I have an image generator on my Substack and if I go put in the search term ‘work’, the above picture is a pretty typical example of what I get:
Happy people, gathered around a computer screen, having spent another productive day generating income for their employers and receiving - in return a modest-but-fair salary and a sense of self-worth.
What the search engine doesn’t return is any images of people working on minimum wage behind the tills at supermarkets, toiling on oil rigs, collecting dustbins, or cleaning hospital toilets.
Which, as far as I can work out, is what work comprises for an awful lot of people who aren’t able to celebrate their good fortune in getting some temporary deskspace in a tech firm or a marketing or media setup.
In short, for a lot of people, work sucks. And, actually, we know it, despite the barrage of messages we receive from the multinational late-capitalist nexus telling us how joyful labour is. At least this is what I take away from this rather encouraging poll finding reported in The Guardian:
So we Brits are less fond of work than any other country surveyed. God bless us, lazy malingerers, that we are!
The ideology of work as an end in itself was birthed ( usefully for employers) in the Industrial Revolution). Combined with the Protestant work ethic, which held that hard work was in some unexplained sense, sacred and a step on the way to heaven, we have been living with this uncomfortable societal conditioning ever since, despite many attempts by many individuals ( myself included) to escape.
To give the devil its due, I’m not anti-work. Like most people, I don’t much like malingerers or lazy, unproductive slobs. People who just sit around all day doing nothing, or going on endless luxury cruises, like many of the affluent retired, get my goat. To have some sort of positive goal is definitely a life-affirming thing. And it certainly helps keep your mind off the real killers of meaning - an awareness of mortality and the incomprehensible, ever-transforming reality that surrounds us and is within us.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Tim Lott's Writing Boot Camp to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.