The upside of downsizing

Finding work you love, while also doing "good" work, is one of the ultimate forms of fulfilment. There's more to it than just making money. We define ourselves by our work. For many creative people, work is their sole definition. It's a perilous path, though, because when you lose your job, you lose your definition. That's not the only problem. The ideal of finding fulfilment through work is a middle-class dream.

For many people, work is just about making money. They don't have careers, they have hourly wages. And yet these people, who get up every morning to earn minimum pay in a competitive economy and find fulfilment through "failure", are the real heroes.

That's what Ben Cheever, the son of the Pulitzer-winning American writer John Cheever and a fine novelist in his own right, learned when he entered the world of the service industry and the hourly wage for his humorous but insightful Selling Ben Cheever. "This book is about failure, and I haven't even been consistently successful at that," he writes. It's a bible, and a laugh, for anyone being downsized.

Author of The Plagiarist and The Partisan, Cheever couldn't get his third novel, Famous After Death, published. Then he lost his job as an editor at Reader's Digest. He was in his late 40s and "redundant, unemployed with limited prospects".

Before you start feeling too sorry for him, consider that he had a healthy trust fund and that his wife is a film critic for the New York Times and a leading member of the Manhattan intelligentsia. He wasn't going to starve.

So, with an appetite for the perverse, Cheever decided to let the wanted ads guide his life. It would be a good idea for a book, but it would also be more. Cheever would learn what it was like to be insignificant, to swallow his pride and seek fulfilment in the tiny interactions that occur every day between people with money to spend and service workers.

Over the next few years, Cheever would travel in a world where nobody had heard of John, never mind Ben, Cheever. He would be rejected by Brooks Brothers, the clothing store where his father bought him his suits. He would fail as a security guard, a computer salesman, a book seller and a sandwich-maker, then reach nirvana as a car salesman. All the jobs had one thing in common: the purpose of the hourly-wage service worker is to take abuse from customers and smile with gratitude.

He discovered that writing and editing - his goal in life - gave you a fat bottom and an isolationist mentality. Retail, whatever it was you were selling, gave you a chance to help people, even when they didn't want to be helped. "People like to be read to," he discovered as a computer salesman.

People perfectly able to read computer specifications went to retail outlets to have a salesman read the specs for them. People ordering sandwiches like to have them served with kindness and a smile.

After a series of bottom-of-the-rung jobs, Cheever was compelled to consider how our egos are affected not only by what we do, but also by how we do it.

Cheever's first foray into the humiliating world of the invisible worker was as a Santa Claus, at the railway station near his home in White Plains, a plush city in New York State. A chief-executive friend questioned Ben's madness, gave him a dollar, then said: "Say ho, ho, ho." Within a year, the chief executive was in jail.

The fluidity of the US economy, where highly skilled people can be riding high one year and plunged into penury the next, is something we're going to have to get used to in this country. Another chief executive in Cheever's circle lost his high-status job and found a new role painting houses. He was happy, he enjoyed the work and the profits weren't bad, either.

So what's the difference between people who lead while others follow - and make lots of money from it - and people who find ways to make money in the service industries, where they are treated like servants? Those who have made money from organising others have farther to fall - that's one difference. Another is that there is a certain fulfilment in servility, Cheever found.

Whether selling computers or cars or making sandwiches, and whether he was good at it or not - usually not - Cheever discovered that momentary interactions with customers could be fulfilling in themselves. Sometimes customers appreciated him, other times all he won was the high moral ground.

He did learn, however, "that all rich people are assholes". Give people money and they will use it to prove their superiority, taking it out on the service-industry workers they come across. It's a false kind of power.

Having given up power, by being an avowed failure, Cheever was able to see failure for what it was: a triumph of humanity over circumstance.

For a deeper analysis, anyone threatened with downsizing should read Crossing The Unknown Sea: Work And The Shaping Of Identity, by David Whyte, a poet who has carved a lucrative career advising company leaders on the nature of work in the US and elsewhere.

He writes: "Work is a very serious matter in almost all respects, whether it is work in the shelter of our home or work in the big, wide dangerous world. Through work, human beings earn for themselves and their families, make a difficult world habitable and, with imagination, create some meaning from what they do and how they do it.

"The human approach to work can be naive, fatalistic, power-mad, money-grabbing, unenthusiastic, cynical, detached and obsessive. It can be selflessly mature, revelatory and life-giving; mature in its long-reaching effects, and life-giving in the way it gives back to an individual or society as much as it has taken."

This is a stunning philosophical realisation, but one so obvious that readers will wonder why they didn't think of writing the book first. It's the kind of insight we need, whether we're starting out in the job market for the first time or the eleventh. It's also interesting to see a poet overtly entering the self-help market - as, between the lines, that's what poets have always done.

William Blake, who could have given the self-help bestseller lists a run for their money had he been born in the 21st century, wrote in The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell: "Then I asked: Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so? He replied: All poets believe that it does, and in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of anything."

Whyte believes it's the "firm persuasion" that gives people the ability to find work they love, or simply work for money. "To have a firm persuasion in our work - to feel that what we do is right for ourselves and good for the world at the exactly same time - is one of the great triumphs of human existence," writes Whyte.

"We do feel, when we have work that is challenging and enlarging and that seems to be doing something for others, as if, in Blake's words, we could move mountains, as if we could call the world home; and for a while, in our imaginations, no matter the small size of our apartment, we dwell in a spacious house with endless horizons."

Whether they make sandwiches, sell cars or, indeed, write articles for a living, people need to feel a sense of belonging in their work, a conversation with something larger than themselves.

"Never mistake a good career for good work", advises Whyte. That's what Cheever learned. That's what the chief executive who ended up painting houses learned. That's the message of both Cheever and Whyte: there is a chance to reinvent life, when you've been downsized, and find fulfilment.

Selling Ben Cheever is published by Bloomsbury, £12.99 in UK; Crossing The Unknown Sea: Work And The Shaping Of Identity is published by Michael Joseph, £14.99 in UK