Redefining “Work” - Part Deux
Summary - In order to provide purpose in a world with universal basic income for all, we need to re-organize our societies. A new ideology is needed, which should revolve around six central pillars of Man. These are Care, Culture, Spirituality, Sports, Science & Education, Exploration.
It was March, 2020
Life was good in those days
I just came back from a perfect holiday which gave me plenty of time to think and write. I argued for a Universal Basic Income and ‘rethinking the way we think’ about work and purpose in life. At the time I believed these were issues discussed only by a select few. I believed my esoteric babble would be high-minded and everything I discussed would be matters that were far away into the future. I was wrong. The world is ‘in lockdown’ due to Covid-19 and all of a sudden we were ripped away from our daily routines, our identity, our distractions. With lockdowns now being extended in many countries, a global case of cabin fever is slowly setting in.
When your government extends the lockdown…
Millions of people around the world are forced to stay at home, feeling almost imprisoned, isolated from what provided them with drive and a purpose. This hits most people to their core. A good friend of mine stated that “everybody has so much time on their hands, but nobody knows what to do with it”. It makes me feel sad really, that so many people only had their job to provide them with a sense of identity and meaning. Not only are they forced to stay at home with no clue as to how long it may take, many of them actually lost their jobs during this unprecedented crisis. I can only imagine the amount of uncertainty and anxiety this causes.
Despite these hard times, I remain positive. As a species we have faced hardship many times before and came out for the better, even though it was not always the best of times for the people living at the moment. We are again at a cross-roads in history. We have the choice to go back to business as usual, or truly change the system for the better. I am inclined towards the latter.
It is time to radically rethink and stop the idealization of work, why we work in the first place, and what work should revolve around in the future.
The idealization of work
We are not Machines
Can we honestly state that we - as a society - have focused on the right things in life for the past ten, twenty or maybe even thirty years? The fact that many of us cannot last a month without a paycheck is a clear sign to me that something is fundamentally wrong. We have been teetering on the edge of economic disaster for quite some time. Covid-19 simply shows the deep vulnerabilities of the current system.
I believe that a radical new way of thinking about the economy or “the system” is required. In particular a new way of thinking about work. We should be focused on adding true value to life. We should not collectively panic over the ‘GDP’, an abstract number aiming for endless economic growth. Humans are not a part of the grand economic cog-wheel within monstrous corporates that are “too-big-to-fail”, only to bail them out and pay for their mistakes once they do fail. We are not simply revenue-making machines in the employment of billionaires that can be ‘switched on or off’.
The Numbing Nature of Work
So why do we keep doing it? Why do we consider work to be sacred and willing to sacrifice our health, our lives for it? Are most of us even aware this is a choice?
Never have I seen someone put the ‘fetishization’ of work in better words than Anna Dent, who coincidentally wrote an article about Universal Basic Income the same time I did.
For those in paid work, working hard and being constantly busy are worn as a badge of pride, and there are whole industries promising to make us more productive and efficient. For some, hard work is enforced through workplace monitoring, impossibly short breaks or expectations of staff being “always on”, for example responding to emails outside work hours. Work is idealized as providing meaning in our lives, while at the same time removing us from other sources of meaning, such as family, friends and our communities, through long hours and unpaid overtime. The negative psychological, social and physical effects of these narratives and assumptions are now being investigated, and the centrality of work in our lives and society questioned.
The nihilistic nature and nonsense of what we see as work is in my opinion best portrayed in the movie Office Space, a true cult-hit which symbolizes the pointlessness of it all. Office Space is about Peter Gibbons, a guy who works in a typical work office environment. Each day of his life is more miserable than the day before. he spends the day doing stupefyingly dull computer work. He goes home to an apartment sparsely furnished by IKEA and Target, then starts for a maddening commute to work again in the morning. His coworkers in the cube farm are an annoying lot, his boss is a snide, patronizing jerk, and his days are consumed with tedium.
I feel that we, in societies around the world, are doing the same thing. We are rehashing Office Space in real life. We get up, go to work, sit for 8 hours (or more if we are ‘ambitious’) commute back, pat ourselves on the back and say we have been productive. While in fact we know, that roughly 80% of the real “work” or value in any given company is done by 20% of the people.
Peter Gibbons, our protagonist from Office Space, naturally figures out what life should all be about and starts dating Jennifer Aniston in the process. In reality, it is not so easy to figure it out. Especially not if we have been hardwired to not think about these things. What’s even worse, is that most of us are not even aware of it. We only see this detrimental part of life when we are suddenly and abruptly confronted with it during a crisis, such as Covid-19.
So if not for work, what should our lives revolve around?
A future of purpose and meaning
It is OK to not feel OK sometimes
Mankind has always gazed up to the stars to find inspiration, meaning and purpose to our life. The awe-inspiring darkness dotted with infinite dreams invoke a sense of wonder within all of us. Perhaps we have been looking down to much, preoccupied with what is right in front of us. Focusing on matters that are less important, or not at all. It feels to me a lot of us have been unconsciously searching for something our entire lives and never found it. A never-ending feeling that there is something more. That we are waiting for something in order to achieve our full potential. Perhaps we never gave ourselves the time to think about these matters.
Now that we are forced into quarantine for weeks (or months) we either succumb to isolation, or we succumb to the hard reality of home-schooling our children while “working” at the same time. Is it not appalling that we are now longing to be back in the office, while we finally have all day with our family? Is it not strange that most of us have no clue what to do when we have all the spare time in the world because we forgot to think about what makes us “tick”?
It is alright to have these feelings of insecurity. It is alright to doubt yourself and not know what you want in life. Honestly, it’s OK. We were taught not to think about that. We were taught to be an efficient part of the system and be obedient workers. From our first days in class to the last hours in our office we listen, we laugh, we work. But we do not live.
You will always want
Virtually all major religions of humanity revolve around two significant themes: desire and suffering. Every religion is basically a new way of looking at these two constants of the human experience. It is in our nature to desire, and it is our nature to experience great suffering. The reality is that each generation, each child, each parent, each lover and heartbroken friend will experience this.
Life is a journey with a clear starting point, and a clear ending. But, each and everyone of us experiences the same cycles of desire and suffering. During life itself, while living, we have little to no clear beginnings, nor ends. We set ourselves goals to achieve, diplomas to get, jobs to obtain, vacations to go on, houses to buy… Only to discover that after each achievement, we want more. It is that feeling as a kid on Christmas eve, not being able to sleep of excitement. This desire will change over time, but it will never go away.
Always in life, when we finally obtain that one thing we always wanted, the feeling of fulfillment quickly subsides and we start desiring something new, bigger, better. it is never enough.
There is no clear sign in life telling us that we have reached ‘the end’ of what we can hope to achieve. Achieving a diploma might seem as the ultimate end goal when you study, but it is but a start of something new. The same applies to your pension. Every ‘end goal’ in life is merely the start of a new beginning.
The Pillars of Man
This insight, coupled with the current challenges we face and opportunities we are provided with, have taught me that a new way of living and thinking about living is needed. Being faced with isolation has a tendency to make us reflect on what is important and what is not. A crisis shows us the things that work, and the things that are broken. The future we can create is one in which there is work aplenty, but we do not have to work. A world in which work means something different, in which we work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity. An ideology based on renewed values, centered around empathy and creativity. Not unlimited, unsustainable economic growth, but unlimited personal growth and exploration of the human experience. It is about achieving your true potential.
The Ideology revolves around six central themes which I call “the Pillars of Man”. These are Culture, Spirituality, Care, Sports, Science & Education, Exploration. Each Pillar is a path that represents a “never-ending journey” in which there is no true end-state. One could be kept busy with either one, or all Pillars in life. It is a choice we are free to make. All of these Pillars represent parts of what makes us human, the things that motivate us in our daily lives, that what defines us and makes us “tick”.
Care
Care is all about empathy, focused on people in the here and now. It is about helping others, either in a hospital or as a leader in politics. It is being a nurse in a nursing home for old people, or simply taking care of your sick mother at the end of her life. It is about being human. Supporting each other during times of great suffering, but also during times of great pleasure.
Culture
Culture focuses more on the long-term collective and our identities. It focuses more on things, such as food, language, music, arts and creating beautiful buildings. It is everything that makes us feel part of the group, a single tribe.
Spirituality
Spirituality is the deeper, emotional part of us longing for deeper meaning. It is about God, the nature of universe, and the reason of existence. It is everything that we cannot see, taste, smell or touch, but feel inside. It is the reality that we all have, but cannot share. These are all the things we want to believe.
Sports
Sports are fun. Sports are all about team competition, winning and losing, playing with friends, learning how to socialize and spend time with each other. It is about raising the bar and becoming the best version of yourself. It is going the extra mile in a never-ending competition.
Science & Education
Science & Education is about knowledge, the search for truth, but most importantly sharing that knowledge. It is about teaching children to learn, and learning new skills to people who want to. It is life-long-schooling, teaching, and helping others in sharing the right information.
Exploration
Exploration is about travel, seeking the frontiers and going beyond. It is about figuring out yourself and immersing yourself in new ways of thinking, cultures and views on the world. It is experiencing the full range of the human existence and bringing that existence beyond its current boundaries, into space itself.
“Learning is the only thing the mind never exhausts, never fears, and never regrets.”
Closing Remarks
The Quarantine makes us hold up a mirror and shows us, with shocking self-reflection, our true nature. It also lays bare all that is wrong with ‘the system’. It is my hope that from this great suffering comes a realization - because we are forced to - that there is considerable potential to change working practices and lifestyles. These challenges make we wonder:
Do we really want to go back to the same way of living as before?
To me, the answer is a clear and definitive NO. If you agree and wonder: then how will we live in the future? How can we re-organize our societies in such a way that we can focus on the pillars and not worry about making ends meet? I will propose an answer to those questions in my third and final part of Redefining “Work”, in which I will portray a possible future society incorporating everything I have written and learned so far.
Personal Note
Losing something reminds you of what it is worth. Considering I do not have any kids or family to take care for at the moment, everyone around me is healthy plus the fact that I still have my job with a permanent contract, I feel quite secure.
Me working from home (above) vs. some of my colleagues working from home (left). I know I am privileged with my personal situation during the Quarantine.
On the one hand, this puts me in a bit of an awkward position as I do not ‘feel the pain’ as much as some others. On the other hand, it puts me in the perfect position precisely because I do not ‘feel the pain’ as much as some others. If everyone was in the same financial position as me (not having to worry about work or income), I believe this crisis would have been a LOT less traumatic for many persons. While in this position, it gives me somewhat of a birds-eye view on what is happening in the World. It provides me the perspective that a new way of thinking about our lives needed. I know now, more than ever, we need to fundamentally and drastically rearrange our economies and the way we organize our societies in order to rise up to the challenge we are currently faced with. That is why I feel a new ideology is needed.
Creating a new ideology is not a new idea of mine and there are plenty of other smarties working on it (a ‘smartie’ or ‘schmartie’ is a smart person). I got the idea after reading the entire series of books by Yuval Noah Harari, i.e. Sapiens, Homo Deus and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Yuval aptly describes how humans view the world. How we construct ideas, principles and religions. In that we are unique on this Earth. He has shown me that the world works according to how we want to believe the world works. For example, capitalism and democracy are considered a given, but they only exist for a mere 200 years or so. These systems exist and ‘work’ only because we believe them to work. Covid-19 shows us the reality that some aspects of them are fundamentally broken and do not work in the 21st century.
At this point however, I agree that my new ideology based on the Pillars is still a faint idea. I will need to explore and explain it better before I can convey it properly to most people. Then again I also need to share my views, even though they are incomplete. I will not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. So, if you have ideas or beliefs that can add to mine, please let me know in the comments.