persuading Indigenous people that one man was innately better than another, that a certain individual, by virtue of his possessions, mandated obedience from his fellows…. Indigenous people did not despise wage labour primarily because of the effort that it entailed. Rather, they thought the work demanded by capitalists stripped life of its humanity.”
16. Sparrow highlights that it was the narrow definition of a role and the repetitive nature of the task that seemed particularly arduous for Australia’s Original People: “Indigenous men and women looked at shepherds, hutkeepers, bullock drivers, splitters, and other employers as people condemned to a single tedious task. They could not comprehend why anyone would accept such monotony, such empty, soulless drudgery, when the bush itself provided the basis for a life of material satisfaction and spiritual enrichment.”
17. Importantly, Sparrow draws attention to the fact that violence was needed for people to yield to the normalisation of work: “In both Australia and England, the acceptance of wage labour came from the destruction of other options. In both countries, the old order was shattered, in part by physical violence, since the new regime ultimately relied on soldiers with guns. Expelled from their lands and thus unable to feed and shelter themselves in their customary manner, people either accepted capitalist discipline, or else became entirely destitute.”
18. It is also worth considering the role of cultural hegemony in our devotion to work, whereby “the ruling class creates an ideology in which its own values become common sense for the rest of society … the role of the state is to maintain institutions such as media and the education system that educate the masses on the cultural ideology of the ruling class. The goal of that education being that the working class develop a sense of freedom and a good life that serves the purposes of the people in power. In other words, the working class starts to value things like innovation and productivity and economic growth that doesn’t actually serve them.”
19. In the aforementioned essay, In Praise of Idleness, Bertrand Russell agrees with the role of cultural hegemony, or what he calls ‘duty’: “To this day ninety-nine per cent of British wage-earners would be genuinely shocked if it were proposed that the King should not have a larger income than a working man. The conception of duty, speaking historically, has been a means used by the holders of power to induce others to live for the interests of their masters rather than their own.”
20. David Graeber also believes that we’ve swallowed the ideology of the ruling class when it comes to jobs: “We accept the idea that rich people are job creators, and the more jobs we have, the better. It doesn’t matter if those jobs do something useful; we just assume that more jobs is better no matter what…. We’ve created a whole class of flunkies that essentially exist to improve the lives of actual rich people. Rich people throw money at people who are paid to sit around, add to their glory, and learn to see the world from the perspective of the executive class…. the system reproduces itself because it’s very much in the interests of the ruling class. I get called a conspiracy theorist for saying this, but I don’t see it that way. We should be conspiring to get rid of this.”
So, what do we do about this? On this topic, I leave you with this parting quote from David Graeber: “We’ve been taught for the last 30 to 40 years that imagination has no place in politics or economics, but that, too, is bullshit.”
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Here is a list of the resources I have referenced in this piece:
In Praise of Idleness, Bertrand Russell (from the October 1932 issue of Harper’s Magazine)
Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber
David Graeber: ‘To save the world, we’re going to have to stop working’, David Graeber
The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying, Bronnie Ware
Civilized to Death, Christopher Ryan
Rest is Resistance, Tricia Hersey
The Mental Infrastructures of Growth: How Growth Entered the World and Our Souls, Harald Welzer
The Right to Be Lazy, Paul Lafargue
Crimes Against Nature, Jeff Sparrow