Let them eat cake!

14.8.2009 von kirsten.

Hard work is “out” – a life of doing what you want, which by definition is not work, is “in”. I’ve been quietly grumbling about this tendency ever since I read “The four hour workweek” by Timothy Ferris and have noticed similar trends ever since (which of course also happened because when you want to buy an orange scarf, you see orange scarves everywhere, but anyway this is my blog, so my perceptions count!).

I must admit that I work a lot (but then why is this something to “admit” at all – it used to be an admirable quality). I love what I do – it is how I want to spend my days and thereby my life (thanks to Mark McKergow for the wonderful quote: “How I spend my days is how I spend my life”). If I die having made the world of people in organisations a place that finds easier solutions and if I can help cut down on a lot of today’s muddled theory, I will be a happy woman. Of course, my “work” is not all I do. I also want my children to grow up to be happy people, and I want to stay healthy and have great friends to spend time with. As my own boss in my own company, I don’t understand the differentiation between “work” and “life” (at least anybody who would have seen me swearing at my computer when I was programming the new website would certainly have agreed that I was very much alive at work).

So how come that there suddenly seems to be an ethos of “not-working”? I mean, if “not-working” is what you want to do that’s completely fine – but why position it as the ideal for everyone? And even worse why pathologize people who like what they do in their work and do lots of it? I need more than toes and fingers to count the times my friends have warned me against diagnoses like “burn-out”, “chronic fatigue syndrome” or even cancer – how terrible for all the people who ARE tired or who HAVE cancer to be blamed in retrospect.

Seth Godin tells a wonderful story in “Tribes”:

“It’s four a.m. and I can’t sleep. So I’m sitting in the lobby of a hotel in Jamaica, checking my e-mail. A couple walks by, obviously on their way to bed, having pushed the idea of a vacation too hard. The woman looks over to me and, in a harsh whisper a little quieter than a yell, says to her friend: ‘Isn’t that sad? The guy comes here on vacation and he’s stuck checking his e-mail. He can’t even enjoy his two weeks off.’ I think the real question – the one they probably wouldn’t want to answer – was, ‘Isn’t it sad that we have a job where we spend two weeks avoiding the stuff we have to do fifty weeks a year’ (Seth Godin (2008). “Tribes”. Penguin: New York et al. p. 100)”.

Of course, this is a bit of a retort and exaggerates in the opposite direction: if people WANT to do a job that is not connected to what they want to do in this world and do what they do want to do in this world in their spare time, that’s also ok, isn’t it?

The “whatever you want to do, it shouldn’t be or feel like work” ethics punched me in the nose just today when I read Bill O’Hanlon’s newsletter. He gives advice on “freeing up your time” (of course for other things than work because that’s kind of a given, right, you don’t want to work!). His advice follows Ferris’ lead almost to the letter. O’Hanlon gives us three steps to working less and leisuring more:

1. Eliminate stuff (I agree),
2. Automate repetitive tasks (I agree) and:
3. “Develop ongoing sources of location-free and time-free income. I joke that my ambition is to create a workstyle that doesn’t require my presence. Again, using simple, inexpensive tools and methods, one can create a base level of income that doesn’t require so much time or action or that can be done from anywhere.” (I disagree).

I think I am objecting to two things: one is the presumption that it is only natural that people do not want to work and that work is in some way bad for you and the other is that everyone (or at least most people in the large audiences of O’Hanlon and Ferris) can actually develop a business that does not require their presence. If you just think of the consequences if everyone (or even just Ferris’ and O’Hanlon’s audiences) suddenly turns into an independent fortune seeker, the advice no longer seems to lead to an attractive picture of the world – at least in my eyes. Of course, with best-selling books and an ingenious business idea in their portfolio, O’Hanlon’s and Ferris’ perspective is only natural: They did it and want to share with us how, so that everyone can imitate their success. Maybe I am too pessimistic, but there is a lot of luck and also hard work involved in getting to where they are. Malcolm Gladwell’s last book, “Outliers”, also suggests that people with excellent skills not only have talent but are the people who persistently pursued what they wanted to learn, who spent long hours practicing their vocation. Telling everybody that success and the easy life is just a good business idea away to me sounds a tiny bit like: “Let them eat cake.”

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