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Our jobs are the places where we devote, on average, a third of our entire day, and roughly half of our waking hours. More enduring for many of us than love or even family, it is our job that provides us with definition and structure, yet many of us have made the all-important life-path decision sometime in the late teens or early twenties. Which is why we can hardly be to blame if years or even decades later, we are occasionally rattled by the belief that we may be spending an inordinate amount of time doing something personally un-meaningful.
While we may count our current selves more lucky than our antecedents, forced to warily search the sky for signs of heavenly displeasure, we can’t deny that modern surety has also sterilised day-to-day subsistence. Put simply, the awe is gone. Why does it hail, how does a rocket lift off, and why are we able to eat fresh strawberries in the harshest winter months? Even if we don’t know the direct answers to these questions, we’re sure we could find them out if we really wanted to. The mysteries lay at our disposal, tamed and at our feet, but such surety does not come for free. The men and women of developed nations walk around with the burden of their entire potential on their shoulders. We are no longer kept back by our born circumstances—and every day, we face the full weight of supposedly being able to be whoever we want to be.
A responsibility which is arguably liberating and destructive in equal measures. Alain de Botton’s “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work,” examines these and many other provocative issues in a read that is much more intriguing than its title suggests. Promising to illuminate the nature of work and the profundity found in all labour, from jet-plane to choco-cookie production, the book does much more than that, questioning the very core of our being and how we find meaning in the activity we exert the most energy on: Working.
Which jobs are meaningful—and which simply crush the soul? While the butchers, artists and craftsman still retire every night with tangible proof of their labours, how many more workers have spent their eight hours in front of a flickering computer screen, working on the disjointed piece of an abstract or ongoing project that will never provide them the same satisfaction on its tenuous completion? How many more workers are producing myriads of food products for consumers they will never see, or tracking money for clients they will never speak with? And does this make them resent their labours—or have we entered an era where we’ve embraced the idea of a lifetime of work that is collective more than individual in its achievement?
To answer these questions, De Botton takes the reader on a journey all over the world, beautifully documented throughout the text with black and white photographs—he’s on a boat, watching fishermen club their catch out of the Indian Ocean and curse the fish in ancient tongues—he’s talking to ladies quality controlling a waterfall of mass-produced cookies—he’s roaming through the Scottish countryside with a transmission engineer and founding member of the Pylon Appreciation Society, observing the untapped sex-appeal of pylons. Accountant, career counsellor, artist, entrepreneur—a wide range of occupations and people come under de Botton’s scrutiny and what he finds in them is sometimes touching, sometimes pathetic, often funny, and always human.
At the end of his journey, the reader and de Botton are standing in the middle of California’s Mojave Desert, observing a fleet of abandoned air-craft. It is a contemplation generally reserved for the splendid ruins of ancient man—and altogether fitting. For de Botton would argue that there is a beauty to all of our human achievements and labours, no matter how removed from nature they may be. In certain lights, the skeletons of ruined planes can fill us with the same awe as a visit to a museum of re-assembled dinosaurs, and watching a constellation of cookies spill off an impossibly wide factory track, each to be eaten by consumers around the globe seeking culinary escapism in three bites, humbles us as our ancestors were once humbled by the stars.
Then we see that no labour is meaningless, and that all work is necessary, to keep us connected in a chain that reaches many times all around the planet, across first and third world countries, deserts, seas, and moors. Work saves us from having to over-consider our place in the cosmos—it gives us a modern place, with modern divinities, enabling us to redefine beauty and meaning.
Or, as de Botton wryly concludes—work at least keeps us out of trouble.
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