Every now and then a run of events serves to remind you that your thinking is seriously out of step with the age. In the last week or so, the papers have been full of the birth of the brand-new baby Blair, with the main focus being the working habits of his parents. Photographs of Cherie arguing her last case days before the birth were in every paper, while the question of whether Tony would take paternity leave was as hot as the Irish weather is not. Then there were the tributes to Dame Barbara Cartland, who died this week, all of which concentrated on her hugely prolific output - some 773 novels apparently. Less column inches were devoted to a less "sexy", but nonetheless interesting report, that the British judiciary are to be investigated on charges of being "lazy and late".
All in all, it amounts to a portrait of society which holds hard work to be an unquestionable good. Sure, Cherie was criticised by some for arguing that one last case, but only because she looked tired and might have been either harming the baby or setting a bad example to other pregnant women. Her strength of character and stiff upper lip in soldiering on despite carrying the equivalent of several bags of sugar strapped to her front was unequivocably admired. Was I the only one who wondered what on earth she was doing even standing upright when she had a watertight excuse for sitting with her feet up reading Hello! instead?
Over the years, I've become accustomed to keeping my slightly antiquated, not so "noughties", views on hard work to myself. But hey ho, I've just decided to go public and admit that I just don't think working hard is a good idea. Long live laziness. Bring on the four-day week. In fact, I would go so far as to state that the cult of hard work is a contemporary blight that needs to be severely re-assessed.
In this country it all began in the 1980s, when there weren't so many jobs. Working really hard, staying on late at night and turning up at the weekends was a way of giving yourself the edge over your colleagues and currying favour with the boss. By working hard at unpaid work-experience, it was sometimes possible to invent a job where there was none. Undoubtedly there was also a snob value about working really hard - bragging about the hours you put in separated you from those layabouts on the dole who, as everybody knew, spent their time doing finger-painting and eating dates.
When the economy took a turn for the better, people felt vindicated that the hard work was paying off. Entrepreneurs such as ESAT's Denis O'Brien were our new heroes and tales circulated of the new millionaires getting up before they went to bed and dictating notes from the bath. In a country where money is fast becoming the new religion, a hard worker is seen as one of the faithful, someone on the fast track to being a member of the ruling elite; someone to be unquestioningly praised and envied.
There is a certain justice to all this. If you work hard, you deserve to be rewarded, whether it's with money or job satisfaction or promotion. But what I object to is the blinkered attitude to hard work that has sprung up, not just in Ireland but almost universally in the western world. It is taken as a given that the eight-hour working day is necessary, as is working five days a week and, increasingly, as is putting in overtime in order to stand still rather than to get ahead. Just "being" doesn't even get a look in.
Working really, really hard, even if that means you then suffer from stress, repetitive strain injury, eye strain, depression, marital breakdown, and anxiety attacks, is held to be a good thing. Slacking off, on the other hand, has gone beyond being a bit of a joke, something a bit bold but funny, and turned into a serious behavioural problem. Certainly when laziness on the job causes others more work or abuses privileges, it is a serious irritant to others and can seem like a form of arrogance. Yet in the rush to sanctify hard labour, laziness has been mixed up with leisure, and taking time for yourself has become in some way wrong. I have got used to sighing about my hard working week when I meet people at the weekend, and I'm used to hearing the same. Sometimes it's true and I'll have put in a string of late nights, but equally, sometimes it's not. As a journalist, my working hours are necessarily erratic and, at times, when all my assignments are done, I am free to saunter into the office at 11.30 a.m., work for a few hours and saunter back out. I've always felt good about the balance between the times when I work hard and the times when I'm just being, even if it doesn't always add up to an eight-hour day, but I don't usually tell other people about it.
In part, this is because I don't want to sound as though I'm boasting about my time off, but equally, I'm conscious of a very real fear that people will not take me or my career seriously unless they think I'm putting in extremely long working hours. In Ireland's new work culture, those who don't put in extra hours are not considered to be real players or even hard workers. We all indulge in groaning about our hectic schedules, yet often, long hours are simply not necessary - rather than leaving when a job is done well, people feel they should sit at their desk into the night to show they are serious about their work. I can't really be the only person who considers work to be a necessary evil, but an evil nonetheless. Of course we all need to earn money and, increasingly, with property prices and just about everything else on the rise, we have to earn a lot of it. But we should still value time spent not working and enshrine it in just the same way that work is now enshrined. One of those slightly trite aphorisms, which has more than a grain of truth, is that nobody ever looked back on their life and wished they'd spent more time in the office.
Tired as she no doubt was, Cherie Blair made the trek to court that one last time because she was arguing a case against the government in England over parents' right to spend time with their children. That basic right shouldn't really have had to go as far as a court case, but because of the belief in the cult of work in both that country and this, objections to something as unquantifiable as a need to spend time with young children were inevitable. I've always tried to hang onto my belief that I am working to make a living and not living to work, but it's getting harder and harder, now that leisure, inactivity, laziness and relaxation have all been re-classified as four-letter words.