Distracting Ourselves From Death?

I have been reading Alain De Botton’s recently published book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. I approached it with caution. He may be a philosopher but what he is reflecting on are his own personal interpretations and thoughts.

De Botton does not say if he has ever experienced the futility of many jobs. He does propose that we are “meaning-focused animals rather than simply materialistic ones”. Maybe so but for some, as recent events in international banking show, seeking money and power remain key. The most casual observer of party politics can plainly see self-serving actions and dirty tricks in the pursuit of political gain. De Botton also says that we have a “prodigeous and steady hunger for support and love”. Again, the darker side of human nature harbours in some a strong desire for power and dominance. Towards the end of the book, De Botton talks about death and suggests that:

“work will at least have distracted us … it will have focused our immeasurable anxieties on a few relatively small-scale and achievable goals”

If This Is A Man

I would thoroughly recommend Primo Levi’s books, If This Is A Man and The Drowned And The Saved. The foreword to If This Is A Man describes the book as being about “the descent into hell”. It describes his time in Auschwitz. Levi is driven to be a witness to unspeakable things and this is what he does in The Drowned And The Saved.

In The Drowned And The Saved, Levi describes the abominations and violence of persecutory slave labour. And even in under these circumstances, he comments on the few in the Lager able to exercise their own trades – tailors, cobblers, carpenters, blacksmiths and bricklayers:

“Resuming their customary activity, recovered at the same time, to some extent, their human dignity. But it was also a defence for many others, an exercise of the mind, and escape from the thought of death, a way of living day by day”

Levi describes the “curious phenomenon” of the compusion to do a job well out of professional dignity and the conscious effort needed to do a job badly. He notes that Solzhenitsyn describes an identical tendency in One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, and recalls in the film The Bridge Over The River Kwai:

“the absurd zeal with which the English officer, a prisoner of the Japanese, strives to build an audacious wooden bridge for them, and is shocked when he realises that the English sappers have mined it … love for a job well done is a deeply ambiguous virtue”.

Why Do We Do It?

This is a far-from-simple question.

We all know people who work silly hours, sometimes because it is what is expected of them and they comply, and in other cases the unreasonable hours worked are self-imposed. This is the love of a job well-done, where people are driven by exacting, self-determined professional standards even though they understand that they are either being economically exploited or perhaps neglecting their home lives. For others, work is indeed a welcome distraction. Why we do it is a complex mix of contextual, systemic, emotional, psychological and value-driven factors. The complexity of these influencing factors confounds, I think, simplistic attempts at ‘employee engagement’.

For me, I am aware of the relative nearness of death (as opposed to when I was in my 20s and 30s). I know time is finite and diminshing. That is not what drives me, though. It is doing stuff to prove to myself I can do it. Like building a business. Confidence comes with age and the psychological need to achieve has not dimmed in any way. What about you? Beyond the need to earn a living, what drives you in the work you do and the way you do it?