The death factories almost mystically announced: Arbeit macht frei; and
the walls of Paris carried the revolutionary message: Ne travaillez
jamais (Debord, 1953). Etymologically, the word work has origins in
different languages. We can trace it back to the Latin tripalium, which
suggests torture, and to the Greek ergon, which allude to care for the
other. Might we say that work is a relationship between two concepts –
torture and care?
The concept of work has been approached from
different perspectives throughout history: from slavery to feudal
relations, from Marxist analyses to the capitalist idea of constant
progress, from feminist demands for the valuation of caring and
invisible labor to the contemporary theory of growing up that places
production in the context of ecological crisis. Of course, we cannot
ignore the five-hundred-year-old Protestant tradition that sanctifies
and glorifies work (Weber, 1905), where the performance of work and how
to become better and more efficient is understood as a sign of morality
and ethics. In classical times, work was despised by the aristocracy,
but philosophers such as John Locke developed a puritanical notion of
virtue through suffering that justified working class labor as something
noble. Centuries later, flow theory (i.e. a state of real engagement at
work) articulated the key to happiness and success at work as a
constant balance between anxiety, where the difficulty is too high for
human skill, and boredom, where the difficulty is too low
(Csíkszentmihályi, 1990). Today there are corporations that employ
happiness managers and introduce exercises to encourage flow work. Love
what you do. Be fanatical in your work. Be committed to work because
work is a source of personal satisfaction and happiness. But we know
that the experience of flow is rare because it is a theory that
primarily addresses highly specialized expertise. The psychology of
experts has been studied in many fields: among chess players, surgeons,
musicians, ballet dancers, athletes (Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Römer,
1993; Chase and Simon, 1973). It was found that what these experts have
in common is that they are actively engaged in an extremely defined and
narrow field and receive frequent feedback of a high quality which is
not typical in most workplaces. So how is it that a particularistic
theory of flow at work has become a general theory of happiness at work?
If flow is related to expertise, and if expertise is not (or only
weakly) related to happiness, why would flow be related to happiness?
Perhaps one way to understand flow in terms of happiness is to place it
in the tradition of the Stoics, who believed that happiness is found in
active engagement with the world. (Amor fati: Treating each and every
moment – no matter how challenging – as something to be embraced, not
avoided.) Nietzsche and Russell also had similar ideas, except that flow
in their work flirts with the fanatical and obsessive.
When we
think about happiness and satisfaction at work, we also encounter
questions of meaning and utility. Most people genuinely want to believe
that they are contributing to the world in a meaningful way, and even
become sick and unhappy if they are denied this meaning. In our society,
useful work is often not respected and is poorly paid, despite the fact
it is often done in the context of jobs with difficult working
conditions. In contrast, a substantial number of meaningless jobs are
very well-paid. David Graeber speaks of these useless jobs as jobs for
their own sake – “dead-end jobs” – that benefit no one. Even the people
who do them, he argues, know that it would make no difference if they
stopped working tomorrow (Graeber, 2018). Some important economic
thinkers, such as John Keynes, predicted that technology would advance
to the point where we would reach a fifteen-hour working week by the end
of the twentieth century. But, instead of a shorter working hours,
today we multiply the amount of meaningless work with the assumption
that more jobs are better regardless of what they entail. In recent
years, we have seen not only new forms of work that blur the established
relationship between work and leisure, human labor directed and checked
by algorithms, inhumane working conditions of an almost post-colonial
nature, but, not surprisingly, the increase of burnout in the workplace,
depressive illnesses, and the reluctance to work at all.
Perhaps it
is time to rethink on the global level how much work we actually have to
do and how many essential tasks technology can perform for us. To work
less would mostly be a matter of adapting the ingrained,
historically-conditioned valuation of work. This adaptation, in addition
to reflecting concern for a decent life for all, would also include the
recognition of values that today do not fall under what we consider
“work” but which nevertheless make a fundamental contribution to the
development of society.
Authors: Loup Abramovici, Tomaž Grom, Teja Reba, Špela Trošt
Production: Teja Reba
Coproduction: Zavod Sploh
Partners: Bunker Institute - SMEEL, Associazione Culturale YANVII,
Moderna galerija, Španski borci
Financial support: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia
