Yesterday I came across two related posts about our working lives.
The first was this Forbes report ranking the OECD countries from hardest to most leisurely workers, based on average annual hours worked. The South Koreans came 'top' in one sense, working on average 2357 hours a year. The Dutch came 'top' in my book, working 1391 hours per year on average.
My country of birth, the USA, is the 9th hardest working, at 1797 hours per year; my adopted country, the UK, is the 20th hardest working among the 32 OECD states, with its long work week being largely offset by its 20 days of vacation a year.
The article shares a soul-numbing story of the life of an 'average' Korean worker, which makes me feel bad for them, as they seem to have no life at all.
To be honest, from what I've seen even in the relatively slack UK, managers and professionals have virtually no time away from work - especially if you take into consideration the lengthy commutes workers in London face. (This may well be true of other workers, I just don't have the same direct experience there.)
A second article, by Lucy Kellaway in the BBC News Magazine examines our ever-more-desperate search for meaning in our work. It seems that success, money and advancement are not enough. We want to feel that our efforts have a purpose, and this seems to be more true today than 10 or 20 years ago.
Madeleine Bunting tells us why this is so, and why it is connected to the hard work covered by Forbes, in her book, Willing Slaves. Many of us are spending more time at work, taking more time to get to and from work and bringing more work home than our parents did. We are also being driven to greater levels of efficiency at work and being asked for greater levels of emotional commitment to work than they were.
As our roles as productive agents in the economy crowd out our roles with family, friends and community, as we find less time for hobbies, volunteering and recreation, we are - counter-productively - seeking meaning in the only activity of any scale left in our time portfolio, WORK.
Why do I say that this 'eggs in one basket' search for meaning through work is counter-productive? Perhaps I should first say that it is RISKY. This is not only because risk is mitigated by spreading our investments (hopes, wishes, bets) across a portfolio of vehicles but also because work is an area of our lives where most of us have relatively little control. The company is bought by a competitor, and our job is a 'synergy' to be 'captured'. Profits are tight, so costs, including the project we've been working on for 4 months, must be cut. A re-organisation shifts our team or our responsibilities. The boss takes exception to our questioning her decision.
I'm not saying we should wish for a utopia in which these things don't happen. We have to live in the real world. I'm just saying that our work is a relatively rickety boat on stormy seas and therefore not the best vehicle to carry all our hopes for meaning in our lives. As with other investments, it is far less risky to pursue life meaning through a portfolio of activities rather than through one. And even if you were to pick one, work is probably not the best.
Which brings us back to the point about the counter productivity of looking at work as the source for life meaning and self esteem. For most, vesting oneself too completely in work is counter productive because we and those to whom we answer are human. Their humanity means that, as they are squeezed by their boss, the market, the taxpayers, falling donor funding, etc, they will grasp and pull any lever they can to get us to sacrifice our own well-being for the good of the company, the department, the team. Our humanity means that our uni-dimensional hope for meaning and self esteem from our work constitutes a tactical weakness and offers just such a lever for our bosses to manipulate to some collective end.
Please don't think that I'm saying these people are evil. I'm just saying that they too are subject to pressures and that they will do what they can to meet the ever-stretching targets they are set. The more single minded they are, the more completely they place their hope for life meaning in their own work, the more this is true.
I'm also not saying that we should not commit ourselves to joint efforts. Failing to do so would lead us to very lonely lives. Teamwork and community effort are very important, but they are not on offer only through paid work.
So how do we break out of this? We need to spend longer hours at work to succeed. These longer hours cannibalise the time we might otherwise spend with friends & family, in sport & fitness, in community service, in creative endeavour. As those activities slip by the wayside, we find that work is the only game in town. Rather than sink into a nihilistic funk, believing that nothing matters, we quite naturally look for meaning, fulfillment, self definition through the one activity we have at any sort of scale - our work. Where is the escape route from this downward spiral?
I believe it is in drawing a line at work at the point that ensures there is enough of us left for the other activities and relationships that enrich our lives. 'Easier send than done,' I hear you say. So let's look at the impediments:
Let's not unthinkingly accept work as the only game in town just because the ever-pressing needs of economic growth and efficiency ratchet up the demands in our work lives. Remember, markets are two-sided, and if enough of us vote with our feet in favour of a more balanced life, the market will move with us.
The first was this Forbes report ranking the OECD countries from hardest to most leisurely workers, based on average annual hours worked. The South Koreans came 'top' in one sense, working on average 2357 hours a year. The Dutch came 'top' in my book, working 1391 hours per year on average.
My country of birth, the USA, is the 9th hardest working, at 1797 hours per year; my adopted country, the UK, is the 20th hardest working among the 32 OECD states, with its long work week being largely offset by its 20 days of vacation a year.
The article shares a soul-numbing story of the life of an 'average' Korean worker, which makes me feel bad for them, as they seem to have no life at all.
To be honest, from what I've seen even in the relatively slack UK, managers and professionals have virtually no time away from work - especially if you take into consideration the lengthy commutes workers in London face. (This may well be true of other workers, I just don't have the same direct experience there.)
A second article, by Lucy Kellaway in the BBC News Magazine examines our ever-more-desperate search for meaning in our work. It seems that success, money and advancement are not enough. We want to feel that our efforts have a purpose, and this seems to be more true today than 10 or 20 years ago.
Madeleine Bunting tells us why this is so, and why it is connected to the hard work covered by Forbes, in her book, Willing Slaves. Many of us are spending more time at work, taking more time to get to and from work and bringing more work home than our parents did. We are also being driven to greater levels of efficiency at work and being asked for greater levels of emotional commitment to work than they were.
As our roles as productive agents in the economy crowd out our roles with family, friends and community, as we find less time for hobbies, volunteering and recreation, we are - counter-productively - seeking meaning in the only activity of any scale left in our time portfolio, WORK.
Why do I say that this 'eggs in one basket' search for meaning through work is counter-productive? Perhaps I should first say that it is RISKY. This is not only because risk is mitigated by spreading our investments (hopes, wishes, bets) across a portfolio of vehicles but also because work is an area of our lives where most of us have relatively little control. The company is bought by a competitor, and our job is a 'synergy' to be 'captured'. Profits are tight, so costs, including the project we've been working on for 4 months, must be cut. A re-organisation shifts our team or our responsibilities. The boss takes exception to our questioning her decision.
I'm not saying we should wish for a utopia in which these things don't happen. We have to live in the real world. I'm just saying that our work is a relatively rickety boat on stormy seas and therefore not the best vehicle to carry all our hopes for meaning in our lives. As with other investments, it is far less risky to pursue life meaning through a portfolio of activities rather than through one. And even if you were to pick one, work is probably not the best.
Which brings us back to the point about the counter productivity of looking at work as the source for life meaning and self esteem. For most, vesting oneself too completely in work is counter productive because we and those to whom we answer are human. Their humanity means that, as they are squeezed by their boss, the market, the taxpayers, falling donor funding, etc, they will grasp and pull any lever they can to get us to sacrifice our own well-being for the good of the company, the department, the team. Our humanity means that our uni-dimensional hope for meaning and self esteem from our work constitutes a tactical weakness and offers just such a lever for our bosses to manipulate to some collective end.
Please don't think that I'm saying these people are evil. I'm just saying that they too are subject to pressures and that they will do what they can to meet the ever-stretching targets they are set. The more single minded they are, the more completely they place their hope for life meaning in their own work, the more this is true.
I'm also not saying that we should not commit ourselves to joint efforts. Failing to do so would lead us to very lonely lives. Teamwork and community effort are very important, but they are not on offer only through paid work.
So how do we break out of this? We need to spend longer hours at work to succeed. These longer hours cannibalise the time we might otherwise spend with friends & family, in sport & fitness, in community service, in creative endeavour. As those activities slip by the wayside, we find that work is the only game in town. Rather than sink into a nihilistic funk, believing that nothing matters, we quite naturally look for meaning, fulfillment, self definition through the one activity we have at any sort of scale - our work. Where is the escape route from this downward spiral?
I believe it is in drawing a line at work at the point that ensures there is enough of us left for the other activities and relationships that enrich our lives. 'Easier send than done,' I hear you say. So let's look at the impediments:
- Some are struggling at a very basic level of subsistence and don't have the luxury of taking stands at work. For them, work is about survival and basic comforts, not about self actualisation and meaning. Granted.
- We care about succeeding. Standards are high in today's labour market, and if we don't throw our full selves into our jobs, we won't keep up with the best, and we'll be, at best, average. We can't pretend that life doesn't involve trade-offs, but they are sometimes not as stark as we think. Finding ways to contribute the most possible within the boundaries you set may well leave you doing more than just keeping up. Even if you end up being less successful at work, that can be more than offset by your success and contribution in other areas of your life.
- But the other areas of my life don't put food on the table or buy me the nice things I want. As I granted in the first bullet point above, putting food on the table, keeping a roof above your head, providing security for your family must come first. However, when we move beyond these and a further layer of modern 'needs', we need to ask ourselves how important our further material desires really are. And why are they important? Because other people have them - nice cars, holidays to Spanish resorts, plasma screen TVs? Look, you can make your life choices however you want, I'm just prompting you to make them in a considered way, rather than thoughtlessly slogging along on the treadmill. Many people with all those great toys find themselves with no time to use them, and they still 'hunger' for the next toy in a never-ending expansion of wants. Anyway, more on this in another post, I think.
Let's not unthinkingly accept work as the only game in town just because the ever-pressing needs of economic growth and efficiency ratchet up the demands in our work lives. Remember, markets are two-sided, and if enough of us vote with our feet in favour of a more balanced life, the market will move with us.
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