LSE Events | Alain de Botton | The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

first of all let me welcome you on behalf of the former European philosophy to this evening and I should explain before us anything else that I'm not as it says on the screen cats we know da I have in fact out a Monty furia allow the president of the forum for European philosophy but that put aside very rapidly it gives me enormous pleasure to be able to welcome I'll under bottle back to the forum tonight Allah has been one of our most regular and reliable supporters and spoken for us on a number of previous occasions and I'm also delighted to see so many of you over here that join in welcoming him back I don't think he needs a very long introduction he's written of course many books which means most of you would have read I think at least some of them I should give you that I would fail to remember them all by heart I'm sure but the first on the one I would like to mention how proofs can change your life is knowledge I read a very long time ago with enormous pleasure whether it changed my life or not I don't know but it certainly cheered me up and it was a great read the consolations of philosophy are also fairly conserving and then out of trouble status anxiety that's a bit more worrying of course the architecture of happiness pleasures and sorrows of work of which he's going to talk to you about tonight but I sure that perhaps just add that he had the rather unusual post of philosophy residents of the at Heathrow and he has written about his experiences there and conceivably he may actually put in a word or two beside what it's like to be a philosopher in residence at Heathrow after the talk there will be a very brief and rapid a book signing let's say signing of Anna's book of the subject of which he's talking about tonight but I don't want to waste more of your time by going on talking myself now turn it over to Allah thank you very much thank you all for coming and these mics on this mic is on yeah what I'm gonna talk about tonight is the subject of of my new book on on work and hopefully then we'll have time for a discussion and very keen that it's not just me talking tonight so so do come back at me with the thoughts and ideas but let me let me introduce some ideas first I think when we're thinking about the subject of work it's important to recognize that our ideas about work a very very strange indeed we're often struck by the modernity and sort of exemplary nature of our technology but it's not really our technology that sets us apart from previous generations in in work so much as our attitudes to work in particular the vision that we have that work could make us happy this is a very striking idea anybody who's been through the UK's education system both at a secondary and at a higher level will have imbibed a vision that the point of work is not merely money the point of work is to find fulfilment and anything less than that is somehow a betrayal of certain hopes that are almost naturally inculcated by the education system so to be modern is to expect that we may find happiness through work of course it doesn't always happen that way you all know that feeling you get on a Sunday evening when you know just when the Sun is setting and the gap between your hopes for your working life and the reality of your working life become very very obvious best to take to the bed and normally by about 8:00 p.m. the worst is over but it's a it's not merely a private experience I think that I'm telling you I think it's a it's a broader phenomenon it's the moment when the weekend crashes up into certain kind of psychological realities of our working lives I think that the the centrality of the idea of happiness lying at the core of our attitudes to work is so modern that it helps to just scroll back in time a little bit historic perspective on this if you ask Aristotle what work was he would tell you straight away that work was slavery for Aristotle anyone who is dependent on another human being for their wages for their survival is a slave they may not be technically a slave but that is what Aristotle would call them this very dark vision of work continues in the Christian era with the idea that work is not incidentally painful it is painful by necessity that work is a way of paying off the sins of Adam and Eve and therefore to complain about the evils of work is to misunderstand the nature of existence this is simply a fact of existence this very very dark vision of work starts to fracture in the early modern period I know I'm talking in a university context so forgive me for generalizations but in about 1750 attitudes to work start to change they really do start to change around then 1750 is the publication date of deed rose or secular PD this famous work that for the first time eulogizes ordinary occupations ordinary crafts we would call them so there are chapters in the site encyclopedia on such jobs as making bread forging an anchor working as a blacksmith these are suddenly things that the bourgeois world the new bourgeois world that is taking shape starts to value for the first time and in voices like those of a Diderot but also of men like Rousseau or Benjamin Franklin in the United States you have a new approach to work that work can be not slavery but a precisely an escape from enslavement it's a way of realizing ourselves it's a way of achieving authenticity it's a way of creating our individuality all these very modern concepts that we now take - absolutely for granted starting to crystallize in the middle of the 18th century it's intriguing that it's exactly this sort of time that there are new attitudes to love again historians of ideas have long pointed out that in about the middle of the 18th century you have a new idea cropping up about marriage it used to be assumed that the reasons why you would marry somebody would be strictly dynastic or practical they'll be to raise children to unite your strip of land with a neighbor's strip of land but you didn't do it for love suddenly a new idea ston assuring idea many of us still wrestling with it that you can marry for love and that that should be one of the principle motives for for marriage and we see it the reason I'm mentioning is this is there's a comparable union here of necessity and pleasure so work is no longer just for money and marriage is no longer just for procreation or dynastic concerns in both cases there is an element of fulfillment that is being proposed and we are the heirs of these two very important ideas that love and work can deliver Freud in this Center archetypal modern famously said that the two pillars of our satisfaction are work and love and we are very much we live that philosophy which is incidentally why it's very hard to find a human being these days in our society who isn't suffering from either of crisis of love or work or perhaps unfortunately both but these are regular occurrences that punctuate the life of the modern self and they do so as I say not incidentally but structurally and so these are beautiful ideas but they're also very very challenging ones and that's in a way so starting point for my thinking about this subject I wanted to write a book about work partly because it doesn't get written about very much I should qualify this but there of course lots of books on economics this is the place to mention them but economics an economic vision of work is of course only one slice of what work is about when you read the Financial Times and you hear the past year in a company's life summed up that is of course a very narrow summary of the activities of what might be tens of thousands of people and and there is of course a whole other human side to the story that I was tempted to bring out if you read fiction there is of course very little data on the world of work if you were to take a proverbial Martian to water stones and introduce it to the spread of and novels on the front table they've come away with an impression that basically human beings spend their time falling in love squabbling with their families occasionally murdering one another but what they don't do is to go to the office they don't have jobs because because writers on the whole only know about the job of writing and this put a severe limit on their own imaginations as to what other people are doing so there's a curious silence about this activity that is absolutely the center of our culture there's an imaginative quiet there's almost an idea which you crop up which you see cropping up in guidebooks that any time that is leisure time should not be focused on anything to do with the world of work and so if you read guidebooks to most countries that one thing that's always missing will very often missing is any mention of how the people in the landscape through which you're traveling are making their living you hear a lot about you know the Basilica on the hillside the painting of certain frescoes etc but no one's telling you how money is being made and this is again I think not just a kind of coincidence this is plugged into our deep suspicion of an interest in production in our moments of leisure production the world of production is not seen as something that we should be taking an interest in in our hours of what should be in the capitalist model consumption so production consumption should be kept very separate wasn't always the case you know in the 18th century when English aristocratic young men traveled to the continent on their so-called grand tours they would be looking out not just for the culture of the countries that they visited but also the economies in a broader sense the economies of the lands they travel through so an 18th century tour is visiting say Naples would not just head straight to the churches and the palaces they would be looking at the aqueducts they would be thinking of the navel yards of the way that wheat was stored in the city etc and this was seen as a legitimate source of of curiosity but now no more it's interesting that the the one group of people who are allowed to be curious about all this are the people who don't or not least not supposed to work and that's children children allowed to be curious about the working world is a I've got a three and a five year old and they're both absolutely fascinated by a book by the American children's author Richard Scarry called what do people do all day and I don't know if you if you know it but I want to call my book what do people do all day I think it's a great title but this book watch people do all those dividers ten chapters that basically just looks at how stuff is done how stuff is made how paper is made how electricity is generated but how coal is dug out of the ground etc and children are allowed and are very fascinated by this but in the adult world I say there's a curious kind of silence not always in in all areas I mean if you switch on the television there are a few shows that will tell you quite a lot about the working world TV dramas are good at telling you about the world of law also the world of medicine and nursing and the world of criminality but if you're interested in a career outside of those three areas allergic to bee then the Naza curious signs have never seen a TV drama about logistics or accountancy etc so that's why I was challenged precisely to write chapters on occupations like the world of logistics or the world of accountancy another thing that sort of spurred me on was a group of people that I came across down at Tilbury Docks people forget that London is still a very busy port the port of London is is still remarkably busy day and night shipping in the stuff that keeps London going in many ways but the fashionable question in in London is always you know what's on at the National Gallery not what's coming in at Tilbury Docks but some extraordinary stuff is coming in if you go down there any day of the week you will see very very interesting cargo no one's looking in fact it's very very hard to spend any time there because the place is surrounded by barbed wire and threatening signs of what will happen to you if you linger but there are that I did come across a small group of people many of them were the proverbial beards and thick-soled shoes ship spotters there are a group normally there's a jetty that you can go to opposite Tilbury Docks and there's always a group of people there with binoculars spotting the cargo as it comes in and out I I was very interested in what they were doing I wasn't so interested I guess in what they were doing with objects of their curiosity because really all this in concerned about was length and type of engines and they reminded me of somebody who's fallen deeply in love with someone and all they can think of doing sort of measuring there is parts of her or his Anatomy it seemed very limited a direction of curiosity but nevertheless I like the way they were being curious about this as I say very neglected part of the world which is it's working Coke's is curiously neglected part so what I want to do slides maybe dip into different working environments and some of the ideas that I came across as I journeyed through them one of the worlds that I wanted to explore the world of logistics logistics as I say is that part of the economy invested in getting stuff around it's a huge employer of people especially in the UK and and is a reflection really of how much of the stuff that we consume comes from somewhere else you know 200 years ago we consumed very little but we tended to know where it came from it came from the vicinity and we would tend to know the people who made it who assembled it we'd have a personal relationship with with the producers who's whose goods we depended upon now there's a huge choice but very very little connection and that loss of connection has led to a loss of all sorts of feelings it's led to a feeling as Marx famously put it of alienation where we literally do not understand where the goods and services we rely on were produced it leads to feelings of guilt as we imagine the worst and it also leads to feelings of a loss of a sense of wonder because there are some rather astonishing things that lie behind those little signs for things like made in Thailand it isn't necessarily very local it it is anyway extremely interesting in all cases but as I say we're not encouraged in any way to take to be curious about it the emphasis of all producers is on is on the act of consumption that's what you're being directed to I felt this I heard that I've spent some time at Heathrow this summer and I was struck by the way I spent some time looking at how airline meals are assembled and it strikes me that watching how an airline meal is made is infinitely more interesting than actually eating it but it is not something that an airport will ever allow you to do if you're just an ordinary member of the public the processes by which an airline works and operates and is refueled and replenished is strictly off limits and it's not just practical it's not about security there's an imaginative problem you're not supposed to be interested in it that's not what that's not what the point of it is and so there's a huge loss in that and I wanted to think about that I remember one day I one night I was off the m25 in a giant warehouse owned by Sainsbury's which feeds all the Sainsbury stores within the m25 the word Cathedral much overused but this really was the size of many many cathedrals and there was an area in in there there was at least the size of this building devoted to what was called exact what's called exotic fish which is any fish caught outside of the UK territorial waters and there's a section about the size of this hole devoted simply to tuna steaks and I remember talking to the warehouse manager and asked him where these steaks had come from and when and he informed me that they'd all come from the Indian Ocean and would have been in the ocean about 22 hours before and would have to be by law consumed and on people's plates in the next 48 hours an incredibly tight window of time and it was then that I developed this curious and no doubt slightly insane desire to try and follow a fish back from the ocean to the plate and I then spent the next sort of three or four months trying to track down every single person who came in touch with a representative fish and I could have been anything really it could have been iron ore from the Western Australian desert that I would have followed to the car factories of Mexico whatever the point was not so much what it was but to try and follow a journey to try and recover those imaginative links because I think one of the things that art can hope to do in the age of advanced logistics is to reconnect us to make for us imaginatively those connections that the process of production trying to edit out constantly and therefore give us back and in that imaginative connection to people and processes that modern technology and management has has robbed us of so that was yes and thoughts about about logistics another area that I went to look at was the world of Career Counseling an NF any of you here come from that world but it is a fascinating world in a sense the job of being a career counselor is the most important job in the world it's the job that will tell people what job they should do and is absolutely central as I say to our modern imaginative ideas of happiness the interesting thing about being confused about what work you want to do is that we have a very hard time it's very easy to know that you're dissatisfied very hard to know what might make you more satisfied and in that sense it's different from other kinds of unhappiness short or unhappy lover and you say you know what's wrong with your situation that person will be able to tell you quite clearly what is wrong and at least the imaginative solution to their problem they would say you know if only my partner were X Y & Z etc people who are unhappy in their jobs very often have a very difficult time trying to say what might make them happier and this is where the job of career counseling that's what the job of career counseling is kind of founded upon that mystery the the career counsel I went to see who operated from his home in South London his his assumption is that the reason why many of us are so confused about our careers and can't readily think of alternatives is that we're very very concerned with something that has the shape of a career something that will deliver the status and income that we associate with that word career and he thinks I think interestingly that that cuts us off from discovering or from getting in touch with the spontaneous sources of interest which might guide us more accurately to our genuine interests and talents so the first thing that he does when people come in to see him is that he sits them down and tells them to stop thinking about what job they should do instead he gives them a piece of paper and tells them to write a list without thinking too much about what they're writing telling them telling him the sort of things they're interested in and he makes it deliberately very open it could be anything from you know you like drinking milk to chatting to your grandmother to going from country walk to fantasizing that you run a fish and chip shop doesn't matter what it is put it down and this then becomes the basis for a sustained such a month-long a series of investigations into the origins of certain interests etc he compares the Assembly of a workable idea of what you might do with your life to a treasure hunter who's going over the ground with a metal detector listening out for faint beeps of interest and he thinks that one of the worst ideas that we have is that is the idea of a calling you know it's a in medieval English this idea of a calling came to be popularly spoken about and it's really the idea that that many of us are likely to receive a sign from God about how we should direct our careers that literally we will get a sign from above and this career counselor thought that from a secular point of view this is nonsense but still very influential that many of us still half expect that at some point the sky will open at a finger will point to us and say accountancy for you and you know academia for you et cetera and it just doesn't happen most of us as he puts it have these beeps of interest that are guiding us and nothing stronger and the point is to try and assemble these into something that's that's coherent which will depend on a long process of introspection this of course very very hard to change career once you're in a particular path and one of the reasons why is that the assumptions of our friends plan our families place enormous pressure on us and so one of the things you might want to do if considering a career change to change your friends or you might need to because people hold us back through their assumptions they say things to us like I I never imagined you as someone who thought about that or something and that can really restrict us and declaring to others to the our immediate circle that we have decided to make a change is an incredibly painful process in some ways analogous to announcing a change in one's sexuality it's you know imagine you gather your family around and you tell them I've got something very important to say to you your sister runs upstairs crying going I always knew it you say you know you always thought of me as an accountant but but really I'm a landscape gardener and it can be very very painful process but it teaches us I suppose to be aware that what's on the business card is only a very sharp appreciation of the true person we live in a world where one of the first questions that you always feel in any social encounter is what do you do and and of course it's at that moment that so many of us want to say I do X but I hope for Y and yet this is something that an impatient world very seldom gives us a time for all this said I'm not entirely sympathetic to career counseling I think in many ways it's a deeply and naively a political process in the sense that it suggests that the only reason why people don't end up in the careers they want to have is that they haven't discovered that career within themselves or in other words it shifts the emphasis from the from the economic and the political to the psychological in a way which i think is often unfair to reality and so that's one problem I think the other problem sometimes is it's the over optimism that's built into the whole job it's sometimes reminds me of creative writing teaching that I've done a bit of and the assumption in creative writing teaching is that everybody has got it in them to be a great writer which I sadly don't think is true and the assumption of of career counseling again is that everybody is everybody's destiny to have a glorious and authentic and meaningful career which again the political and economic system prevents us from having let alone our own deficiencies and an inner challenges so a kind of naivety there temperamentally I'm more attractive I suppose to a vision of the workplace as one in which we can never expect that more than a share of us will be in jobs that accurately reflect our talents we talk of waste all the time wasting electricity wasting water wasting resources of course the one resource that we continue to waste in prodigious quantities is human life our own and those of others and it's certainly my hope that in the 21st century will get slightly cleverer at managing to extract from people those talents which they themselves are not aware of and necessarily in which we all struggle to to get a grip on there's a lovely concept in st. Augustine where he ridicules and declares a sin the idea that all of us are necessarily in the right jobs or as he puts it posts he says it's a sin to judge a man by his post and in that he means that the posts that we have are on earth is likely to have come our way through all sorts of series of accidents chances and other posts that we might have had have gone missing through similar process of accidents and so we must be very careful in judging people and this flies in the face of the modern meritocratic vision of life where politicians on all sides of the political spectrum are always trying to help us to create a meritocracy a society where everybody will end up where they merit a being and while many of the steps many many marriage aquatic steps are of course admirable the idea that you can ever get to a true meritocracy is insane and cruel because ultimately we can never end up ourselves exploiting all our talents and no one else will either and so bearing that in mind and any new social encounter seems a very very important part of civilization let me move on to another working environment and another set of ideas and the other another job that I went to investigate is the world of biscuit manufacturer I went to hang out with the UK's largest biscuit company which is called United biscuits they make lots of they're the second in a bag nut market but their biggest in biscuits and they make popular household names like McVitie's and admit jaffa cakes and those make hula hoops and KP skips it's such a huge organization and I went to they let me in to observe the launch of a new biscuit a huge launch for them many millions of pounds invested in it called the moment I don't know any who have ever eaten a fitties moment you shouldn't have done because all biscuits have a demographic I didn't know this but all because of a very tightly defined target audience the moment is designed for 26 to 36 year old female audience lower-income living in north of England as you're wheeling your supermarket trolley down the aisle long before you know what you want to eat a biscuit why's the biscuit knows that you're coming and itself so you can learn an awful lot about about people by asking them what their favourite biscuit is my favourite biscuit is a Jaffa Cake which is apparently it's sort of secret identity from a marketing point of view the Jaffa Cake is a biscuit for people who are very interested in a healthy active lifestyle based on healthy nutrition but are not actually going to do any of that that's the Jaffa Cake so so I think 15,000 people working at United Biscuits across a number of manufacturing sites and one of the things I soon found talking to people at United Biscuits is I couldn't understand what their jobs were you know when I when I asked that proverbial question what do you do it took normally about five or six other questions follow-up questions before I could get a sense of what they were doing they were doing is like being a you know packaging technologists or data systems analysts very very hard to understand now this you probably have observed this phenomena in many social situations you know generally nowadays when you get into conversation about jobs it can be very hard to understand immediately what someone is up to this is absolutely right from an economic point of view economists sure some of them in the room will know that that is the basis of our assumptions of how societies get wealthy specialization economic specialization for the economist vilfredo pareto but there's a car stein law that suggests that the more specialized the society is the higher its and its wealth will be there's no point train drivers coming home in the evening and starting to make yogurt or brain surgeons having a go at making children's clothes you specialize in a certain area and then of course trade your your your your goods with others and that's the way to wealth it is of course a very very productive way from an economic point of view but there is a human cost as I'm not the first to point out and this is what I was interested in what is the human cost of this economic again and I think that one of the ways to point to it is with a word meaning one of the things that I kept finding in my time at United Biscuits was that word many people they're earning a very good money but many of them on Facebook and in private situations when I talk to them would admit to problems of meaning and otherwise they say what on earth is the meaning of what I'm doing and that word because I would kept coming up I sort of thought well what is that word meaning what what do people mean when they use that word I think that one of the things we desperately want from our work is to change the world for the better it's not a fashionable idea because the leading economic idea is that we're out for ourselves to maximize our income of course we are from many points of view there is also a very very powerful drive in us to make a difference to other people's lives for the better to either reduce suffering in others or to increase pleasure reducing suffering you know being a brain search and a nurse etc these are obviously very meaningful jobs but there are also you know any job that increases pleasure it is partaking in the same sort of process if you're reuniting somebody with their lost luggage or sanding a stair banister you are at the end of the day leaving the world slightly better than you found it at the beginning and this is an absolutely essential part I think of a meaningful life and hence a satisfied working life don't get me wrong making biscuits is in a sense a meaningful activity anyone who's ever been hungry at 11 o'clock knows thank goodness that McVitie's exists and other things we can get our teeth into the problem is it doesn't feel very meaningful in many links across those 15,000 people meaning is lost and that's the view with specialization the links between the product and its manufacturing processes are so large and that we lose as a worker we lose an imaginative connection with the products that we're that we're making so biscuits was used to be an artisanal process the flour and other ingredients would come in in the morning you turn them into biscuits you'd see the pleasure on someone's face in the evening and it was all extremely tangible now if we were employee 8,300 in the office in Hays where United Biscuits is based you know you might have a job insuring the pallets that are used when transferring biscuits around different sites that United Biscuits use around the UK that's very very far from the whole business of actually consuming producing the biscuit in its artisanal form and this leads to feelings of as I say meaninglessness and this is something the industrial world struggles with and that I was keen to to investigate let me let me carry on and dip into another area of working life which is the world of accountancy which I went to see partly I was challenged to write about accountants because it's accountancy is the proverbial boring job accountants tend to apologise when they declare what they do and this seemed this even possible it couldn't be possible that a job that so at the center of economic life could be so truly boring and I was challenged to find out and was graciously given a an opportunity to do so by an affirm that i sadly subsequently not allowed to name for legal reasons but it's the second largest accountancy firm in the world and they've got offices near Tower Bridge but I'll go further anyway a very large these offices very very large ten thousand people working on this site and I went to hang out in this vast white-collar factory I suppose and I was very interested in lots of factors of life in this in this organization one of the things I was keen to look at was the issue of motivation motivation is absolutely central to what we would now call the art or pseudoscience of management what a management books about they're basically about how to motivate a workforce now motivation used to be very easy the only thing you needed to motivate a workforce and the good old days was a whip if people were not working hard enough you you would hit them and then you know they would heave stones and move their oars with greater speed but of course unfortunately this has really become a taboo in most modern workplaces you can't hit your employees and this has led to tip to the art of management and right at the core I suppose that the art of the auto management is the recognition that an unhappy workforce is going to be an unproductive one and this is a deeply unfortunate because it means that management has to emerge us itself in questions of what makes workers happy which is I say extremely tricky one very expensive one but there seems no other way in most industries if your workforce is not happy you will suffer and so there's a sort of strange alliance that management has had to to make with the satisfaction of its employees something's really quite a deep level and and it's paradoxical given how work was organized with for centuries so work has become nicer for many people because niceness is the only way in which products will be effectively generated in many industries the the area of a company that on the whole responsible for this area is the HR department what is the HR department when it's not sacking you is essentially trying to make sure that you will be a happy worker I went into this accountancy firm happy to satirize the world of HR but came away actually strangely impressed and fascinated by what HR people get up to in this organization they occupied a huge part of the office to hold the ninth floor dedicated to their mission and they were doing all sorts of fascinating things they were when I was there they were setting up a an aunty a 24-hour anti-bullying hotline which is basically that if you were in any way feeling humiliated or slighted by it by your colleagues you can pick up a phone and it our anonymity speak to a trained counselor and thematically we have that will be dealt with with extreme sensitivity and intelligence really if you find that one of your co-workers has bad breath how's your case booked on this in the HR department there's again you can call this line and report the problem it's not an incidental problem because not a negligible from because accountants tend to work in very small teams they're hired out for a very high sums of money and if clients notice there's a problem with a particular worker in this area they may not invite them back and this could seriously affect the bottom line so again you can call up a hotline and within a two-week period an employee will be called in to do a course on something else letter-writing public speaking but in the course of this session you will be left in no doubt as to the importance of good oral hygiene but in a way that is non specific and will not leave anyone embarrassed you know it used to be the case that domestic life was the center of sensitivity of tact of understanding and the working life was the center of humiliation and exploitation I've had a Dickensian view of labor I don't think I'm being autobiographical to suggest that in many cases that equation has been flipped and in the most advanced workforce at workplaces you get a level of civility and and politeness that domestic life is still struggling to catch up with I know for one that I would sometimes return from my time with the accountants and it'd be a Friday night and my wife and I would be sitting down for dinner and the insults and the crockery we're about to fly and I was thinking you know where's the 24-hour anti-bullying hotline now but you know that there just isn't so anyway this equation I was fascinated buying another thing I was interested in was the issue of wasting time as a writer I'm obsessed by the idea that I'm wasting a lot of time and I just don't get very much done every day I feel tremendously guilty watching friends and family members going off to the tube station thinking comparing my life to theirs and thinking that they are a hive of activity while I sit there and eat jaffa cakes but but fortunately though my time with accountants showed me otherwise it showed me that fortunately most offices are fascinating the unproductive in all sorts of ways compare the average office it's almost like a bucket full of water but it's got full of holes in and as it's being carried along water is just leaking out and it's amazing if there's anything left in the terms of profit by the end of the year it's a it's utterly fascinating also a capacity how many errors there are in every organisation and how many errors an average organization can take now something like 80% of decisions are bought to be the wrong ones but the organization survives and endures and that's an extremely optimistic message it suggests that all of us have an extreme capacity to make mistakes or daughter to tolerate mistakes occasionally in situations that we would call tragedies you know we step on a landmine as where we step on something that really has a disproportionately serious impact on things but for the most part organizations and individual lives are remarkably flexible and tolerant of of error and as I say leaky of effort to because this doesn't stop there being in most offices and incredible culture of self-sacrifice and hard work in this accountancy firm incredible matches know that long hours if you hope to get anywhere in the organization you have to put in extremely long hours in one o'clock in the morning there's always a trolley that passes down corridors carrying pizza and coke and you have to do a few coke and pizza nights a month especially in the junior ranks to show willing and I remember one night I was with a one Saturday morning I was watching a team of people who had been at work since the previous Friday and we're working all night and they were still at it and it was Saturday must be about 2:00 in the afternoon and I remember thinking I started thinking about the Sabbath and you know what is the Sabbath I mean Sabbath strange Old Testament idea God makes the world in seven days on the seventh day he stands back and asked us to admire his creation and and how fine it is and how hard he is worked now what what's this story really about from a secular point of view walk in a secular mind hope to do with that story I think it's really a story about megalomania it's really a story about reminding us that we did not create the world now this is something that the workaholic finds quite hard to remember someone who works very hard is essentially sitting in the cockpit what they perceive to be the cockpit of life pulling the levers and having a very important role in directing not only their life but the life of the company perhaps even the nation or the universe but the truth is that most of the controls are unplugged and most of what happens is not directly connected to anything that we are doing and the Sabbath is really an institutional attempt to remind us of this it's not just good for our health it's an attempt to make a psychological point about the extent to which events that occur to us are not necessarily in our hands what happens to us is only tangentially connected to our actions and that we need a specific amount of time in which that will always be made clear to us so the Sabbath and the modern workplace see the time is running short let me let me just make a few other other points another thing that I was interested in in the in the office and I hope I can we didn't know each other well enough for this ISM but offices a curiously erotic places now let me qualify this I mean we tend to pride ourselves in the modern world on how open-minded we are about relationships and matters of sex and the body and we tend to giggle at our Victorian ancestors who are incredibly embarrassing by the sight of an elbow or knee fainting at all-time cetera and we consider ourselves infinitely superior and much more open-minded and able to tolerate a you know an open-minded vision of what we are as sexual bodily physical beings until it comes to the workplace and I was fascinated when I entered the the web as I was given a folder which is given to all new entrants to to the accountancy firm and it's very large folder telling you you know such things as you know how much you can claim back on your receipts and how much you can spend on a meal outside the m25 etc but there was one whole section of this fat folder that was basically wasn't called this it was basically about sex and the summarise it really the message was don't not not with anyone below you to the left of you to the right of you man women don't and it seems to me that you know this was phrase very much in the language of protecting the innocent from the unwanted advances or often male superior superiors in the office I don't think that's the whole story I think there's a strong element it seems to me of jealousy in this the corporation is jealous and the thought that it's really trying to repress through these codes of conduct is the thought very basic though it is that it may be more fun to have sex than to work and it seems to me that any functioning society has to have that thought repressed that we have to a certain amount of AB negating of the libido is absolutely essential to any working culture and in this respect our culture is no different from any other though we pride ourselves on being so open-minded so these it's no coincidence that the rules are there we've managed to sneak them back in they were always there in various ways of course there is a an odd way in which injunctions and prohibitions against sex have a curious way of making of charging an atmosphere and at the the other organization which of course proscribed sexual activity very heavily for centuries was of course the church and it's interesting at and if any of you know the work of Robert dant and the historian of early modern France he wrote a wonderful book a few years ago in which he studied all the books that were published in 18th century France and analyze them for political basis and social basis etcetera and a whole chapter there is devoted on 18th century pornography and Danton makes a fascinating observation that 98% of all pornographic literature published in 18th century France was set in either a monastery or a nunnery and I don't think it's coincidental because again it fits into the structure of the church as a jealous organization which prescribes sexual activity and nevertheless makes it more interesting in the process and I was fascinated a little while back when some friends who I don't know very well distant acquaintances I don't be able to say who I hardly know people told me that on the internet something I don't really know about at all there are some sites dedicated entirely to sexual activity in offices which seems to tell us an awful lot and I'm going to stop at that point there but you get you get my drift okay let me sum up now because we are really running out of time the it I don't want to follow I don't want you to follow only the the sorrows of work because I think that work is a very important source of of satisfaction as well and it's worth me just saying a few words about what I think these sources of satisfaction are and in other words what work can be when it's going well I think that at the heart of what we need work for is the word order I think that we are essentially order creatures we are creatures whose levels of anxiety is absolutely fundamentally reduced by any activity which manages to impose order on a section of the world we've come from chaos and we will be returning to chaos you know the world before us was chaotic the world after us will be chaotic in terms of our personal life and the world of work is a world where for a time we're able to impose an element of order and work when it's satisfying shares something in common and are not simply being trivial with the act of washing up or the act of doing the washing up the reason we're doing washing up is quite satisfying that tells us a lot about what work is sat about what working is when it's satisfying it's a washing up normally doesn't take very long it takes you know 10 15 minutes and you transform a mess into something tidy and you do so as I say in a short period of time which allows you to see the journey from chaos to order and I think that any satisfying piece of work has in it that ability to take you from chaos to order in a time scale which means that you can hold on to a picture of both and gain satisfaction from the contrast and it does matter what you're doing it could be in organizing data or organizing people or whatever it is there are incredible incredible links to the way that the ordering mind works and you know whenever you get people talking about their careers close up you know an architect and a writer get together and then they realize that making a book and making a building are quite similar actually the surprising thing is that's true right across the board that so many of activities are similar because they have at their heart a similar that ordering kind of impulse the other thing that I think work allows us to do when it's satisfying is it allows us to be slightly better than we normally are it's very hard to get most of our life right in fact most of our life is a mess but occasionally we manage through our work to make an island that is slightly better than the rest of us is slightly more serene ordered logical coherent and I think that is where work is in a way a source of redemption and you know it's criticizing the workaholic previously but there is something about a workaholic and that I think we can all identify with and sympathize with which is buddy who perhaps can't get the rest of their life right and who throws themselves into work as a way of escaping from intolerable stresses to which as I say we should perhaps be sympathetic because all of us probably have an element of that in us as I say we can't be a success in every area of life when we say that so-and-so is a success we're always applying a value judgment no one is successful in every area and work as I say is a part of our lives that sometimes it's easier to get right than than some others and we can welcome it for that I'm going to stop it there because I want to leave time foot for your thoughts and ideas and questions so do come back at me but thanks very much for listening at least of this part thank just just stick up a hand if you put any thoughts my dear doesn't wait for the microphone yes burgundy shirt yeah thanks for pardon me that was really great none of the pets of your interest in knowledge a couple of things I wondered about one word would anybody want to be an air traffic controller and two what do you think about prostitution traffic control process you've never had these thoughts connected yeah I'm a little bit of background I was I was contacted this summer by baa the owners of Heathrow who who said to me would you like to come and be our first writer in residence and the embarrassing thing was I was absolutely desperate and the reason is I've always been fascinated by airport it seems to me that if you're trying to understand the modern world the airport is a the kind of center with so many of these themes that make us modern come together everything from high-technology consumerism globalization the destruction of the environment it's all there at the airport these things that are normally often just abstractions come together as vivid living things at the airport so that's why I was very keen to hang out there I went in my time there I was able to talk to lots of people and did go and talk to some air traffic controllers the the thing I learned and perhaps doesn't quite answer your question but the thing I learned from them and this is something that tells us something maybe about work in general this air traffic controller I talked about at some length said I can't allow myself to think about what I'm doing in the sense of I can't allow myself to think that there are people in those tubes and I said oh why and he said well because it will be so worrying that I might make him crash he has to consider these these people merely at abstractions and I think maybe that's what we all have to do in order to get our job done they're probably in all of our careers elements where if we were too conscious about what we were up to the whole thing would collapse and so I was interested in the idea that while in other parts of the airport the the dramas of individual actors passengers etc are right at the centre of things up in the tower you're just looking at things as as dots on the screen and you it would it would impede your a job to do anything else prostitution what do I think of prostitution I think it's I think it should it's on a continuum with other things you know I think we've all come across situations but in our own lives our lives of other people where someone will go oh I'm prostituting myself here so we use that word sometimes to talk about something which doesn't just happen in that career called prostitution and that is really a moment in which we feel that that balance between work as a free activity work at an activity we would really engage it and work as coercion comes together particularly painfully and it's like that word slavery you know word slavery prostitution they're quite close historically quite close concepts the the dream of the modern world is to eradicate both prostitution and slavery but it has a habit of clinging to the system it's it's about power relationships and we simply haven't worked it out how to eradicate those power relationships and so there will always be prostitution with a small p and a capital P so long as we can't properly sort out issues of exploitation really other thoughts yes you've got Mike Ross okay and I think excuse me thank you thought that was really interesting and quite funny as well and I think I need to start by declaring that I'm a career changer I feel like I ought to say that I used to be a doctor I was a psychiatrist by training and then I decided to Jack it all in and become a parliamentary official which is what I'm doing now and but I've never felt more fulfilled because I'm doing both my parliamentary official jobs and I'm also low coming and doing the occasional psychiatry clinic and I was struck by your observation that as we've become more specialized in the workplace the humanity from work seems to have disappeared I also noticed that you saw to yourself as three different things philosopher author and entrepreneur yeah and I don't know I mean one of the things that I've found is that since I've had two careers I feel better and I was wondering where the portfolio careers is the way forward in order to address that issue of losing losing humanity as we become more specialized so that was the first question about portfolio portfolio careers the second question with my psychiatry cation is have you managed to escape that feeling that most of us get on Sunday evenings when we have to go back to the workplace do you feel fulfilled in the workplace yeah yes I mean the portfolio career it's it's fascinatingly in the modern world because it's a moment where our dreams confront a reality the dream is the Renaissance man or woman you know that's the dream the dream is one in which work will be an arena in which we can fulfill our many many talents and that runs headlong into the economic virtue of specialization so we've really got two goods clashing in the classic a sort of liberal conflict where you know the desire for the expansion of the soul in many directions is hampered by something else which will find very worthwhile which is a specialized work force which can generate the sort of wealth that we see as very welcome and if you listen to Adam Smith is in fact the guarantor that the bottom 10 to 15 percent of the population won't starve we need a specialized economy according to Adam Smith because it's only this that will prevent the famines that beset less specialized economies and that is still at the end of the day the biggest and most powerful defense of specialization and a consumer society we shouldn't defend a consumer society by how intelligent and wonderful it is to have so many varieties of ice-cream we should defend it on the basis that it actually prevents the bottom portion of the population from suffering it very intensely and so that's that's I suppose I reckon slightly irreconcilable conflict I think you're very lucky it sounds in terms of having two careers the the rude word for people who maker is is a dilettante someone who can't do one thing very well and there's that tension in in our society we know that many many jobs can't be done by someone who only does them at two a week or three days a week and it's sad because often the blocks to them being done on a part-time basis are institutional and to do with custom rather than to do with the fundamentals so if you talk to architects most architects will say things like you know you don't need to train for seven years you could probably do this in today you train for a year you probably do it but because you can't do it because there's there's you know guilds that prevent you from from doing it and that's not just in the world of architecture in many many worlds you get this sort of specialization so that prevents the broadening of the individual and it's incredibly painful absolutely leads me on to my next neck part of your question about me and Sunday evening though I'm a great veteran of should say that all I write all my books from personal problems this one not no exception like everybody you know I'm very happy to do what I do as a writer but I'm constantly struck by limitations a book is on a bad day can seem like a very small thing in a huge and turbulent world and a very small attempt to change something and there are moments of impatience I think that I am somebody who believes in the power of ideas to try and change things and lots of errors in which I want to try and change things and I'm aware the books are very good in some areas but faulty in others and I think that might be the origin of that last slightly curious word entrepreneur I helped last year to set up something called the School of Life which is an institution not that's different from the Forum for European philosophy and that it aims to use philosophy but culture more broadly to engage with the problems of everyday life and to have an impact on on everyday life's and that's just one example of something I'm trying to do but it's a you know it's horrendously difficult and I know at first hand that it's it's very hard to go from being you know a writer on Monday to being a mini HR department with a crisis on Tuesday and so I'm not romantic about their other thoughts yeah thanks very much a work is important for us and for most of us it's a very intimate part of our lives but it is a journey as you as you have all through and I've interested and how you react to a dog Hema skills their quote that the greatest journey is not in a way you traveled or what you've done and so on but it's actually how your mind develops and the key part for me from from the work experience would be not to have stagnation and that you know it's it's the journey within the staffs much much more greater rather than the the status and all the other things look I I absolutely agree that the the dream of work should be that it's a process of growth and and self-discovery and the perfection of of the individual but of course balanced against that is the perfection of the corporation and the bigger unit in which the individual operates so and this is something that you know comes back to education whereas one say that the education system suggests rather your view of work that work could be that your professional life that's waiting for you after you passed all these exam will be one in which you can develop your talents in many areas but there's often a rude awakening and it tends to happen when people leave higher education and enter the workforce is often a very rude shock when that dream of individual development and authenticity that I think you're alluding to comes up against the demands of of the workplace this a friend of mine who runs a helps run a small media company told me that it just employed somebody was 23 straight out of university and that there was a sort of intriguing moment when Generation Y whatever it is crashes into the workplace you know they were having a discussion about the way that a certain film should be should be shot and everybody was discussing this and pitching in and in the end my friend sort of who was the boss called the meeting to an end and said well I thanks very much but I think we'll do it this way and this young graduate came along and said well that's really interesting that that's your view I can't agree with you and I think perhaps we should revisit this and he sort of had to clear his throat and say you know I'm the boss and this is a moment I suppose it struck me because that's really a moment when it shows that there is there are structures of hierarchy and authority that deeply violate that dream that is otherwise proposed by other sections of society it's almost as though I mean it does reflect even the proposal of Marxist analysis it does reflect two things that capitalist society needs capital society needs two things on the one hand entrepreneurial spirits self-starters authentic people who want initiative and who don't want to be under the cosh of somebody else who want don't want external Authority desperately need those people and it also needs people so it needs a spontaneity but it also needs people who will be willing to be coerced it needs as it were a large workforce which will be more or less a quiescent Turk to rules and discipline so it needs so in there's a clash very often in the education system between if you like you know authenticity and coercion clash and this is something I think it's a it's a it's a conflict within our own society and it's something that all of us as we work through a working world probably gonna have to encounter and how we make our peace with it you know will shape our our careers obviously yeah this question right at the back I'm really intrigued by your idea about domestic life and work life and how almost that can be I mean nowadays can be flipped like almost the importance of the work life has I mean far greater impact on the way we experience life than domestic life I mean do you have I mean any further thoughts on that and also how this has effect on culture the way actually I mean creative culture and the way I mean yet people leave and the way people kind of structure their thoughts and kind of how they participate in reality yes I mean it was obviously not a noise about work-life balance and had a juggle work and so-called life it reflects our society's difficulty at pricing one of things that went wrong in the current economic crisis was a problem about pricing I we didn't know what value to put on things has been a tremendous readjustment of pricing and hence a value you know the value of a banker is now at least socially very different from what it was we have very difficult time putting a price on things which don't have a direct economic outcome not not indirect but direct so we're very bad at calculating externalities what's the value of a good mother you know we're very hard time deciding that it was very good value of a nurse you know etc we don't really know or need the mothering function that could be more general and we don't have to put a price on it because we don't know we you know our instruments are too crude for calculating the benefit of something again a tremendous amount of economic work to be done in trying to get a handle on this and try to come to a more sensible vision of things and it's because of this that we that we have a problem with work life we we don't know how to get the right balance I think the idea of balance though is a naive one it's a classically bourgeois one the bourgeois world is non tragic by non tragic I mean that it does it refuses to accept that not all good things can belong together it refuses to accept that that there isn't perhaps no solution to certain things that there is no solution which won't involve a severe loss in some area and so just as I was suggesting that bourgeois marriage is this kind of win-win dream and bourgeois work is this win-win dream money together with satisfaction love together with children etc this is a denial of certain tragic realities of existence and work-life balance is again an attempt to smooth over a tragic fault line in life as I try to suggest you know we can't all be successful at everything and the person who is successful in their career is on the whole unsuccessful at family life just it's just a true thing you know I've observed both scenarios and I think the answer is not so much that there is some ideal reconciliation but there could be a more conscious approach to choice so that we know what we're trying to be successful at in by realizing that we can't be successful at everything users potentially a chance to be more honest about what we have a decent chance of actually being successful at and leads us to be able to face that choice more consciously and more with greater kind of insight so that's what I would say about that yeah yes what's my view of boredom and and and work of course the dream is never to be bored but psychologists tell us and I think they're right in this that things happen when you're bored that what looks like boredom is very often a process of just trying to figure out what comes next and that if you were never bored you would you would miss out on all sort of quite vital processes and kind of states of mind that's a sort of that's good boredom if you like of course there's probably dull boredom I mean truly mindless boredom but there is a useful sort of boredom in which we're preparing to find something more more interesting I think the fact that many of us are bored for periods of the day also suggests how much work there is to be done in trying to find out when people are actually doing their work most jobs still have a very mechanistic model where you have to show up at a certain time and leave at a certain time and management wants to see that you're there because otherwise they think you're not working of course we all know that we're very bored and doing nothing at our desks but management things were because you are there you are working and because this is a very this is a failure really to understand what you want out of your workforce management that knows what it wants out of its workforce will let their workforce work wherever they like whenever they like because they've got a way of quantifying them as soon as you don't quite know why you need your worker you want them there at nine o'clock just in case something comes along and you want to see that they're supposedly doing their thing again my hope for the future is that we'll get better at working out when people are working and when they might as well be having free time being board free associating etc so that those moments of ball when we're at work but change to the desk will we will be less one one last question let's let's take one last question hi you mentioned that like workplace who are actually for putting things in order and we come from cows and we are going to go to gas but don't you think that it's actually contributing more to chaos I don't think that work is contributing to chaos I mean a lot of work of course does contribute to chaos when you think of the environmental impact etc but I think that I mean well we need to be extremely cynical to think that all work was simply that destruction and exploitation and the simply the generation of more chaos I think it's probably true to say that you know 50 percent or so is product is genuinely productive and the rest is probably isn't but I I wouldn't I wouldn't edge toward the cynicism that would suggest that all work is simply adding to the chaos I think that most of us at least want work to be unque otic and to be productive and that's where I think again economics gets us wrong and thinking that where we want to be selfish there's an amazing amount of selflessness and in fact most organizations would collapse very quickly if people did merely what was on their job description and if you read the average contract according to which people are hired if people just did that society would come to an end I mean the wheels of Industry would lock because so much of what people are doing in the workplace is bringing the whole of themselves to the workplace and bringing reserves of goodwill and energy and kindness and forbearance that were really that are not being paid for anyway that were created normally in families normally by mothers the word mother I mean father's - the maternal instinct the nurturing instinct and this goes into the workplace the true HR departments of global capitalism of families or the units that create effective workers but this isn't paid for so again thinking of externalities this is free stuff so we come to the workplace not just intent on causing chaos I think but insofar as we feel relatively sane and all of us are a bit insane sometimes big portions of our lives but all of us are slightly unhinged but insofar as where we manage to get on an even keel we do have the interests of others and more than ourselves at heart and and we try and and exert ourselves positively I think on that note let's let's start there because otherwise we'll all get to tied but if you want to come and say hello please do I'll be signing books outside and I want to say thank you very much to all of you and also to the forum for European philosophy for hosting me tonight and on so many other occasions in the past - thank you very much

Channel: London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

Views: 108,443

Rating: 4.8640575 out of 5

Keywords: LSE, London School of Economics, Public, Lecture, Event, Seminar, Alain de Botton

Id: 8-O2IPxOa5A

Length: 67min 50sec (4070 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2010