Anthropologists estimate that nomadic cave people had a significant advantage over the civilizations that came after them: they worked perhaps four hours per day. Many people assume that agriculture developed because it was easier simply to sit still and watch plants grow than to traipse around looking for food that grew spontaneously. Not so. Agriculture increased the workload immensely.
Today, in developed societies, the workday is not quite so onerous as it was for early farmers or for workers during the Industrial Revolution. But it still vastly exceeds that for hunter-gatherer humans. The form of the work has also changed. If we put on our rose-tinted glasses, we can say that modern work is generally cleaner, safer, and easier than scavenging for meals. But donning our blue lenses, we can say that most work has lost its obvious connection to existence: we shuffle bits of paper, move objects around, type on keyboards, and create unnecessary products.
In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Alain de Botton writes that the modern workplace subdivides tasks so much that each employee works on only a tiny bit of the process, rarely seeing a product or project from inception to completion.4 He suggests, echoing Karl Marx, that this fragmentation can create an alienation from the work itself. Few of us would prefer to return to feudal farm life or resurrect the occupational glories of the Eastern Bloc, but the point is, for many, a valid one. It is somewhat more difficult to bask in a glow of achievement gazing at a pile of completed paperwork than when hammering the final nail into a freshly built barn.
Despite concerns about modern work and workplaces that are too numerous to mention, there is a constantly repeated cultural imperative to work as hard as you possibly can. Hard work, even when it is for a distant and unknown corporate master, has the air of virtue. Further, once we achieve a personal best (the most e-mails sent in an hour, the greatest daily sales of pipe fittings, the most burgers flipped), we are to regard this as nothing more than a mark to be surpassed. In the almost meaningless lexicon of modern management, we are to give 100 percent to our work. Unsatisfied by even that mark, mathematically challenged supervisors sometimes request 110 percent.
Ask what “giving 110 percent” actually means, and you will quickly discover that the idea is not intended to be parsed, defined, or questioned. “It’s just something we say, for goodness’ sake. It doesn’t really mean anything.” But it keeps getting said.
You are to pour everything into your work: all of your time, your energy, your creativity. You are to leave nothing behind, so you leave at the end of the day an empty shell, like a plastic water bottle or a hot dog wrapper. You are to save nothing for the rest of your life—your spouse, family, friends, interests, health. By starving the sustaining elements of your life, they will drop away, leaving you with only your work to prop you up. But work will never do this, so misery will soon follow.
You should also calculate your capacity for work using an extremely short time horizon. Ask yourself, “How hard can I manage to work today?” Avoid the longer-term questions, like “How hard can I reasonably and sustainably work for a year—or for many years?” The answers to these two queries usually sit in opposition to one another. You can easily work fourteen hours today without burning out or irrevocably damaging your relationships or health, but you cannot work this way forever. For maximum misery, treat the marathon of your work life as though it was a sprint.
The question you must avoid asking is “What is all this work for?” In the cave person’s era, the answer was obvious. The function of the work was to feed the people doing it. Work was subservient to the demands of life. In the confusion of modern culture, we have succeeded in turning this idea on its head. It is now the function of the person to serve the work and to do so with as small an expectation of reward as possible. The economy is not an instrument for the enhancement of human welfare. Human welfare is an instrument for the enhancement of the economy.
None of this is intended to imply that work has no rewards or has no meaning in itself. Many find fulfillment by striving mightily to excel in their roles—seeing in the completion of a condominium project the creation of homes, in the sale of insurance policies the prevention of financial disaster, in the provision of health care the enhancement of lives. But in these cases, people view the work as their own goal, rather than seeing themselves merely as tools for completing the goals of others. To enhance misery, you should instead see yourself as a mere hammer in the hands of the real builder—your boss, the business owner, or the faceless shareholders. Or as the nail being hammered.
Work life can, then, be an effective mechanism for the creation of unhappiness—particularly if one relies on it exclusively to sustain one’s life. A one-legged coffee table is dangerously unstable. If dangerous instability is one’s goal, then pouring all one’s resources and spending all one’s time on a single element of existence is an excellent strategy.