Learning to love your job

The end of the boom means we may have to change our attitudes to work – but it mightn’t be all bad, says writer Alain de Botton.

WHEN IT CAME to career advice, my father’s was simple: avoid working in a factory like him. I hardly needed advising as my generation took it for granted that work would be a kind of personal project: not a place you went and clocked in, but an activity that was rewarding and a core part of identity.

In 1882 German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that “rare individuals would rather perish than work without taking pleasure in their work; they are choosy, hard to please, and have no use for ample rewards if the work is not itself the reward”.

That attitude was commonplace in the last few decades when the economy was booming. Work was far removed from the traditional notion that it was a necessary evil to put food on the table. Our age was the first in which it is assumed you’d probably work anyway, even if you didn’t need the money.

You worked for yourself, and the boom years suited that: no loyalty to a company; rampant job hopping. It was a seller’s market and companies were falling over themselves to retain staff and keep them motivated.

Now, however, the shoe is on the other foot. Fear will motivate employees. Work perks are disappearing. A friend who works at an internet giant is pining for his lost free ski trip . . . or, rather, “winter conference”.

Does this mean those still in work will be less fulfilled, or will our attitudes to work change with the times?

Alain de Botton tackles this issue in his new book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, which is published this week. He thinks a less idealistic view of work is likely to return. "For many people work will again be welcomed for its most basic function: food and shelter and survival."

Ironically, this may come as a relief. “There is a problem with high ambition. We grow up thinking we’re all going to have wonderful jobs and relationships. That is the dominant idea of our time: you can make it, you can do anything. And, of course, that’s not always the case. Oddly, when you have lower expectations you are in less danger of disappointment, so those who hang onto a job might have less of those awkward questions.”

IT WAS EASY to feel those anxieties, that pressure to succeed, during the boom years.

Peter Barrins from Sligo thought he was ahead of the curve when, in 2005, he quit his job as an accountant with a prominent multinational to travel and work with Goal.

“Everyone was moving jobs quite quickly, it was frantic and heady: parties, lots of money, no life outside work. The only day off was Sunday; that was pure recovery.”

He adds: “When jobs are 10 a penny you’re inclined to value them for what you can get out of it rather than what you can put into it. It was easy to panic; you feel like it’s a big competition.

“They buy this car, they have five holidays a year, there is a compulsion to keep up with that, regardless of the pressure that more responsibility and promotion brings.”

Barrins says in the mornings he used to sit in the car given to him by the company, looking at the house he was working to pay for while thinking: “Who am I? I didn’t know who I was by the end of it.”

For many people, the opposite will now be the case: having invested so much of their personality in their jobs, they may feel bereft if unemployed or working short-time.

“It’s an issue of degree: how much should we let this dominate our lives?” asks de Botton. “Parts of the western world came to the view that, really, work could be everything. In boom time it’s very possible to get mesmerised by work, its results and salaries, so that you lose sight of other things.

“Busy people who lose their jobs tend to say, ‘I’m spending more time with my family and friends and I get on better with them’. They’ve paid a heavy price for this realisation, but it’s not a bad one to have.”

Careerism and materialism, says de Botton, have deprived us of one key tool for coping with setbacks: “Finding bad news normal.”

Religion, he says, used to do this for us. “Life is fallen, humanity is on a road to lack of fulfillment. These messages are lost in a hedonistic society where we think we can achieve anything. The recession is a call to humility, to a recognition that there are stubborn problems in human life that will not go away.”

From a psychological point of view, a recession is an easier time to lose your job. Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen says when you lose a job you tend to take it personally.

“People look for a flaw in them. Now there is a huge villain called the financial crisis and you can switch some of the blame to it. But being unemployed in our culture is not easy: work and consumption have been the two areas of self-actualisation.

“If you are cut off from both of those, you will feel you are losing in what is like a social competition. But that might get easier as conspicuous consumption becomes less fashionable. My office is next to the Louis Vuitton in Oslo, and it’s a lot less busy now.”

BARRINS IS CONFIDENT he will re-enter the workplace on his terms, and that people’s expectations of what their jobs will mean to them will become more realistic.

“Around 2001-2002, expectations were outrageous, I interviewed people and they expected far more money than they were worth, and far faster promotion than was practical. There was such a demand that we weren’t taking the best people for the job, but the best on offer. You just took what you could get, and then, ironically, they thought they were brilliant. It was mad.”

He says staff retention was a problem, and costly for employers. Now, there is more realism on both sides.

“It’s an employers’ market and they are getting their own back. People were divorced from reality. I’d be on my own at home thinking, this is crazy stuff. It was unreal.”

Svendsen sees an upside to such realism. “I’d quote The Smiths: ‘I was looking for a job and then I found a job, and heaven knows I’m miserable now.’

“We lost that realism, that sense that a job is a job, with ridiculous expectations. Happiness was no longer something we had a right to search for, but something we were entitled to. We had these norms of the perfect self-actualised life, but we will always fall short of that. We are probably the first generation to go around being unhappy because we do not have complete happiness.”

De Botton sees another possible welcome legacy of our troubled times: “Modern meritocracy suggests that you need only look at a pay slip to find out who is a goodie and who is a baddie. The recession is challenging that simplicity. The banking crisis has revealed a problem with meritocracy,” he says.

“The idea that bankers deserved all they were paid is clearly mad. We see that some quite stupid people made a lot of money and nice people lost everything.

“I think we will be less judgmental about those who have ‘failed’ and less impressed by those who have ‘succeeded’ now: both owe a lot to accident.”

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Workis published tomorrow by Hamish Hamilton. Work by Lars Svendsen is published by Acumen