Labour pains

Try to relax and not take your job
so seriously, says Lars Svendsen in Work

by JULIET WATERS

Labour day is a few days away, summer is almost officially over, and it’s time to start worrying.

As Lars Svendsen points out in Work, his ruminative but highly interesting contribution to the Art of Living series (a collection of popular philosophy books published out of England), we live in a day and age that’s in the grip of chronic work neuroses. According to a 2006 study from the Pew Research Centre, “Americans believe that workers today have to work harder for less money, with fewer benefits and less job security than a generation ago.”

But the facts don’t quite support this pessimism. Wages are higher, working hours are lower. And while job security may be lower, studies consistently show that “most of those who leave an employer do so because they choose to, not because they lose their job.”

Furthermore, if you’re the average reader of a book of popular philosophy then odds are you’re more affluent and better employed than 99 per cent of the people who’ve ever lived on the planet Earth.

No matter what your level of work anxiety is, it helps to put things in historical perspective. Technology is bringing about more work flexibility than humans have ever had. And even if this brings with it significantly higher levels of financial and career uncertainty, few would want to live in ancient times when your work destiny was pretty much decided from birth.

Unless, perhaps, you knew you were going to be born a male aristocrat in Ancient Greece. The Greeks were notorious for hating work. They really had only one goal of work, and that was leisure. The more mundane work you could pass off to others the better. Selling your work for money was considered to be even more shameful than having work forced on you. Aristotle believed that some people were “natural slaves,” and since the Greek ideal was to live your life according to your destiny, there was nobility in slavery. (Not much written evidence, however, to support the possibility that the slaves felt this way about it.) Not so for business. Merchants were considered the lowest of the low.

Christianity brought some major attitude changes towards work, but it was well over a millennium before humans with influence started to consider work more important than prayer or meditation. And then the pendulum seems to have swung full force the other way. With the introduction of the Protestant work ethic, leisure began to sink lower and lower on the scale of socially accepted values. Work started to become a kind of religion in itself.

“This work ethic seems to have lost much of its force,” says Svendsen. “Fewer and fewer people seem to believe that hard work as such is particularly ennobling.” Still, the Protestant heritage in many countries continues to influence our relation to work. And worse, it seems to have a pernicious influence on how we relax.

Svendsen makes a pretty convincing argument that what’s really contributing to our collective sense of burnout is not how much we work, but how we spend our leisure time. We fill our weekends and vacations with so many activities that it’s exhausting, and there are many studies which suggest most people actually prefer their time at work and find their off-work time increasingly stressful.

No matter all the recent theories and utopian ideas about the end of work, Svendsen believes work will always be important. But he also believes that as a society we are taking work way too seriously,

placing all kinds of high expectations on our working life and how it relates to our well-being.

Of course there are some people whose work is so important and vital to our civilization that it’s a good thing they spend every minute thinking about it. Unless that’s you, however, it may be worth considering the words of British philosopher Bertrand Russell: “One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”

WORK BY LARS SVENDSEN, ACUMEN
PUBLISHING, PB., 138 PP., $19.95