29 Stop Working, Start Living

Idler: Can one live without working?

Vaneigem: We can only live without working.

‘In Conversation with Raoul Vaneigem’, Idler 34, 2004

What, then, is the right way of living? Life must be lived as play, playing certain games, making sacrifices, singing and dancing, and then a man will be able to propitiate the gods, and defend himself against his enemies, and win the contest.

Plato

If you really enjoy your job, if you go to bed on Sunday night full of joy, if you leap up on Monday morning full of excitement and anticipation at the pleasures the day will bring, if you love your boss and love your work, then you can skip this chapter. If, on the other hand, you find your job a drag, if you find it exhausting, stressful, boring, frustrating, enraging, humiliating and badly paid, then read on. You are not inevitably stuck in it. You do not have to do it. There are alternatives. Work and life do not necessarily need to compete. They can meet in the idea of play.

The tragedy of the nineteenth century was that Western man came to see himself, first and foremost, as a worker. Life became a serious business. Frivolity, mirth, play, ritual, dance, music, merriment, dressing up: those childish pleasures, all central parts of life for the nobles, priests and peasants of old, had been under constant attack since the middle of the sixteenth century.

Before the Reformation, England was one non-stop party. It really was merry. Ronald Hutton, author of a splendid book called The Rise and Fall of Merry England, writes of the all-year-round festivities of the merry English. Christmas, for example, lasted a full twelve days, during which time you were not allowed to do any work. This was quickly followed on 2 February by a holiday called Candlemas and then more merriment on St Valentine’s Day on the fourteenth. Then came Shrovetide, which started on the seventh Sunday before Easter and lasted for three days. Easter lasted a full ten days, till the festival of Hocktide. There was just time for a bit of work. Then there was St George’s Day on 23 April, another day off. A week after that came May Day, of course, which marked the first day of two months of merry-making and sex in the woods. Then there was 23 June, or Midsummer Eve, and the feast of Corpus Christi. Then came St Peter’s Eve on 28 June, followed by Lammas on 1 August, opening a season of summer fairs and harvest suppers. In November came Martinmas, followed by the fasting of Advent, and then it was back to Christmas once again.

Merry old England was, says Hutton, ‘a society in which ritual and festival was utilized for many different purposes at many different levels’. But, he writes: ‘Then came a direct ideological challenge from early Protestantism, which stood not merely to reform the physical and ideological context of worship but to destroy much of the festive culture with which the old Church had been bound up.’

Following the Puritan attack on fun, the nineteenth century came up with a new idea: instead of banning it, they decided to sell fun, and therefore make money out of it. Our need to play was sold back to us as a product. The record industry, for example, represents the industrialization and commercialization of music. It is the making of something that is by its very nature not-work into work. Industrialization is the process of taking life, splitting it up into little bits and turning them into profit-based industries. Other examples might include the communications industry (pay to talk), the energy industry (pay for wind), the food industry (pay for what nature provides for free), the entertainment industry (pay to be diverted), the leisure industry (pay to play), and so on. These were all areas that once upon a time were voluntary, free-flowing, domestic and, in most cases, literally free.

The line between art and life is still blurred today in more primitive, less serious, more playful societies such as rural Mexico, where the people come down from the mountain farms to the towns in order to sell their crafts in the marketplace. These crafts are useful and beautiful: rugs, ceramics, hats, wooden toys. It is not a slave-like existence, because the craftsman/smallholder takes responsibility for his own life. ‘Every workman,’ says Eric Gill of the olden days:

was in some degree a responsible workman – responsible not merely for doing what he was told but for the quality, the intellectual quality of what his deeds effected. He was a more or less independent person who was expected to use, and was paid to use, his intelligence and, therefore (if only to make his work pleasant in the doing – for it says in the book of Ecclesiasticus, ‘a man shall have joy in his labour; and this is his portion’), he was a person who did to some extent, either more or less, regard the thing to be made as a thing to be made delightful as well as useful.

Gill talked of what he called ‘integrity’. By this he meant not ‘staying true to your principles’ but ‘integrating different parts of your life’. It is the separation of our lives into mutually competing zones that causes the problems, the anxieties, the illnesses, the debts. Our goal should be to bring them together, to integrate them, to harmonize them, so work and life become one and the same thing. Make money out of what you are doing anyway. In my case, I spend each morning writing and reading, and the rest of the day is given up to household work: gardening, cleaning, baking. Gardening is a good one, because there is so much pottering involved. I would say that during one hour of gardening, at least half is spent just staring. Sometimes I succeed in bringing the children to the vegetable patch with me, thereby combining the useful and enjoyable activity of growing food with childcare. The evenings are for drinking, eating and talking.

Indeed, before industrialization, ‘beautiful’ and ‘useful’ had not yet been separated into mutually antagonistic categories. They were the same thing. The peasant/craftsman also had a few acres of his own and could therefore produce some of his own food. This kind of responsibility for one’s work has been removed from the equation, and work has become an exercise in handing over shifts of one’s own life to an overlord in order to get money, and far longer shifts and far more of them than was expected of the most downtrodden medieval bondsman.

In Homo Ludens, the venerable Huizinga argues that all cultures are at heart based on a concept of life as play rather than life as work. The Japanese, for example, enjoy their asobi and asobu, meaning ‘play in general, recreation, relaxation, amusement, passing the time or pastime, a trip or jaunt, dissipation, gambling, idling, lying idle, being unemployed’. We might note their similarity to the English social phenomenon given the acronymn ASBO, after Anti-Social Behaviour Disorder, the latest failed attempt by the forces of law to control delinquent youth. Play and its brother, idleness, were once incorporated into work. Even the judges of old didn’t over-exert themselves. In De Laudibus Legum Angliae, written in 1470, Fortescue actually boasts of how little work the judges do. This leaves them more time for reflection, which will make them better judges. ‘You are to know,’ says he:

That the Judges do not sit in court to do Business above three Hours in the day, that is from Eight in the Morning to Eleven. After they have taken some Refreshment, the Method is, to spend the rest of the Day in the Study of the Law, reading of the Holy Scriptures, or else it is taken up in some other innocent Amusements, at their Pleasure: So that it is rather a Life of Contemplation, than of Action, free from worldly Cares and Avocations.

To write such a passage would be almost inconceivable today, when most of us spend our time going round telling everyone else how busy we are and how hard we are working. In the internal interplay between the World and the Dream, between the everyday and the otherworldly, the world has been in the ascendant too long. We need to redress the balance. ‘Only connect the prose and the passion,’ wrote E. M. Forster in Howards End, ‘and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.’ We have fallen off the wall, and we need to put ourselves back together again.

We have lost play, soul, creativity. The great junkie Beatnik Alexander Trocchi writes in his book Invisible Insurrection:

Man has forgotten how to play. And if one thinks of the soulless tasks accorded each man in the industrial milieu, of the fact that education has become increasingly technological, and for the ordinary man no more than a means of fitting him for a ‘job’, one can hardly be surprised that man is lost. He is almost afraid of more leisure … His creativity stunted, he is orientated outwards entirely …

Education itself is a putting-off, a postponement: we are told to work hard to get good results. Why? So we can get a good job. What is a good job? One that pays well. Oh. And that’s it? All this suffering, merely so that we can earn a lot of money, which, even if we manage it, will not solve our problems anyway? It’s a tragically limited idea of what life is all about. But we should be mucking about all the time, because mucking about is enjoying life for its own sake, now, and not in preparation for an imaginary future. It’s obvious that the mirth-filled man, the cheerful soul, the childish adult is the one who has least to fear from life. Each time I put on a party either at home or at our village hall, a certain grown-up neighbour complains. He is the fearful sort, free of mirth, bound by seriousness. Other people for him exist only as barriers to his cocoon, his ‘peace and tranquillity’. He has run away from life.

We have been taught to believe that the new system, in which a service industry has replaced service – or, in other words, we no longer work for the grand houses, we now work for the big companies – is an improvement in terms of personal liberty. But I would question that assumption. No feudal overlord of the past ever had the might, power and wealth of Terry Leahy, the Earl of Tesco’s. He earns £10,000 a day, £1,500 an hour, and is lord and master of over 250,000 vassals – that’s nearly one in every hundred UK workers, all in thrall to Tesco’s, and most taking a year to earn what he takes in a day. It amazes me that we all queue up to serve him and his gang of mega-shareholders. There is no autonomy in employment, no elegance, no grace, no hospitality. Surely the lowliest pot-boy was never so encumbered as the Tesco’s shelf-stacker? The supermarkets take all romance and spirit out of life.

We snigger and scoff at the feudal system of work, counting ourselves very lucky today, but a sober examination of the manorial system of the eleventh to fifteenth centuries would suggest that the supposed illiterate, bonded peasants had more freedom, more riches and were more self-sufficient than the average wage slave of today. We saw earlier how John Aubrey of Foxton owed just one day a week’s work to the manor. The rest of his time was his own. His income pro rata would have been at least £150,000 in today’s terms. As it was, he was earning three to four times his annual rent for one day’s work a week. He had eighteen acres and his own house. He also would have known one or more crafts: every village needed its shoemaker, mason, carpenter, blacksmith. Now, compare that sort of life with the tedium of the call-centre operative earning £12,000 a year for five days’ work a week. The call-centre employee has to work five times as hard for less than half the salary. As for a widespread house-owning class, said to be one of the great economic advances of the recent age, this is another con. If the mortgage company owns 90 per cent of it, how can this be said to be owning your own house? Instead, you are in slavery to two authorities, the employer and the mortgage company. Fall behind on these payments, and the mortgage company will literally take your home from you. Therefore, you will subject yourself to all sorts of humiliations at work out of fear of losing your job. This is surely savagery and slavery far in excess of the medieval system.

If you are thinking of quitting your job, then let me say I can highly recommend it. I think it’s much easier to live without a job. For one thing, it’s a lot less work. An hour worked at home is equivalent to two in the wasteful office or factory. In the institutional workplace, we perfect the art of doing the smallest amount of work in the longest amount of time. There is a huge amount of time wasted. At home, that process is reversed: we do as much work as possible in the smallest amount of time. So four hours work at home is like a full day’s work in the office. In another sense, though, when you work at home and when you manage to bring work and life together into one thing, then you are working all the time. Or you are never working; it’s up to you. Writing an article is neither more nor less important to me than digging up a parsnip. It is all part of life; everything is equal, the good and the bad, the money-earning and the not-money-earning.

You also find that, when jobless, you stop spending so much. Gone are the commuting costs, gone are the endless giant coffees – slave no more to Starbucks! Free at last! – gone are the lunchtime sandwiches, gone are the drinks after work with co-workers. You don’t even need so many clothes. Your costs plummet. The home worker can easily save £100 a week. That itself reduces the pressure to work.

One objection I hear, another mind-forg’d manacle, is the line: ‘I wouldn’t have the self-discipline to work for myself.’ This is another myth. We are encouraged to believe that we are useless, unable to look after ourselves and hence need an employer to subdue our unruly self and slot it into a strict timetable. When you realize that, in fact, you are free, this problem ebbs away.

A wonderful thing about being jobless is the fantastic sense of freedom and autonomy that you feel every day. I would rather earn £10,000 a year and be jobless than earn £500,000 and spend ten hours a day as an employee. In my mind, there’s no contest.

Active joblessness of this sort also leaves time and energy for community projects. Since giving up work, I’ve been able to join our local village-hall committee, organizing concerts and dinners. I’ve joined the local music festival and work on booking bands each year. This is all unpaid work and all the more enjoyable for being unpaid.

Relaxing the hold that work has over your life and replacing it with play can be a slow and gradual process. The key to enjoying a life beyond full-time employment is to realize that, once you stop working full time, you start to become a producer, a creative person, rather than a consumer. The earliest forms of work deemed acceptable by the Catholic Church were creative. The monks were allowed to bake bread, brew beer and work in the garden. This is because work, the clerics felt, should reflect God’s own act of creation. And they were right: these three forms of work are the most enjoyable. Gardeners, bakers and brewers tend to be happy people.

It is also true to say that you can be a wage slave without being a slave to wages. You don’t necessarily have to quit your job in order to be free. You can make your job into something that suits you. One friend, for example, decided to stay on the shop floor, so to speak, in his social-work job rather than move up to management. This is because he could work a shorter week (thirty-three hours, in his case), and the work itself was less stressful. In his job, looking after adults with learning disabilities, he does things he enjoys, such as gardening and playing the guitar. And he still has plenty of time and energy to work in the garden and make things at home and update his website and print magazines. So, he has a job, but he is not wholly dependent on it; and he has taken a creative approach to his job, in that he has made it fit his life, and not the other way around.

Many people I know have chosen to go part-time. Working three days a week gives you a psychological advantage, because the number of days you have to yourself outnumbers the days you are selling to an employer. Reduce your hours of vassalage; reduce your service. Do less.

Another argument for freelancing is that it is much safer than regular employment. Work is dangerous. Four hundred people a year are killed at work in the UK. The vast majority of these deaths occur at the bottom end of the scale, among goods drivers, warehouse staff, fitters, dock workers and so on. Work causes around 30,000 non-fatal injuries per year; half of these are in the service sector. And, according to the Centre for Corporate Accountability, idlers are safe: the figures for injuries among the self-employed are minute.

Anything that helps reduce our dependence on wages is a good thing. My new idea is the three-hour-shift system. The standard working day should be seven hours, and it should be divided into two shifts of three to three and half hours each. Thus, each week would consist of ten shifts. Now, at different times in your life, you could do more or less work. So, at certain times you might do the full ten shifts; at others, you could cut down to just a handful. A freelance economy of this sort would open up all sorts of new avenues for people. Right now, with a forty-hour week, it is just too difficult to see the wood for the trees and to have any energy left over at the end of the day for doing anything creative, making compost, or keeping hens or making honey, or baking bread, or brewing beer, or whatever your pleasures happen to be.

My other idea is Odd Jobs. This is a new service that I have set up on the Idler’s website. Noticing that Idler readers were struggling with the idea of giving up work entirely and trying to make money solely from their creative enterprises, I conceived Odd Jobs as a way for idlers to find temporary or part-time work in order to support their other activities. So, on Odd Jobs, you can advertise your own services or offer work. One example is a freelance classical musician, a tuba-player, who trained as a plasterer in order to make money during fallow periods in the tuba-playing world. He answered an ad on Odd Jobs, and he is going out to Italy to live for two weeks with a couple who need some plastering done, in return for a free holiday. This is the sort of creative approach that we need to take to the world of work. Odd Jobs escapes entirely from exploitative temp agencies and the disabling professionalization of work, because it simply works on the basis of a private contract between two individuals. Odd Jobs also says: ‘We are not going to sit around and wait for government and unions to improve working conditions. We are going to ignore the whole thing and set up our new vital systems for living and working.’

Specialization is a curse. ‘Oh, I’m no good at that sort of thing,’ we say to ourselves, with our learned sense of uselessness. But crafts are actually terribly easy to learn. Better to be jack of all trades than master of none. Victoria went on a course locally in which she learned how to make the rush matting on one of those Van Gogh-type chairs. Every moment a pleasure and, at the end of it, we had a mended chair, a thing of beauty and utility. Craft unites work and play, and art and life.

Be a jack of all trades; abandon perfectionism. Embrace the creed of the amateur. Do it for love, not money. A spade, a saw and a chisel, that is all you need to be free.

In play is freedom, says Huizinga, because it is self-directed and voluntary:

Child and animal play because they enjoy playing, and therein precisely lies their freedom. Be that as it may, for the adult and responsible human being, play is a function which he could equally well leave alone. Play is superfluous. The need for it is only urgent to the extent that the enjoyment of it makes a need. Play can be deferred or suspended at any time. It is never imposed by physical necessity, or moral duty. It is never a task. It is done at leisure, during ‘free time’. Only when play is a recognized cultural function – a rite, a ceremony – is it bound up with notions of obligation and duty. Here then, we have the main characteristic of play: that it is free, is in fact freedom.

We need to make all of our time free. Do what we like all day long. Do nothing all day long. Muck about all day long.

If you enjoy your work, then it’s not work. As my friend Sarah says, the trick to living free is to wake up every morning and screech: ‘Morning, Lord, what have you got for me today?’ She maintains that this really works. Freedom can start today, right now. You can change your life in one second. Freedom is a state of mind.

PLAY