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Maybe it’s because work is satisfying.Maybe it’s because we’re trapped.Or maybe, as Ryan Avent suspects, it’sbecause of a troubling combination of thetwo

RYAN AVENTRYAN AVENT

hen I was young, therewas nothing so bad asbeing asked to work. NowI find it hard to conjure up

that feeling, but I see it in my five-year-old daughter. “Can I pleasehave some water, daddy?”

“You can get it yourself, you’re a biggirl.”

“WHY DOES EVERYONE ALWAYSTREAT ME LIKE A MAID?”

That was me when I was young,rolling on the ground in agony onbeing asked to clean my room. As achild, I wonderingly observed thehours my father worked. The stoicalway he went off to the job, chin heldhigh, seemed a beautiful, heroicembrace of personal suffering. Thepoor man! How few hours he lefthimself to rest on the couch, read orwatch American football.

My father had his own accountingfirm in Raleigh, North Carolina. Hisspeciality was helping peoplemanage their tax and financial affairsas they started, expanded, or in somecases shut down their businesses.He has taken his time retiring, and I

SOCIETYSOCIETY

WHY DOWE WORKSO HARD?

1 8 4 3 M A G A Z I N E1 8 4 3 M A G A Z I N E

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now realise how much he liked hiswork. I can remember the glowingterms in which his clients would tellme about the help he’d given them,as if he’d performed life-savingsurgery on them. I also remember theway his voice changed when hereceived a call from a client when athome. Suddenly he spoke with acommand and facility that I neverheard at any other time, like a captivepenguin released into open water,swimming in his element with naturalease.

At 37, I see my father’s routine withdifferent eyes. I live in a terracedhouse in Wandsworth, a moderatelysmart and wildly expensive part ofsouth-west London, and a short trainride from the headquarters of TheEconomist, where I write abouteconomics. I get up at 5.30am andspend an hour or two at my desk athome. Once the children are up I jointhem for breakfast, then go to workas they head off to school. I canusually leave the office in time to jointhe family for dinner and put thechildren to bed. Then I can get a bitmore done at home: writing, if there isa deadline looming, or reading, whichis also part of the job. I work hard,doggedly, almost relentlessly. Thejoke, which I only now get, is thatwork is fun.

Not all work, of course. When myfather was a boy on the family farm,the tasks he and his father did in thefields – the jobs many people still do– were gruelling and thankless. Ionce visited the textile mill where mygrandmother worked for a time. Thenoise of the place was sooverpowering that it was impossibleto think. But my work – the work welucky few well-paid professionals doevery day, as we co-operate withtalented people while solvingcomplex, interesting problems – isfun. And I find that I can devotesurprising quantities of time to it.

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What is less clear to me, and to somany of my peers, is whether weshould do so much of it. One of thefacts of modern life is that a relativelysmall class of people works very longhours and earns good money for itsefforts. Nearly a third of college-educated American men, for example,work more than 50 hours a week.Some professionals do twice thatamount, and elite lawyers can easilywork 70 hours a week almost everyweek of the year.

Work, in this context, means active,billable labour. But in reality, it rarelystops. It follows us home on oursmartphones, tugging at us during anevening out or in the middle of ourchildren’s bedtime routines. It makespermanent use of valuable cognitivespace, and chooses odd hours topace through our thoughts, shovingaside whatever might have beenthere before. It colonises ourpersonal relationships and uses themfor its own ends. It becomes our livesif we are not careful. It becomes us.

hen John MaynardKeynes mused in 1930that, a century hence,society might be so rich

that the hours worked by eachperson could be cut to ten or 15 aweek, he was not hallucinating, justextrapolating. The working week wasshrinking fast. Average hours workeddropped from 60 at the turn of thecentury to 40 by the 1950s. Thecombination of extra time and moneygave rise to an age of mass leisure,to family holidays and meals togetherin front of the television. There was avision of the good life in this era. Itwas one in which work was largely ameans to an end – the working classhad become a leisured class.Households saved money to buy ahouse and a car, to take holidays, tofinance a retirement at ease. Thiswas the era of the three-Martinilunch: a leisurely, expense-paddedmidday bout of hard drinking. Thiswas when bankers lived by the 3-6-3rule: borrow at 3%, lend at 6%, andhead off to the golf course by 3pm.

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The vision of a leisure-filled futureoccurred against the backdrop of thecompetition against communism, butit is a capitalist dream: one in whichthe productive application oftechnology rises steadily, untilmaterial needs can be met with just afew hours of work. It is a story of thetriumph of innovation and markets,and one in which the details of apost-work world are left somewhathazy. Keynes, in his essay on thefuture, reckoned that when the end ofwork arrived:

For the first time since his creation man will be

faced with his real, his permanent problem –

how to use his freedom from pressing economic

cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science

and compound interest will have won for him, to

live wisely and agreeably and well.

Karl Marx had a different view: thatbeing occupied by good work wasliving well. Engagement in productive,purposeful work was the means bywhich people could realise their fullpotential. He’s not credited withhaving got much right about themodern world, but maybe he wasn’tso wrong about our relationship withwork.

MARX IS NOTCREDITED WITHHAVING GOT MUCHRIGHT ABOUT THEMODERN WORLD,BUT MAYBE HEWASN’T SO WRONGABOUT OURRELATIONSHIP WITHWORK

In those decades after the secondworld war, Keynes seemed to havethe better of the argument. Asproductivity rose across the richworld, hourly wages for typicalworkers kept rising and hours workedper week kept falling – to the mid-30s, by the 1970s. But thensomething went wrong. Less-skilled

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workers found themselves forced toaccept ever-smaller pay rises to stayin work. The bargaining power of thetypical blue-collar worker eroded astechnology and globalisation handedbosses a whole toolkit of ways tosqueeze labour costs. At the sametime, the welfare state ceased itsexpansion and began to retreat,swept back by governments keen toboost growth by cutting taxes andremoving labour-market restrictions.The income gains that might havegone to workers, that might have keptliving standards rising even as hoursfell, that might have kept society onthe road to the Keynesian dream,flowed instead to those at the top ofthe income ladder. Willingly orunwillingly, those lower down theladder worked fewer and fewerhours. Those at the top, meanwhile,worked longer and longer.

It was not obvious that things wouldturn out this way. You might havethought that whereas, before, a maleprofessional worked 50 hours a weekwhile his wife stayed at home with thechildren, a couple of marriedprofessionals might instead each optto work 35 hours a week, sharingmore of the housework, and endingup with both more money and moreleisure. That didn’t happen. Rather,both are now more likely to work 60hours a week and pay several peopleto care for the house and children.

Why? One possibility is that we haveall got stuck on a treadmill.Technology and globalisation meanthat an increasing number of goodjobs are winner-take-mostcompetitions. Banks and law firmsamass extraordinary financial returns,directors and partners within thosefirms make colossal salaries, and theroute to those coveted positions liesthrough years of round-the-clockwork. The number of firms with globalreach, and of tech start-ups thatdominate a market niche, is limited.Securing a place near the top of theincome spectrum in such a firm, andremaining in it, is a matter of constantstruggle and competition. Meanwhile

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the technological forces that enable afew elite firms to become dominantalso allow work, in the form of thoseconstantly pinging emails, to follow useverywhere.

This relentless competition increasesthe need to earn high salaries, for aswell-paid people cluster together theybid up the price of the resources forwhich they compete. In thebrainpower-heavy cities where mostof them live, getting on the propertyladder requires the sort of sum thatcan be built up only through longhours in an important job. Then thereis conspicuous consumption: theneed to have a great-looking car anda home out of Interiors magazine, thecompetition to place children in good(that is, private) schools, the need tomaintain a coterie of domesticworkers – you mean you don’t have apersonal shopper? And so on, andon.

The dollars and hours pile up as weaim for a good life that always staysjust out of reach. In moments ofexhaustion we imagine simpler livesin smaller towns with more hours freefor family and hobbies and ourselves.Perhaps we just live in a nightmarisharms race: if we were all to disarm,collectively, then we could all live acalmer, happier, more equal life.

But that is not quite how it is. Theproblem is not that overworkedprofessionals are all miserable. Theproblem is that they are not.

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Drinking coffee one morningwith a friend from my hometown, we discuss ourfathers’ working habits. Both

are just past retirement age. Bothworked in an era in which a good jobwas not all-consuming. When myfather began his professional career,the post-war concept of the good lifewas still going strong. He was adedicated, even passionate worker.Yet he never supposed that workshould be the centre of his life.

Work was a means to an end; it wassomething you did to earn the moneyto pay for the important things in life.This was the advice I was given as auniversity student, struggling to figureout what career to pursue in order tohave the best chance at an important,meaningful job. I think my parentswere rather baffled by mydetermination to find satisfaction inmy professional life. Life was whathappened outside work. Life, in ourhouse, was a week’s holiday at thebeach or Pop standing on thesidelines at our baseball games. Itwas my parents at church, in the pewor volunteering in some way oranother. It was having kids who gaveyou grandkids. Work merely providedmore people to whom to showpictures of the grandkids.

This generation of workers, on theearly side of the baby boom, ismarching off to retirement now. Thereare things to do in those sunsetyears. But the hours will surelystretch out and become hard to fill. AsI sit with my friend it dawns on us thatretirement sounds awful. Why wouldwe stop working?

Here is the alternative to the treadmillthesis. As professional life hasevolved over the past generation, ithas become much more pleasant.Software and information technologyhave eliminated much of the drudgeryof the workplace. The duller sorts oflabour have gone, performed bypeople in offshore service-centres orby machines. Offices in the richworld’s capitals are packed not with

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drones filing paperwork or adding upnumbers but with clever peopleworking collaboratively.

The pleasure lies partly in flow, in theprocess of losing oneself in a puzzlewith a solution on which other peopledepend. The sense of purposefulimmersion and exertion is the moreappealing given the hands-on natureof the work: top professionals are themaster craftsmen of the age, shapinghigh-quality, bespoke products frombeginning to end. We design,fashion, smooth and improve, filingthe rough edges and polishing thewords, the numbers, the code orwhatever is our chosen material. Atthe end of the day we can sit backand admire our work – the completedarticle, the sealed deal, thefunctioning app – in the way thatartisans once did, and those earninga middling wage in the sprawlingservice-sector no longer do.

The fact that our jobs now follow usaround is not necessarily a bad thing,either. Workers in cognitivelydemanding fields, thinking their waythrough tricky challenges, havealways done so at odd hours.Academics in the midst of importantresearch, or admen cooking up a newcreative campaign, have alwaysturned over the big questions in theirheads while showering in the morningor gardening on a weekendafternoon. If more people find theirbrains constantly and profitablyengaged, so much the better.

Smartphones do not just enable workto follow us around; they also makelife easier. Tasks that mightotherwise require you to stay late inthe office can be taken home.Parents can enjoy dinner andbedtime with the children beforeturning back to the job at hand.Technology is also lowering the costof the support staff that make longhours possible. No need to employ afull-time personal assistant to run theerrands these days: there are apps totake care of the shopping, thelaundry and the dinner, walk the dog,

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fix the car and mend the hole in theroof. All of these allow us to focusever more of our time and energy ondoing what our jobs require of us.

There are downsides to this life. Itdoes not allow us much time withnewborn children or family memberswho are ill; or to develop hobbies,side-interests or the pleasures ofparticular, leisurely rituals – oranything, indeed, that is not intimatelyconnected with professional success.But the inadmissible truth is that theeclipsing of life’s other complicationsis part of the reward.

It is a cognitive and emotional relief toimmerse oneself in something all-consuming while other difficultiesfloat by. The complexities ofintellectual puzzles are nothing tothose of emotional ones. Work is awonderful refuge.

his life is a package deal.Cities are expensive. Lessprestigious work thatdemands less commitment

from those who do it pays less –often much less. For those withoutindependent wealth, dialling backprofessional ambition and effortmeans moving away, to smaller andcheaper places.

But stepping off the treadmill doesnot just mean accepting a differentvision of one’s prospects with adifferent salary trajectory. It meansupending one’s life entirely: changinglocations, tumbling out of thecommunity, losing one’s identity. Thatis a difficult thing to survive. Onemust have an extremely strong,secure sense of self to negotiate it.

I’ve watched people try. In 2009 goodfriends of ours packed their thingsand moved away from Washington,DC, where we lived at the time, to thesmall college town of Charlottesville,Virginia. It was an idyllic little place,nestled in the Appalachian foothills,surrounded by horse farms andvineyards, with cheap, charminghomes. He persuaded his employer

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to let him telework; she left her high-pressure job as vice-president at abig web firm near Washington to takea position at a local company.

My wife and I were intrigued by thethought of doing the same. She couldteach there, we reckoned, and I couldwrite. It was a reasonable train ridefrom Washington, if I needed to meeteditors. We would be able to enjoythe fresh air, and the peace andquiet. Perhaps at some point wewould open our own shop on themain street or try our hand atwinemaking, if we could save a littlemoney.

IT WASN’T THESTRESS OF BEING ONTHE FAST TRACKTHAT CAUSED MYCHEST TO TIGHTENAND MY HEARTRATE TO RISE, BUTTHE THOUGHT OFBEING LEFT BEHINDBY THOSE STILL ONIT

Yet the more seriously we thoughtabout it, the less I liked the idea. Iwant hours of quiet to write in, notdays and weeks. I would miss,desperately, being in an office andarguing about ideas. More than that, Icould anticipate with perfect clarityhow the rhythm of life would slow aswe left the city, how the externalpressure to keep moving woulddiminish. I didn’t want more time tomyself; I wanted to feel pushed to bebetter and achieve more. It wasn’t thestress of being on the fast track thatcaused my chest to tighten and myheart rate to rise, but the thought ofbeing left behind by those still on it.

Less than a year after moving away,our friends moved back. They hadfound themselves bored and lonely.We were glad, and relieved as well:their return justified our decision to

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stay in the city. One reason thetreadmill is so hard to walk away fromis that life off it is not what it oncewas. When I was a child, ourneighbourhood was rich with socialinteraction. My father played on thechurch softball team until his back gottoo bad. My mother helped withcharity food-and-toy drives. Theyboth taught classes and chaperonedyouth choir trips. They socialised withneighbours who did these things too.

Those elements of life persist, ofcourse, but they are somewhatdiminished, as Robert Putnam, asocial scientist, observed in 1995 in“Bowling Alone: America’s DecliningSocial Capital”. He described theshrivelling of civic institutions, whichhe blamed on many of the forces thatcoincided with, and contributed to,our changing relationship to work: theentry of women into the workforce;the rise of professional ghettoes;longer working hours.

One of the civic groups that Putnamcites as an important contributor tosocial capital in ages past was thelabour union. In the post-war era,unions thrived because of healthydemand for blue-collar workers whoshared a strong sense of classidentity. That allowed the unions’members to capture an outsize shareof the gains from economic growth,while also providing workers and theirfamilies with a strong sense ofcommunity – indeed, of solidarity.

The labour movement has unravelledin recent decades, and with it thenetwork that supported its members;but these days a similar virtuouscircle supports the professionalclasses instead. Our social networksare made up not just of neighboursand friends, but also of clients andcolleagues. This interlaced world ofwork and social life enriches us,exposing us to people who dofascinating things, keeping usinformed of professional gossip andproviding those who have good ideaswith the connections to help turnthem into reality. It also traps us. The

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suspicion that one might be missingout on a useful opportunity or ideahelps prod us off the sofa when anevening with “True Detective”beckons seductively.

This mixing of the social andprofessional is not new. It is notunlike Hollywood, where friends havealways become collaborators, actorsmarry directors, and an evening outon the town has always been a publicact that shapes the brand value ofthe star. Or like Washington, DC, inwhich public officials, journalists andpolicy experts swap jobs every fewyears and go to the same parties atnight: befriending and sleeping witheach other, exchanging ideas, living alife in which all behaviour isprofessional to some extent. But ashours have lengthened and work hasbecome more engaging, this socialpattern has swallowed other worlds.

There is a psychic value to theintertwining of life and work as wellas an economic one. The society ofpeople like us reinforces our belief inwhat we do.

Working effectively at a good jobbuilds up our identity and esteem inthe eyes of others. We cheer eachother on, we share in (and quietlyregret) the successes of our friends,we lose touch with people beyond

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our network. Spending our leisuretime with other professional striversbuttresses the notion that hard workis part of the good life and that thesacrifices it entails are those that adecent person makes. This is what aclass with a strong sense of identitydoes: it effortlessly recasts thegroup’s distinguishing vices asvirtues.

Life within this professionalcommunity has its impositions. Itmakes failure or error a more difficult,humiliating experience. Social lifeceases to be a refuge from theindignities of work. The sincerity ofrelationships becomes questionablewhen people are friends ofconvenience. A friend – a real one –muses to me that those who becomeimmersed in lives like this suffer fromStockholm Syndrome: they befriendtheir clients because they spend toomuch time with them to know thereare other, better options available.The fact that I find it hard to passjudgment on this statement suggeststhat I, too, may be a victim.

y parents have not quitemanaged to retire, but theyare getting there. Even withone foot in and one foot out

of retirement, their post-careeritinerary is becoming clear. Theymean to see parts of the world theycouldn’t when they were young andhad no money, or when they wereolder and had no time. Their travelsoccasionally bring them to London tosee me and my family. On a recentvisit the talk shifted, as it often does,to when I might be planning to returnto the east coast of America, muchcloser to the Carolinas, which iswhere they and most of the rest of myextended family still live. As my fatherwalks around the house, my three-year-old son trotting adoringly behindhim, they ask whether I couldn’t domy job as easily closer to home.

I get hung up on as easily. Thewriting I could do as easily, justabout. Building my career, away fromour London headquarters, would not

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be so easy. As I explain this, acircularity threatens to overtake mypoint: to build my career is to makemyself indispensable, demonstratingindispensability means burying myselfin the work, and the upshot ofsuccessfully demonstrating myindispensability is the need tocontinue working tirelessly. Not onlycan I not do all that elsewhere;outside London, the obviousbrilliance of a commitment to thiscourse of action is underappreciated.It looks pointless – daft, even.

And I begin to understand the natureof the trouble I’m havingcommunicating to my parentsprecisely why what I’m doing appealsto me. They are asking about a job. Iam thinking about identity,community, purpose – the things thatprovide meaning and motivation. I amtalking about my life.

RYAN AVENT is The Economist'ssenior economics editor and FreeExchange columnist

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JOONYOUNGLEE - MARCH 13TH 2016

Absolutely a wonderful and thoughtful piece.Cheers

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