Being Human
Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!
— Mame Dennis (Aunty Mame, 1958)
NOW THAT WE’VE GOT THE FORMALITIES OUT OF THE WAY we can get into the fun stuff! I’ll start by launching into some existentialism: What makes us human anyway? And how does, and should, work fit into that picture?
The Lottery
My mum buys a lottery ticket every week. She has for as long as I can remember. She’s probably spent, in present value, about $24,000 on tickets over the course of her life.1 This money, given gains in the stock market over the last thirty years, could be worth over $120,000 if it was invested rather than gambled.2 And because I don’t recall being driven to school in a Ferrari, I’m pretty sure she never took home the jackpot. (Sorry, Mum, this does have a point!)
She’s not alone. In the United States, for example, people spent $80 billion on lottery tickets in 2016.3 About 49 percent of Americans actively play the lottery,4 so on average that works out to be $511 spent per person each year. This is a lot of money, and it’s basically an extra tax. The government gets whatever is left after paying winnings and expenses, which it uses to fund various public services such as schools, parks, and juvenile detention centers, things that tax money already pays for, or should anyway.5
The people who buy lottery tickets give the government this voluntary and inefficient tax for a one-in-three-hundred-million chance of winning the jackpot. That’s the same likelihood as picking up a coin and flipping twenty-eight heads (or twenty-eight tails) in a row,6 not something we would normally bet money on.
But even though most people know their chance of hitting the jackpot is next to zero, there is that chance. O! that chance …
Anyone who has bought a ticket has had that fantasy. Your numbers start coming up, one by one. You jump out of your chair and keep watching and checking as they keep dropping. Your heart races. One more to go. It’s yours! You’ve got all of them! You check them. Once. Twice. Three times. You get your partner to check them. You check them in reverse order. You check them slowly. You check them upside-down. They’re all there!
You scream. You cry. You’ve won! You’ve never won anything in your life! You don’t even remember how big the pool is this week, but it was at least forty or fifty million dollars. You’ve just won enough for everything you will ever want or need. All those debts are gone! You never have to worry about money again.
Then comes the most thrilling part of the fantasy.
Your alarm wakes you up the next morning at seven. You iron your shirt or dress, for the last time ever. You drive through the start-stopstart, fifty-minute commute to work, for the last time ever. You walk through the sliding glass doors of your office, for the last time ever. Your smile is so big your face almost breaks in half. Your colleagues have already heard the news; they’re hugging you, crying, high-fiving, asking why you even came in. Your cheeks glow and you just keep riding the wave, hoping not to wake up again.
Now the fantasy splits, depending on how much you love or loathe your boss. It will range from either trashing their desk and leaving with an “I’m outta here!” to sitting down and crafting an especially elegant letter of resignation along the lines of “I will sadly yet gleefully be pursuing sunsets and sunrises instead of paychecks…. But thank you for being such an incredible person to work for. … XOX.”
After you deliver this message to your boss, you walk out the front door and drive home (which is much quicker than the drive in, because it’s nine thirty in the morning and no one’s on the road), for the last time, and begin planning what to do with all that money. You might even go to the beach or the cinema to gain your composure.
It almost feels wrong, but you are free.
Free.
Whenever I ask someone why they buy lottery tickets, I usually get a response along the lines of: “For that chance of financial freedom.”
This thing, financial freedom, has a few different meanings.
The first is usually the ability to pay debts. Many of us have debts of various types and sizes, and they all create a feeling of non-freedom. We feel trapped, burdened, weighed down, by those negative dollar signs and reminders to pay.
Part of the reason we work as much as we do is to keep up with payments, and we feel immeasurably stressed at the prospect of not being able to pay the minimum balances. We belong, in the back of our minds, to whomever we owe money to (usually the bank). Being able to finally get out of the bank’s pocket, either by gradually paying down debts or annihilating them with a glorious lump sum from a lottery jackpot, leaves us feeling that we’ve escaped.
Another meaning of financial freedom is the ability to live out our wildest fantasies: buying a yacht and sailing around the world; living in a mansion with a movie room and a popcorn machine; moving to a cabin on a lake in Finland to write that sci-fi novel; buying an Aston Martin and painting a fire-pterodactyl on the bonnet. Many lottery winners do indeed live their dreams of upgrading real estate, buying new cars, and travelling.7 This is the fun part of financial freedom – ticking off the bucket list.
But the last and most crucial meaning of financial freedom is right there in the name: freedom. In its purest sense, it means waking up in the morning and being able to choose exactly how you’ll spend your day. Having full ownership and agency of your own body and mind. It’s something many of us can’t even imagine unless it’s the weekend (and we somehow have no other obligations) or the holidays (which are too short).
Now, follow me down a somewhat obvious chain of logic:
1. Having a lot of money, as in the case of lottery winnings, gives us the freedom to do the things we want to do each day (check).
2. Which means that, conversely, without a lot of money, we don’t have the freedom to do the things we want to do each day (check).
3. Which means that, without a lot of money, we’re constrained to do something that takes away from our freedom (check).
4. And that thing we must do, to live, if we don’t already have a lot of money, is work (check).
5. So, work, in its current form, must take away from our freedom by getting in the way of our ability to do the things we want to do (check).
6. And the only way to gain freedom is to get a lot of money so we can escape work (double-check).
Hence the lottery.
This thing exists because we don’t feel free. We waste billions of dollars collectively on lottery tickets for a fraction of a chance to escape work, because it’s only when we escape that we can be free to do all the things we want to do. When people launch into the Wild West of freelancing, they’re also chasing an opportunity to do these things.
More importantly, this deep desire to escape demonstrates that the things we’re missing out on aren’t just nice-to-haves. They’re more fundamental than wanting a yacht or a mansion or a fancy car. In fact, these things are built into our DNA. They’re the things that make us human. And we crave them. Because, in the current system, with our current, normal jobs, we’re not getting enough – not even close.
Poverties
The World Bank defines poverty in purely economic terms: extreme poverty is living on less than $1.90 a day (based on 2011 prices). According to this metric, about 736 million people in the world, over half of whom reside in sub-Saharan Africa, live in extreme poverty.8
To take into account a more complex nature of poverty beyond mere income, the United Nations introduced the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) in a 2010 report. This measurement includes health (e.g., nutrition, child mortality), education (e.g., years of schooling, number of children enrolled), and standard of living (e.g., cooking fuel, access to toilets, water, electricity, assets). Using this measure, about 1.3 billion people worldwide live in multidimensional poverty.9
In either case, millions of people around the world go to bed hungry, live from day to day without knowing what the immediate future holds, and are often too tired and overcome with helplessness to improve their outlook. But – and I’m setting myself up for extreme eye-rolls and comments about First World problems – poverty extends beyond these measures, and it’s much more pervasive in developed countries than we might think, afflicting even those with well-paying work and roofs over their heads.
When the United Nations defines poverty as a “severe deprivation of basic human needs, [including] food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information,” they acknowledge that, as humans, we need more than just food and water to live. Or, in essence, there’s a difference between surviving and living, and things such as education and information, although not required for survival, are critical for living.
But humans require even more than these basic needs.
Imagine that you’re locked in a box. It’s big enough for you to stand up and move around in, and wide enough to lie down in comfortably. In that box is a constant supply of clean water and nutritious food. Purified air is pumped in through a tube. You have a working toilet and shower, and a special light provides for your vitamin D. New books appear weekly through a hole in the wall for you to read. You have a comfortable bed to sleep in. You have a couple of bars on which you can do pull-ups and push-ups. And you also have a stash of cash under your mattress (not that you need it, but your financial security is assured nonetheless).
Essentially you have, according to the World Bank’s and United Nations’ definitions, everything you need to not be living in poverty. You could stay alive for many, many years in this box. The question is this: would you feel alive in this box? Would you consider this existence to be living?
Probably not. You would have enough food and water and fresh air, but you would be deprived of other extremely important human needs. Not having any form of human contact, not having freedom to leave the box, not being able to see the sun or the sky, not having any newness or novelty, and not being able to pursue some sort of higher mission or meaning wouldn’t just leave you feeling unhappy, it would make you prefer death, and within weeks you would desperately try to escape head-first through the book-hole.
Indeed, in a similar and very real situation, prison inmates who are locked in solitary confinement “often describe feelings of extreme mental duress after only a couple of days…. Some researchers have even compared confined inmates to victims of torture or trauma because many of the acute effects produced by solitary confinement mimic the symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder.”10
These people have food, they have water, they have a working toilet, somewhere to sleep, a roof over their head, room to move around, but they’re suffering in many other ways.
The Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef, in his work on Human Scale Development, asserted:
The traditional concept of poverty is limited and restricted, since it refers exclusively to the predicaments of people who may be classified below a certain income threshold. This concept is strictly economistic…. [W]e should speak not of poverty, but of poverties. In fact, any fundamental human need that is not adequately satisfied, reveals a human poverty.11
Fundamental Needs
Humans have many other needs besides those that keep us from physically dying, and when we’re lacking in any of them, not just food and water and sanitation, we feel it to our core.
These needs have been labeled and categorized throughout the years by various researchers. They usually include basic survival (food, water, health, medicine), shelter and security, connection to and belonging with other humans, understanding and curiosity, identity, freedom, discovery and creation, leisure and fun, and transcendence or greater meaning.
Probably the most famous categorization of needs was Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy. Anyone who has attended a management course will have seen Maslow’s pyramid of needs, and how these needs can be used as motivators in the workplace.
Maslow himself didn’t construct a fancy pyramid infographic in PowerPoint (because it wasn’t invented yet), but he did propose an order of importance for human needs, starting with physiological (survival) as the most important, and moving down, in order, to safety, love and belonging, esteem (mastery, achievement, being respected by oneself and others), cognition (understanding and intellectual stimulation), aesthetics (appreciation for beauty and nature), self-actualization (reaching one’s highest and true potential), and lastly, self-transcendence (spirituality, a higher purpose beyond the self).12
In other words, humans have to fulfill their immediate needs before we can concern ourselves with our more esoteric desires. Someone who’s starving to death won’t be concerned with whether they’re fulfilling their higher purpose in life; or at least that was the initial premise.
This hierarchical approach to human needs isn’t overly useful, especially regarding the connection between work and our lives. Maslow himself proposed that the hierarchy “is not nearly so rigid as we may have implied,” noting examples of people who perceive self-esteem to be more important than love, or who pursue creative fulfilment over even the basic survival needs.13
And there are countless instances of humans over the ages sacrificing the basic needs of survival to fight for liberty, love, gender identity, political and religious ideals, and the fulfillment of many other so-called higher-level needs, thus throwing the hierarchy to the grinder.
Other categorizations for human needs have been proposed over the years, including Three Needs Theory by David McClelland, Human Givens by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell, and ERG theory by Clayton Alderfer, to name a few.
For this book we’ll be using Manfred Max-Neef’s list of fundamental human needs, a comprehensive and easy-to-understand classification system. Max-Neef understood the importance of each need independent of the others. To repeat his earlier quote: “Any fundamental human need that is not adequately satisfied reveals a human poverty.” He added that “each poverty generates pathologies,” meaning that we suffer when any need is unfulfilled, regardless of its place in the order of need fulfillment.
Max-Neef also captured crucial needs that Maslow and others didn’t, such as freedom and leisure. The unfulfillment of these has an immense bearing on modern life.
He used his list in the context of national development, arguing that we must take every human need into account when seeking to increase well-being and life satisfaction, and hence the economic participation, of a population. With that understanding, developers, such as governments, can focus on creating or encouraging satisfiers of multiple needs, and ensure that they’re not inhibiting or destroying people’s abilities to satisfy some needs in favor of fulfilling others.
Max-Neef developed a human-centered approach to economic development, and that’s extremely relevant for our approach to the workplace.
Max-Neef’s (Modified) List of Fundamental Human Needs
Below are basic descriptions of Max-Neef’s list of needs and examples of how these needs can be satisfied. They include examples of what happens when the needs are not fulfilled, providing strong evidence that they are indeed fundamentally important.
The satisfiers provided are not exhaustive because, as Max-Neef postulated, the “fundamental human needs are finite, few and classifiable,” but the ways in which those needs are satisfied change over time, from culture to culture, and from person to person.14
I’ve taken some liberty and added a tenth need, nature, to the original list because it’s clearly more than just a nice-to-have, or merely a satisfier of other needs, as I’ll describe further.*
Subsistence (survival)
This is basic survival, satisfied by having food, clean water, sanitation, medicine, shelter from the elements, and other things that keep us alive and at a comfortable distance from death. It means having enough food to be at a healthy weight, not just enough to avoid starvation.
And even though you can’t eat or drink it, money is also a major satisfier of this need, because in most cases we can’t survive without it.
The importance of not dying probably doesn’t need to be expanded on. Although, as mentioned previously, its importance can be superseded by a poverty of any other need.
Protection (security)
This refers to the ability to continue surviving, and it’s satisfied by having a job or some other secure source of income, being mentally and physically healthy, and having social security, health systems, insurance, legal systems, military, home ownership or rental agreements, support from others (family and friends), savings, infrastructure, access to markets, a functional government and good economy, and so on.
Figure 3.1. List of fundamental human needs devised by Manfred Max-Neef (with one addition by the author).
Apart from the practical elements of these satisfiers regarding our continued existence, a deprivation related to this need causes uncertainty and stress long before our survival is truly threatened. An example of this is in the next chapter, where we discuss how even the perception of job insecurity can result in physical and mental health problems.
Affection
Affection means love, intimacy, and connection, mainly with other humans, but also, importantly, with the self, and with animals and the natural world. It’s satisfied by physical touch, sex, friendship, partnership or marriage, parenting, sharing, caring, laughing, talking, giving gifts, and merely being in the presence of others.
A poverty of this need presents in astounding ways. The brain of a child who is emotionally neglected by its parents won’t develop properly. One study found that “globally neglected” children (e.g., minimal exposure to language, touch, and social interactions) had abnormally small brains. And this lack of brain development resulted in a range of developmental problems: “language, fine and large motor delays, impulsivity, disorganized attachment, dysphoria, attention and hyperactivity.”15
Other (also pretty dark) examples of poverty of affection can be found in the Catholic Church and prisons. Catholic priests, who in general must remain celibate (if not already married before becoming a priest), and prisoners, who have limited access to normal avenues for affection, both often end up fulfilling this human need through abhorrent means: sexually assaulting children in the clergy16 or raping other prisoners.17,18 These people are starving, and as Dr. Malcolm said in Jurassic Park when talking about other creatures fulfilling their fundamental needs, “Life … uh … finds a way.”
Understanding
This involves using our brain to figure things out and learn. Mastery. Curiosity. Discovery. Teaching. Finding patterns and connections.
This need is satisfied not so much by the end result of knowing things but more by the process of understanding, of figuring something out for ourselves. It’s less about having mastery and more about gaining mastery.
For example, if a friend saved you the effort of watching a murder mystery by telling you who the killer was and why they did it while the opening credits were still rolling, would you feel any sense of satisfaction from having that knowledge? Or would you feel that you needed a new friend because this one deprived you of the reason for watching the movie?
If you’ve ever been micromanaged in a work environment you will have felt that same deprivation of understanding, of working something out for yourself, of developing your own sense of mastery or skill. It sucks, on a fundamental level.
Participation
A single human in isolation is soft, slow, and highly visible prey. We don’t have protective armor, sharp teeth, poison in our skin, or the ability to leap into a high branch at the first sign of danger. But many humans, working together, have become the most indomitable species on the planet.
We know, on a genetic level, that we need to be part of a group to survive, so we crave cooperation with other humans. We know that combining our efforts and knowledge produces greater results than any one individual could achieve. It’s why we have a strong feeling of satisfaction when we help others, through charity or volunteering, even when we’re helping complete strangers.
Being part of a group, and feeling included, accepted, and respected by others, is strongly ingrained in our psyches. If you’ve ever experienced those sometimes-crippling feelings of shame or embarrassment (and would rather die than speak in public), which stem from the fear of being ridiculed or rejected by others, you’ll know just how important this need is. We want and need to belong to the group.
Some might see leisure as a nice-to-have, especially if they work in Silicon Valley and hustle sixteen hours a day. But the ability to rest, relax, play, shut down, daydream, and sit in idleness doing absolutely nothing is as necessary to our lives as night is to day.
To be able to achieve to our full capacity, we must have periods of doing nothing. Constantly doing without adequate periods of not doing has done untold injury to many people. It results in burnout, low productivity, health problems, errors and accidents, suicide, and a lack of enjoyment of life.
Rest, recovery, and play enable our brains and bodies to rebuild damage, consolidate and order information (learn and remember), build strength, increase creativity, and all sorts of other good stuff. And merely enjoying the world is important to a full life.
Creation
Creation is the need to use our imagination, knowledge, and unique self to produce something that wasn’t there before, whether it’s an idea, music, a story, a new machine, or a better process for picking strawberries.
This is where we have an appreciation for beauty, chaos, variety, and novelty. Boredom from doing the same things with the same people for an extended period of time reveals a poverty of this need. For instance, marriage or staying in an uninspiring job for many years can deprive people of newness and novelty, and they end up leaving or searching for ways to spice things up.
Identity
Because humans are highly self-aware, we’re not content with merely considering ourselves one of the many living, breathing organisms with two arms and two legs and opposable thumbs. We have a need to answer two questions in great detail:
1. Who am I?
2. How does the puzzle piece of me fit into some bigger picture?
The first is answered in an enormous number of ways, including, but not limited to, our name, physical appearance, age, gender, race, country of origin, profession, skills, likes and dislikes, language(s) spoken and accent, sexuality, level of education, relationship status, the car we drive, the clothes we wear, the sports or games we play or watch, the clubs we’re a part of, our life history, symbols like tattoos and rings and body modification, how and if we’re growing and developing, achievements and failures, dreams and goals and aspirations, favorite music, and so on.
The second question has been bugging philosophers (and every other human) since, like, forever: In the grand scheme of things, what is the point of me? Why am I here? What is the meaning of (my) life? And we answer that in a million different ways as well.
Spirituality and religion are ready-made answers that have made many of us content. That is, our purpose in the big picture is to serve a deity, and if we follow all the rules we’re rewarded with a glorious afterlife.*
The many other ways we seek this transcendence of the self include helping other people (volunteering, protesting, donating), helping the natural world around us through sustainable acts and practices, pushing for ideals and beliefs, having and raising children, connecting with nature and animals, sharing in rituals and stories with cultural groups and families, looking to the stars or deep under the ocean to try to find new life, entertaining others, or advancing technology and science.
More and more often our jobs and professions need to correspond to some higher meaning beyond making money. (One could argue that work has become a kind of religion in many countries.)
And others seek to just live a good life and enjoy the moment, and their purpose is that they have no purpose other than to live. This forms part of their identity and is something they value and hold on to.
Freedom
Freedom means having autonomy and control over oneself. Choice. Independence. The ability to speak, to vote, to think freely, to have privacy.
As we find our way as a species, we have taken away many freedoms from many individuals and groups. Slavery and the oppression of women are blatant examples of the theft of freedom. These thefts, along with more-subtle poverties of freedom, such as injustice and unfairness, are deeply felt. Even hearing about injustices faced by strangers on the other side of the planet creates a vicarious deprivation of freedom, and may stir people to action.
Less-obvious non-freedoms include those most relevant to this book: bosses owning an employee’s time in the modern workplace by dictating when they must be at the workplace, or making workers feel they have little autonomy, both of which contribute to a strong desire to escape.
Nature (my addition)
Max-Neef saw the importance of nature to people, but only in that it satisfied other needs, such as affection and leisure. But the importance of nature to our physical and mental well-being can’t be overstated – especially as we tend toward urbanization.
Just seeing (or not seeing) nature has profound effects on our existence. One study involving a prison in Southern Michigan found that prisoners who had a view of rolling farmland and trees were 24 percent less likely to get physically or mentally sick than their poor comrades whose cells looked out onto bare brick walls.19 The poverty of nature generated pathologies. Thus it fits within Max-Neef’s description of a fundamental need.
Being immersed in every part of nature affects us: the sun, the water, the land, and what we put into and on our bodies. The more closely linked we are to nature, the more we benefit. And conversely, when we’re deprived of the natural world, we suffer immense harm.
This list qualitatively states what we need as humans, but the importance of our needs can be measured. A study by Louis Tay and Ed Diener, which used a Gallup survey of 60,865 people from 123 countries, quantified the effects of each of our needs on our subjective well-being (SWB), which comprises life evaluation, positive emotions, and negative emotions.20
Tay and Diener (and Gallup) used a list of needs similar to Max-Neef’s, which I’ve put in parentheses:
• Basic needs for food and shelter (subsistence)
• Safety and security (protection)
• Social support and love (affection, participation)
• Feeling respected and pride in activities (participation, identity, creation)
• Mastery (understanding, creation, identity)
• Self-direction and autonomy (freedom)*
Table 3.1 shows the relative importance of each of these human needs, across the world, for the three components of SWB. The numbers outside the brackets are basically the percentage of relative importance for each need (e.g., for the world, basic needs account for 63 percent of the variance of life evaluation, whereas for positive emotions they only account for 3 percent of the variance).
The first significant result of the survey was that our needs seem universal across cultures and countries, thus affirming their fundamental nature. The highlighted rows show consistent patterns across different cultural regions for life evaluation, positive emotions, and negative emotions, illustrating that regardless of whether we live in Africa or Northern Europe or the Middle East, our needs are quantifiably similar.†
And following that, you’ll notice that different needs hold different relative importance for each of the three SWB components. For life evaluation, basic needs were generally the most important. For positive emotions, social and respect needs were most important. And for negative emotions, basic, respect, and autonomy needs held the most influence.
Tay and Diener concluded that “balance in life is desirable; this follows from the fact that each of the needs makes separable contributions to SWB…. Thus, because people need to fulfill a variety of needs, it is likely that a mix of daily activities that includes mastery, social relationships, and the meeting of physical needs is required for optimal SWB.”22
It may seem crude to place the infinite complexity and wonder of humans into a grocery list of ten or fewer items, but to the contrary, these lists demonstrate how varied and numerous our needs are at a fundamental level.
Table 3.1. A study by Louis Tay and Ed Diener shows the relative Importance of needs worldwide for three components of subjective well-being.21 Note: Total R2 represents the total amount of variance accounted for in the dependent SWB. Relative importance is calculated such that all values sum to 1.00, representing the proportional contribution. Bolded values show consistently large relative importance values across world regions. Numbers without brackets show the relative importance of needs alone. Numbers in brackets show the relative importance of both needs and income.
These are not optional extras; they are necessities for life:
• Creative outlets
• Rest, leisure, and fun
• Learning and testing new and varied concepts
• Spending affectionate time with friends and family
• Having a sense of freedom and autonomy over one’s life
• Feeling part of a broader community
• Being in and around nature
• Having a strong feeling of identity and purpose
A deprivation of any of our needs reduces our humanity – it takes away from our feeling of being alive and harms us and the world around us. Conversely, a balanced fulfillment of every need creates contentment, good physical and mental health, and lives that we don’t need to escape from.
These human needs, specifically Max-Neef’s modified list, will form the foundations of what we’re trying to achieve in this book. Work flexibility is so much more than parents being able to pick their kids up from school. Work flexibility helps us to take care of what makes us us.
Twenty-Thousand Years Ago
Meet June.
June is a member of the species Homo sapiens. She is a fifty-year-old matriarch of a tribe of about fifty people who live in the Vézère Valley in southwestern France, near what is now the town of Montignac. It’s a softly sloping, green landscape with plentiful fauna, flora, and river systems, surrounded by mountainous, rugged terrain.
Sunrise. June opens her eyes and two small, cheeky faces grin down at her. “Are we fishing today, Gramma?” one of the small faces asks.
“Yeah!” cries the other, “We haven’t been fishing for soooo long. And you said we would!”
June did promise her two granddaughters, aged five and seven, that she would take them to the river today. They’ve been helping her weave a new net for the last week out of rope brought to their village by a neighboring tribe; and it’s time to test it before the yearly salmon run.
They gather the long net and head toward the river.
June teaches the girls a song about the salmon on their way, a song taught to her by her own grandmother many years ago. She also tests the girls’ knowledge of which berries they can and can’t eat as they pass different bushes and trees. (The younger, Fi, has developed a habit of eating anything colorful.)
Ryle, the older sister, tests her slingshot skills on a rabbit sitting in the open. She misses and it hops away. “You’re getting closer,” June tells her as she rubs the top of her head. “Next time remember: two eyes.”
Back in the village, some of the men are trying out a new paint pigment on stones. It’s an ochre chalk one of them found several kilometers away in a dry riverbed, and they’re impressed with the rich red it leaves on the rocks after being mixed with water and lard. They try out various mixtures with different ratios of water and animal fat before settling on the right amounts. Tomorrow they’ll go down to the nearby cave and add this to the illustrations of animals they’ve already begun – pictures to glorify their spirit guides, such as the powerful bison, the proud stag, and the majestic horse.
One of the men is especially excited about going to the cave. Last week his name was Si. But after killing his first bison he is now considered a man and can choose his own name, so he is now called Fasu, meaning patient. It’s taken many months for him to feel courageous enough to go on the hunt, and he feels proud to have taken his time. He will paint his bison at the cave and join their spirits forever.
A teenage couple sit nearby under a tree, whispering to each other their dreams of journeying far from the valley, to see what’s on the other side of the surrounding limestone cliffs. They’ve spent their whole lives in the same land with the same people, and they’re sure there must be something else, something more, on the other side.
June and the girls return in the late afternoon with a bounty of salmon, and Fi has brought back a pouchful of probably edible berries. They’re just in time to meet members of their neighboring tribe, who have arrived with their own supply of food for tonight’s Moon Feast. They greet each other with gleeful hugs and nose kisses and begin to prepare the food, face paint, and costumes.
After the feast the full moon rises over the craggy hills in the distance, and a full and content elder, June’s uncle Dilé, stands in front of the fire and begins to tell the story of Hyena, who was born laughing at all the strange creatures in the world, especially humans, who walk on their back legs and lost their tails. But he finishes by saying that even Hyena has respect for all who walk or swim or fly and the land that birthed them, and that’s the way of the world.
One of the visitors sings a song, and the people dance with each other under the bright moon and share stories of their lives since the last feast.
These people are doing many of the things their ancestors have been doing since Homo sapiens arrived on the scene over two-hundred-thousand years ago. Some of these things were done by Homo habilis and Homo erectus, the parents of modern humans, millions of years ago.
That’s where our needs come from. They were imprinted on our genes as we were growing up as a species. Through complex evolutionary processes (beyond the scope of this book) humans developed certain adaptations based on what enabled us to survive, both as individuals and as a group, and these things have become part of who we are.
For instance, our ability and will to cooperate and socialize with other humans increased our fitness for survival by providing protection and enabling us to share knowledge about food and water sources, new technologies, and other information that gave us a survival advantage. Those who didn’t cooperate with other humans were more likely to die before handing down their lone-wolf genetic information to the next generation; hence, that need to participate and build affectionate relationships was written onto our genes.23
The more curious and creative of our ancestors would have found ingenious ways to survive and thrive, identifying patterns such as seasons, the weather, star and moon movements, herd migrations, and growth in different edible plants, and they found ways to keep warm during cold periods after we lost our protective covering of fur.24 Through using our minds, our brains grew in size and complexity, and now we crave understanding, learning, and higher reasoning.
An important physical adaptation also shaped our cognitive needs. When our ancient ancestors decided to stand up and walk on two legs, our hands became freer to make tools and weapons, carry, throw, draw, build, feel and investigate, and sew clothes and shoes. We developed finely tuned motor skills and opposable thumbs, and the number of nerves in our palms and fingers increased dramatically. Those developments, which we once used to fashion spearheads, can now be used to play “Flight of the Bumblebee” on a piano.25 We have a deep sense of satisfaction when we use our hands, in concert with our minds, to visualize something that doesn’t exist and then turn it into reality. This is why creation is such a fundamental part of who we are.
Leisure is important to us because leisure was the way we lived. Instead of working forty or more hours a week, ancient humans would have spent most of their time relaxing, chatting, grooming, or playing with members of the tribe, or sitting alone and looking at rocks or stars.26 In today’s world we’re overwhelmed by information and stimuli, and when we meditate or switch off from technology, we improve our mental health. This works because the world we evolved in was much quieter than today, with only a bit of talking and singing, and the trickle of a creek (and the occasional volcanic eruption).
We have an affinity with nature because that has always been our home. We’re a part of nature. We may have left it, with the rigid squares and rectangles in which we live and work, but it didn’t leave us. We grew up under the stars, in branches, surrounded by grass and rocks and hills and creeks. When we’re out there again, in the woods, or by the sea, or around other animals, we’re home, and our minds and bodies thank us.
And having the freedom to choose what we do when we wake up and how we do it has been part of our DNA for over four billion years. It developed when we were single-celled organisms floating around in whichever direction we damn-well pleased!
I’m not saying that life for June and her tribe was perfect twenty thousand years ago.
A small wound from a cut could spell doom without antibiotics.27 Food and water scarcity may have been a problem during ice ages and droughts. We were at the mercy of tigers and snakes and cannibals. Infant and child mortality – without modern medical technology and knowledge, and because of infanticide and other causes that we don’t see as acceptable now28 – were extremely high compared to the present.29 But we could certainly argue from the point of view of needs-fulfillment that June and her tribe had a pretty sweet existence.
It’s likely that ancient humans had the capability to fulfill their needs in a balanced and sustainable way that we in the modern world achieve only when we retire or win the lottery. These people had abundant time with family and other social connections, rest and leisure, varied and adventurous days, freedom to choose how to spend their time, exposure to nature, consistent and involved learning and teaching, healthy diets, and active lifestyles.30
The Devolution
About twelve-thousand years ago humans were domesticated by wheat. For a fascinating read about humans giving up the beautiful hunter-gatherer existence to toil in fields for rich masters I recommend Sapiens (2011) by Yuval Noah Harari.
This domestication would have started small. Abundant wet seasons provided high growth of grasses and grains, leading to semi-permanent settlements where humans could take advantage of this food source until it was depleted. Carrying the grains back to camp for grinding and cooking would have spread the seeds, and experimenting with storing food for leaner periods and cultivating for improved growth lured humans into larger, more permanent settlements.
We became dependent on these crops and on other types of farming and industry arising from permanent towns and cities. Slowly, without noticing much of a change, we left our old ways of living and could never go back. Wrote Harari:
Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers. Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease. The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of human-kind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.31
It (obviously) didn’t stop there. The larger, permanent towns and cities enabled huge leaps in our cooperative abilities and specializations, mirrored by leaps in science and technology, language and writing, government and laws, medicine, travel and discovery, and all the other things we take for granted in our modern lives.
The Scientific Revolution, starting in 1543 with the publishing of Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), and ending in the early 1700s with Isaac Newton (either with the publishing of Opticks in 1704, or his death in 1727),32 opened our minds further to the workings of the world and the universe, formed modern experimental methods, and subsequently produced technology that would look like magic to someone from a few hundred years prior (e.g., telescopes, mechanical calculators, steam engines).
From these developments emerged industrial machines capable of producing more materials and products than any human could make by hand; thus, on the back of mass textile manufacturing in the United Kingdom from around 1760, the Industrial Revolution began.33
GDP per capita increased dramatically due to growth in markets, populations took off, and the “standard of living” arguably increased due to advances in technology and life expectancy, greater access to consumable goods, and higher average wages to buy said goods.34
Without these Revolutions – the Agricultural, Scientific, and Industrial – I wouldn’t be typing this sentence on a computer, I wouldn’t be able to drive to the shop to buy food for a whole week, I wouldn’t have an understanding that the earth travels around the sun. We wouldn’t have achieved any of the current greatness and dominance over the planet that we have so far without these significant periods in history.
But the cost that most of humanity has paid since the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution to enable those achievements is immense. Many of us, most of us, lost our freedom and autonomy as soon as we settled (or were dragged) into this new existence of needing to work for others to survive, and our ability to take care of our fundamental human needs – those we developed over hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years – fell into a pit of darkness.
For our needs, these weren’t revolutions, they were a devolution. The Devolution. And with each advancement we made in technology and society and GDP, the masses have been forced to devolve further and further away from what we need as humans.
Our close connections to family and community were whittled away, time for relaxing and leisure disappeared, the opportunity to have varied, adventurous days was forced into one or two days on the weekend (and must compete with the laundry), and the ability to choose what we do on a daily basis became a long-forgotten, laughable myth.
Figure 3.2. The Agricultural, Scientific, and Industrial Revolutions, collectively, pushed us further and further away from a state of having our needs fulfilled, creating various chronic poverties. (The graphic is not to scale and purely for illustrative purposes.)
A) Before the Agricultural Revolution: human needs were fulfilled as they had evolved, in balanced and sustainable ways, because this was the environment in which they were created.
B) The Industrial Revolution: the low point of The Devolution, where needs-fulfillment was arguably at its lowest in history.
C) Now: humans have managed to claw back some of our ability to fulfill our fundamental needs because workplaces are slightly less industrialized as we shift to knowledge and information work. But those rigid work traditions are proving difficult to shake off, and we’re still, for the most part, unnecessarily living with poverties.
Figure 3.2 is a conceptual graph of our level of needs-fulfillment over these different periods, from before the Agricultural Revolution to the present.
The Industrial Revolution was the very bottom (B). During this time, kids weren’t just part of the labor force, they were preferred because of their relatively minuscule wages and high expendability; workdays of twelve to sixteen hours were common; there was a severe division of labor and housework for men and women; and only one day of rest was allowed (because God said).
It took some time, but luckily we started to see the impacts that this sort of work environment was having on the lives of workers: people were dying or getting sick because of long hours and poor conditions, kids included.
These impacts were revealed through the concerted efforts of unions, and some employers realized that it was good business to look after their employees. For example, Henry Ford doubled the minimum wage for his employees in 1914, and then reduced the workweek from six to five days twelve years later in 1926, both for mostly altruistic reasons.35* Governments started to set some rules for what business owners were allowed to make employees do, and for how long, and, thankfully, some societies said that it’s not okay for kids to be working and dying in coal mines.
So over the last hundred or so years we’ve managed to claw back a fraction of our ability to fulfill our human needs (C in Figure 3.2). Many countries now legislate a maximum number of days or maximum number of hours that people can work, ensure that kids aren’t being used for labor, and have certain standards for health and safety.
But even at the start of the twenty-first century, when we have abundant knowledge and wealth, and unbelievable technology, we’re still much closer to the level of unbridled labor we had in the dirty factories in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than we are to the autonomy and balance of June and her tribe twenty-thousand years ago.
Our needs are still in a pit.
The employee sitting in an open-plan office from Monday to Friday, eight thirty to five or six, for over 90 percent of the year, and spending an extra one or two hours a day just getting to and from work, is starving. They simply don’t have the capability to take care of their own needs in a sustainable way.
They have food, shelter, water, and access to medical care, but because of the poverties of other needs they fantasize about the weekends or their upcoming holidays. They dream of being anywhere else, and they build life rafts out of a few branches and risk their financial security in the ocean of freelancing or entrepreneurship.
They might drown, but many don’t feel like they have a life in their current situation anyway, so it’s worth the risk. Or they just sit there and starve, too scared to challenge what’s normal because they need the money. There are many examples of poverties caused by the rigid workplace:
Subsistence
Because of a deeply embedded culture of overwork in Japan, 71 percent of men in that country “routinely get less than seven hours of sleep each night.”36 And in the United States, also at least partly due to the stress and length of their workdays, one in three adults aren’t getting at least seven hours of sleep on a regular basis. (Other major causes of not sleeping enough include obesity, physical inactivity, smoking, and excessive alcohol use,37 all of which can be heavily influenced by rigid work practices, as discussed in the next chapter.)
Pathologically speaking, it has been found that “sleeping less than seven hours per day is associated with an increased risk of developing chronic conditions such as obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, and frequent mental distress.”38
Protection
A study in the United Kingdom found that only half (53 percent) of people exercise more than once per week. The top reasons given were that they are either too busy or too tired.39
Another study, also in the United Kingdom, found that 37 percent of people never exercise or play sport. Never! Similarly, 40 percent of the respondents in this study claimed that lack of time was the main reason for not exercising more often.40
We can safely assume that at least one of the reasons people feel they don’t have enough time to take care of their health, in this simplest and most powerful way, is due to the rigidity of their work (more on this, again, in the next chapter).
Leisure
A strong sign that people don’t have enough time and energy to fulfill their leisure needs (and other needs, including creation, affection, nature, and freedom) during the normal workweek is that 81 percent of fully employed adults are found to suffer from “Sunday night blues” or the “Sunday scaries”41 – that feeling of existential stress and anxiety about diving back into the too-muchness of the next long and rigid week.
The World Health Organization has recently included burnout in the 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases as an “occupational phenomenon” defined as “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions:
1. Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion
2. Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job
3. Reduced professional efficacy.”42
In some of the most rigid workplaces in the world, burnout is running wild. A survey of fifteen-thousand U.S. doctors found that 44 percent “were experiencing symptoms of burnout.” A large U.K. law firm found that 73 percent of its lawyers were feeling burnout.43
And a Gallup poll of U.S. full-time employees found that nearly a quarter (23 percent) feel burned out at work “very often or always,” and 44 percent feel this way at least sometimes.44 Drained of human needs, especially regarding rest and play, these people are just getting through the day.
Affection
Loneliness has become a crushing epidemic across much of the world (especially in Western societies), and is likely to be one of the main causes of a corresponding spread of depression, anxiety, and other health and well-being problems.45 The United Kingdom has recently appointed a Minister for Loneliness to focus on this issue.46
It may seem unfair to say that work has any part to play in the loneliness epidemic, especially when you can argue that work, for many people, is one of the main avenues for social connection.
But that is the problem!
First, working long and rigid hours gets in the way of genuinely connecting with people outside of work, such as spending time with friends and family, or creating connections in the community. A YouGov study in the United Kingdom found that “almost half (49 percent) of respondents say that being busy in their day-to-day lives stops them from connecting with others as much as they would like to.”47
Second, even though the workplace is a major source for human interaction, these interactions are often only skin-deep. Work isn’t usually where we open up and share our troubles and dreams with others. This isn’t surprising, since many of us maintain a professional distance at work, or we want to avoid professional fallout when relational issues arise, or we don’t feel that we can trust those we compete with.
One Gallup study on U.S. workers found that only two out of ten people have a “best friend” at work48 – that is, someone they can confide in, care about, spend quality time with both in and out of the office, trust, and, dare I say, love.49
Combining these two points, it could be said that many people with normal jobs spend most of their waking hours disconnected from true social interaction and affection, a complete reversal of the daily lives of June and her tribe.
Nature
A systematic review found that, because they don’t get enough sunlight, 80 percent of shiftworkers, 77 percent of indoor workers, and 72 percent of healthcare residents were vitamin D deficient.50 A deficiency of the sunshine vitamin has been linked to osteoporosis, certain cancers, cardiovascular and respiratory disorders, inflammatory bowel diseases, cognitive disorders, and a long list of other crappy stuff.51,52 This is just one of the many ways (and one of the worst) that work environments and cultures, and the lack of daily freedom, get in the way of our proper connection with nature.
Understanding/Creation
Work doesn’t always satisfy our cognitive needs. Often there’s little variation, and when there is it’s either at the mindlessly simple end of the spectrum, or it’s highly specialized to the point of still being mindless, thus not providing the stimulation our brains require.
One survey of thirteen-hundred professionals around the world found that 65 percent of us are bored at work, with legal (81 percent), financial (68 percent), and accounting (67 percent) being the most boring. Research and development (45 percent) and executive management (49 percent) were the least boring.53
We often don’t get to use our minds as they were designed to be used while we’re at work; we can’t use our minds in varied and complex ways with consistent discovery and novelty. Someone who spends the majority of their time the way most of us do is starving their brain.
Freedom
The mere feeling of freedom is one of our strongest needs, and it’s one of the biggest needs we aren’t meeting in the workplace.
A survey of nearly one thousand freelancers found that the top reasons they give for preferring the unpredictability of freelancing over a typical office job all related to freedom: work-life balance (70 percent), desire to choose when I work (62 percent), freedom (56 percent), desire to choose where I work (55 percent), and desire to be my own boss (49 percent).54
Without freedom it’s much harder to fulfill our other needs in sustainable ways. From the same survey, 60 percent of respondents “said freelancing has helped them become healthier, and 66 percent said they are less stressed as a freelancer.” Escaping their normal jobs allowed them to start relaxing and take care of themselves.
These are just a few examples, but they’re enough to show that the rigid workplace is really fucking us over as a species.
What can be done about this situation?
One option is to wait thousands or millions of years for our fundamental needs to slowly evolve to disconnection from other humans, being surrounded by artificial light and bricks, constant busyness, doing the same things day after day, not requiring sleep or physical activity, and mindless servitude. Evolution never really reaches an end point, so this is not such a silly idea; it just requires patience.
Another option is to start moving away from unchecked capitalism, today, and toward a way of working that considers employees as humans, and to start valuing people’s needs as much as shareholder profits and CEO salaries.
We also need to recognize that human sustainability and capitalism aren’t mutually exclusive, but in fact synergize beautifully, as I’ll discuss in Part Two of this book.
It’s time to combine our astounding advancements in technology and understanding of the universe, and our knowledge of what we need as humans, to fight back against The Devolution. It’s time to prioritize our needs, in all areas of society, especially the workplace. It’s time for us to leap out of this pit.
Coping
Polite skeptics may, at this point, be tempted to say that everyone who works for them is fine and happy, and none of this applies to their workplace. No one who works for me is in poverty!
Although humans have evolved to require certain things to feel whole, alive, and healthy, we have also evolved to be highly adaptive and can cope with terrible environments, such as drought, war, ice ages, concentration camps, and open-plan offices. If nothing else, Homo sapiens is a survivor.
This means that we can subsist in this rigid, traditional work environment and work long hours, even when most of our needs are starving, and it can take years before we realize that something is wrong. Many of us think that it’s normal to ignore our human requirements and prioritize work in order to provide for ourselves and our families. It’s only when we’re surrounded by beeping monitors that we realize, with deep regret, that we’ve sacrificed our happiness for the sake of work.55
If something isn’t a direct and obvious threat to our survival, we’re usually okay with it. Our traditional workplace doesn’t have sharp claws and big teeth; it’s not something we instinctively run away from when we see it. Sure, occasionally we gloriously quit from a particularly heinous work environment; but usually we put up with it and ignore the voices inside that say “this isn’t good,” because, as far as we know, it’s normal. We slowly succumb to ill health and other problems, not realizing that we’re being attacked by this way of living.
I’d felt the black cloud building for some time. At first it was little things: occasionally getting to work late because I couldn’t get out of bed, turning down invitations to meet friends so I could stay home and watch movies by myself, my waistline expanding with a bit too much comfort food, having trouble focusing on my work.
Because of my long hours at work and commuting two to three hours a day, I could easily put a tick next to each of the demonstrations of poverty set out in the previous section.
Slowly and surely, I was consumed. I became numb. I couldn’t make the simplest of decisions. I sat and stared at my monitor at work, trying my best to at least look busy when someone walked past.
I was going through the motions of life, pretending to be a person.
“I think I might have depression,” I told the HR manager, my hands cold and shaking as I forced the words out into the open.
It wasn’t the first time I’d gone through mental health problems during my career, but this time I decided to tell my employer in the hopes that they would be understanding, and perhaps try to work with me as I found help. And thankfully they were understanding, at first. They gave me time to see a therapist, and my boss helped to plan new deadlines for my projects.
The therapist confirmed that I was suffering from severe depression and anxiety. We talked mostly about work, and how I felt trapped by my current existence, and how I didn’t feel alive because my life was nothing but work and sitting in traffic, and that I knew that there was something fundamentally wrong with the way we work, and how I was constantly working, even after hours, to try to escape from work and free myself.
She suggested that I should work a bit less, and that even though it’s admirable that I’m trying to start my own side business, maybe I should focus on my day job and learn to be content with what I have. She took me through mindfulness exercises – breathe in, breathe out, focus on a tree outside, breathe in, breathe out – that would help me cope with life in its current form.
Henceforth, every day, when I started having trouble focusing, I’d breathe in, breathe out, look at leaves brushing against the office window, and close my eyes. And once a day I’d walk outside and sit on a park bench for fifteen minutes.
It did help to a certain extent, and I now do my best to do some simple meditation on a daily basis to escape from information overload and recenter myself. But the real solution came only a few weeks after I told my employer about my situation. They fired me.
The letter on the table had some fluffy statement about the “position being unnecessary, and it will be divided between different functions.” Whatever. I was too numb to argue. On top of the dubious timing of my firing, this was my third time being made redundant in the space of five years. It was the final nail.
On my drive home, I swore off working for other people and being in a normal eight-thirty-to-five office job forever. I knew the damage it had done. “Never. Fucking. Again.” I would be free, at any cost. With this thought, a thin ray of sunlight pierced the black cloud for the first time in years.
After a final, sobbing breakdown, and after spending my last few dollars on food and exorbitant rent, I moved away from the city to stay with family in a small tourist/retirement town on the coast. I fell into a job as a lifeguard at the local pool, and after writing a few articles on LinkedIn, managed to become a contributing writer for a flexible job-search company.
The pay wasn’t great for either of those jobs (especially compared to what I was receiving in a “normal” job) but for the first time in years I started to feel content. The healing process began.
The lifeguarding took up three or four days a week, sometimes half-days, sometimes longer days with a few-hours gap in the middle, and the writing I could do whenever and wherever I wanted; the only commuting was a five-minute drive to the pool.
With this newfound flexibility I had the freedom to attend to my human needs, all of them, every day.
I slept as much as I needed to sleep. I took my dog for a nature walk each morning and evening. I regularly worked on things I was passionate about (writing and editing). I exercised every day (obviously my free pool access helped!). I could do housework whenever it needed to be done, in the gaps of the other stuff I was doing, rather than using my precious weekends for it.
I met with friends to hang out during weekdays (it was tough to stop feeling guilty about that). I could make love at ten on a Tuesday morning (I hadn’t been able to do that since skipping classes back at university).
I spent time doing nothing but appreciating the beauty of the world around me. I’d spot a type of bug with cool wings that I didn’t know existed and then wonder how insects evolved, or I’d see a constellation of stars that I’d never seen before because I finally had time to look up.
Thanks to the dismissal from my last rigid job, the major root cause of my depression was solved: I no longer had any poverties. I no longer craved weekends because I was living sustainably, fulfilling my fundamental human needs, every single day. I no longer needed to cope.
This, for me, was revolutionary, and it was one of the reasons I decided (and was able) to write this book. I’d seen firsthand that it’s possible to be enormously productive and free; these things weren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, they both flourished at the same time, because of each other. It quickly became my mission to help that concept spread as fast and far as possible.
I don’t recommend that everyone rush off to become a lifeguard (it will make you hate kids and their parents). But my point is this: even though I was still working thirty to forty-five hours a week, and even though I’m earning much (much!) less now than I was in the corporate world, the freedom to avoid long commutes, have control over my start and finish times, and have flexibility and freedom in general, has given me a life that people throw money at the lotteries in the hopes of one day winning. I’d won without buying a ticket.
It doesn’t require the Wild West of freelancing to get those things. Employers need to realize that they have the power to make incredible differences to their employees’ (and their own) lives. And then they need to ask how the current work structure produces poverties and work with everyone in the business to find out how they can make a difference that allows people’s needs to be fed.
Even simple things, such as letting someone work remotely for one or two days a week, can vastly reduce stress and increase health and engagement. Or letting people leave when their work is finished, rather than them feeling that they have to stay until five ten just because the boss hasn’t left yet, makes them feel that they’re a trusted adult with control over their own existence.
How many of your people are coping?
Work Is Not the Devil
At this point you’re probably wondering why I hate work so much, and if there’s any point in reading a book by some dirty socialist who’s completely against it.
Well, I’m not against it. Far from it.
We need work.
Or rather, our needs need work.
Going back to the lottery fantasy at the start of the chapter, what would really happen after you quit your job? Maybe you’d travel around the world, perhaps spend a month in Greece on a yacht. Then you’d come back and upgrade your house to a mansion with an infinity pool and a cinema. Maybe you’d finally take those singing classes you’d always thought about. There would be abundant computer game time. Probably some partying and champagne. And all of this interspersed with bountiful time with friends and loved ones.
But in this life of luxury and leisure, you’d start to get bored. Real bored. And you’d start to feel that some things are missing. Playing PlayStation all day isn’t all you expected. Constantly going to the beach has started to lose its appeal. Even spending too much time with loved ones and your entourage of friends is wearing thin.
These things were fun for a few months but now they’re leaving you with an empty, useless feeling. Some gaps are forming in your humanness. You’re getting up at ten every day; and your brunch of smashed avocado on sourdough toast isn’t filling you up the way it used to.
Maybe part of the reason that many lottery winners blow all their winnings within the space of a few years is that they’re trying to fill that empty feeling with more and more material things, or trips, or giving money away to family or charity, not realizing that by quitting their jobs they escaped from something they need.*
Work helps to fulfill an incredible number of our fundamental needs. Work is a direct satisfier, to various degrees, of at least seven of the ten needs in Max-Neef’s modified list: subsistence, protection, understanding, participation, creation, identity, and affection. Even if we weren’t paid for work – if money didn’t exist – we would still do something other than relax on a beach, eat, or hang out with friends.
We have an inbuilt desire to create, to challenge ourselves with a project that has a beginning, middle, and end, and to do so with the joint effort of other people. It’s something that fosters connection and cooperation, which have enabled humans to survive and dominate the planet. It’s part of how we identify ourselves – we can feel proud to be an expert, and we can pass that knowledge to others. Our minds are powerful and active; if they’re not being put to use they get unbearably restless. When we work we get blissfully lost in the flow of doing, in discovering, in testing, in asking Why? We’re tinkerers and problem solvers, from before the time we figured out how to harness fire. And we need missions: something to fight for, or fight against, with passion; something that drives us.
What June and her tribe were doing was work: teaching youngsters, studying the movements of the animals they hunted, building spears and weaving nets, painting cave walls, tracking the stars and moon, caring for one another, singing songs, sharing their history, trading with other tribes. Yet no one was paying them to do these things. They did it because that’s who they were. It’s a part of being human.
An article in the Sydney Morning Herald56 about a multi-millionaire surgeon who had declined retirement, even though he had more than enough money to do so, completely missed the point of why he wanted to keep working.
The author speculated that Daniel (the doctor), like other wealthy people, was so incredibly hard working and driven to succeed that he just couldn’t imagine not working; that is, he was wealthy because of his inherent drive to succeed, so he could bear the pain of working.
Daniel must be incredibly driven and disciplined in order to have achieved his success, but I propose that he continues to work because in doing so he satisfies many of his fundamental human needs: it’s the challenges, the opportunity to make a difference, using his mind and skills, and his connections with patients and colleagues that keep him working. The work itself adds value to his life, regardless of how much money he’s earning.
These needs are within all of us, not just the super wealthy and successful. It just so happens that the wealthy are often in a better position to choose work that they’re passionate about and have more freedom to pursue it in a way that they choose.
And the less well-off often dislike work because it may not be something they enjoy doing, and they don’t have as much freedom to choose how and when the work is done – they lack flexibility. If these people suddenly became rich, they might retire for a while, but then they would realize that they want to do more than relax and have fun. They would find work, in some form, and do it in a way that suits them.
We’re going to continue our little switcheroo on our lottery fantasy.
As it turns out, even though many, many people buy lotto tickets for their chance to attain freedom, the majority, when asked what they would do if they did win, said they would continue working in some fashion.
When Gallup asked people in the United States in 2013 what they would do if they won ten million dollars, over two-thirds (68 percent) of respondents said they would continue working, many even in the same job at the same company.57
Another survey by CareerBuilder found that just over half would continue working if they didn’t need a job financially. The most common reasons to continue working were “I would be bored” (77 percent), “Work gives me a sense of purpose and accomplishment” (76 percent), and “Financial security aside from the winnings” (42 percent).58
Many people see value in working besides a paycheck. But they still demonize work and long for escape, or at least an avenue of escape for when they can no longer bear it, because society has created a bastardized version of what work should be.
We’ve allowed work to take up a disproportionate chunk of our lives, and to compete with the rest of life instead of being a part of it. Rather than being a positive, wonderful thing that allows us to be whole in so many ways, it drains many of our needs and creates poverties.
The thing we want to escape is not work itself, but long and rigid work, and we should escape from it. We can do that by moving back to a world where work is just one of the things we do, in reasonable proportion to everything else.
That people want to work kicks up all sorts of questions.
First, and I’ll make this point a few more times: how terrible is our traditional, rigid workplace if it’s managed to make many of us despise this fundamental life necessity? It has been forced down our throats to the point where we can’t stomach it. If we were force-fed $100 steaks (or $100 parmesan polenta steaks for the vegetarians), they would taste horrendous. In the same way, we’ve managed to make work completely inedible when it should be satisfying and delicious.
Second, is retirement necessary? Are we retiring from work, or are we retiring from terrible workplaces and unsustainable lives? If work is something we want to do, and it provides substance to our lives, would we really want to suddenly end it?
Ask Warren Buffett. The dude is nearly ninety years old. He has more money than Scrooge McDuck. Has he stopped working so he can go fishing and look after his garden? What about Richard Branson? He owns a damned island! He could play computer games on his own beach while his personal assistant pours cocktails into his mouth through a gold funnel. Neither of them needs to work, but they do. Are they in the special minority of people who are driven to succeed, or does work feed their lives in ways that money and luxuries can’t? (It’s the second one.)
With our populations getting older across much of the developed world, this is an important point. (I’ll expand on this in the next chapter.) Flexibility allows people to work longer, to their benefit, by making work more palatable, thereby reducing the strain on the welfare system and the younger working generation, to everyone’s benefit.
The last question, and the most important for this book, is: if people like work, and have an ancient, internal drive to work, do they need to be monitored and micromanaged, kept in an open-plan office so everyone can see if they’re working or not, and be forced to collaborate with their team? And do they need to be kept at work until five to make sure they’ve earned the right to go home? Or could they be trusted to work with autonomy and independence because of the inherent benefits that work provides? (I did warn you about my sarcasm.)
A New Description of Flexibility
Now that I’ve introduced important concepts about what it is to be human and how work fits into the picture, here’s a new description of flexibility:
Work flexibility is a practice that can maximize the positive effects of work on an individual while reducing or eliminating the negative effects. People want to work. They want to feel productive and to have feelings of achievement and belonging, and to have a secure income. They just want and need the freedom to fulfill the other important parts of their lives as well. Flexibility enables people to be free to be a whole human, as much and as often as possible.
For the rest of the book, and whenever you’re thinking about work structures and managing others, I ask you to consider this description. It’s a reminder that people aren’t inherently lazy and indolent, and if they have freedom, they won’t automatically abuse it. If you help them fulfill their human needs, they will feel like they’ve won the lottery, and they’ll have the energy and appreciation to give you their very best.
* While reading an early draft of this book, a friend suggested that the list could be further enhanced by including eyeliner and free Wi-Fi; but I questioned the fundamental nature of these needs.
* Religion is a ready-made satisfier of many other needs on this list, if you’ll notice, such as affection, participation, understanding, protection, and for some, subsistence. There’s no wonder it’s played such an important role, for better or worse, in human history. The same could also be said for sport; just replace glorious afterlife with premiership cup or Olympic medal.
* The effects of leisure and nature weren’t measured in this study, but I’m sure some interesting results would have arisen if they were.
† There are differences between regions regarding the importance of specific needs; this may be due to the relative lack of fulillment in each region, which heightens their perceived importance. For example, basic needs are significantly more important in South East Asia, Latin America, and Africa, where they would be less fulfilled than in the more developed regions of Southern and Northern Europe and the Middle East.
* To combat high levels of worker absenteeism and turnover, and to increase productivity, Ford realized that people need to be able to fulill their needs (such as feeling inancially secure and being able to rest).
* Other reasons they lose all their winnings is that they have no idea how to manage that amount of money, having never had that much, and they perceive those winnings as bonus money and thus completely expendable.
