Another thing: Working hard or hardly working

Musing on work and happiness.

Welcome to Letters From the Knot. This is a free weekly newsletter, primarily built as an outlet for a fiction writing project I’m working on. On the weeks I’m not publishing fiction, I’ll be sending something a bit more freeform and personal. This is one of those.

As much as I hate to admit it, I spend a lot of time thinking about work. I don't like the idea that I’m defined by my job but, because I have to do it basically all of the time, it’s hard not to be absorbed by it.

Politically, I’m highly skeptical of “work”. I suppose I’m also a little entitled, so I don’t love being told what I should be doing every day. And no matter what job I’m in, or how good that job is, or how worthy, when I’m having a bad day I can’t help wondering how we ended up organising our society like this, giving over the majority of our lives to work, to a life that’s usually fixed, and repetitive, and hard and, for many, inherently exploitative*. 

(*I took a couple of swipes at capitalism in my last newsletter and I lost a handful of subscribers so, statistically, this is not a road I should be going down but, hey, I’ve started now so I’ll finish).

Of course, for many people it’s difficult not to think about work because, increasingly, ideas around work are being politicised and weaponised in manufactured culture wars as a way to sow intergenerational discontent, reinforce class boundaries, undermine unions, and drive clicks. You don’t need to look far to find stories in the right-wing press about unproductive nurses, or work-shy millennials who don’t want to go to the office or, when they do go to the office, spend their time sitting on beanbags or doing yoga on the roof or making tiktoks. Our willingness to “work hard” is held up by these outlets as a signifier of our moral fabric.

My issue with “work” is partly a definitional one. I know people who take great value from their work, by which I think they mean they find it gratifying to apply themselves to something that requires effort or expertise in return for reward or recognition or just a sense of achievement. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, and the idea of doing something in return for something else needn’t be thrown on the anti-work bonfire.

The problem is that successive governments and newspapers have done a very effective job of conflating the concept of “work” with the concept of “effort”. If you don’t want a job, you’re seen as lazy or unproductive, regardless of where else in your life you might be expending effort or using your time. It’s in the context of capitalism that the relationship between effort and reward has been degraded to something abstract and transactional, and that the imperative to work has been tied up with our sense of self worth.

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As an all round fun guy, I also talk a lot about work. Try as I might to avoid the question at parties, or when meeting new people, it’s almost inevitable that I’ll end up talking about what people “do”. I’m sometimes told this is bad etiquette, or that asking that question is a sign that you’re boring or unimaginative, but it’s such a huge part of our lives that it would be weird to skirt around it. It would be a bit like visiting a new parent and refusing to acknowledge that they had a baby. 

Even so, when I ask people about their work these days, I’m generally less interested in their actual jobs (fascinating though they may be) and more interested in their attitude to work or in their strategies for making peace with work. I meet people who are self-employed, or run their own businesses, for whom the relationship between effort and reward is a little less abstract. These people tend to be among the happiest, (even if not always the most financially secure). I also meet people for whom a job is just a job, an inconvenient part of the week that they tolerate to enable a lifestyle that has nothing to do with it. I’ve also met people for whom work is a calling, the core of their being, and a source of immense satisfaction.   

Of course I also know people who aren’t able to work. I’ve written before about my partner's chronic illness, the realities of which mean she can’t work at the moment. Through her, I’ve seen in ugly detail how the mechanics of our society are geared to make people who can’t work feel worthless and burdensome. Such is the centrality of work to our society that not working, even when it's entirely out of your control, is something people are made to feel great shame about. And, obvious though it will be to anyone who’s experienced it, it’s worth noting these pressures have been built into our welfare system intentionally, as opposed to inadvertently.

As you can see, I find it easy to tie myself in knots about this stuff. My own relationship with work is a tricky one. I think my job is important and that I might in some way be able to help people, but I also can’t pretend I would be doing it for free. Nor can I pretend I jump out of bed every day desperate to get stuck in, or that I relish the lack of liberty inherent in needing a job in the first place. 

I try, instead, to compartmentalise. When my partner and I got a civil partnership a couple of years ago, I took her surname, Blanchett. Except, because I’m lazy and the admin was a faff, I actually only took it in the sense that I changed my social media profiles and now write under that name. My employer has slightly more demanding criteria for a name change, however, meaning that in my working life, I go by a different name. By extension, I’ve started to form two slightly separate identities. Very few people I work with know about this newsletter, for example, or follow me on twitter, and this has proved a helpful boon in trying to think of myself as a thing bigger than and separate to my working self. 

And now my writing fulfils another interesting part of my work-life puzzle. As yet, writing fiction isn’t something I’ve done for profit but, all being well, I’ll get a novel published and (though it’ll never make me rich) it will in a sense become “work”. And then what happens? Do I become a person who loves their job? Or will writing, too, become something I grow bored of and grumpy about? Or do I just need to cheer up and stop worrying about it? Subscribe to find out!

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Cultural indigestion

An insight into my cultural diet.

Reading. I reread Wuthering Heights a couple of weeks ago for my book club which was a surprisingly wild ride. The last time I read it I was about 18 or 19 and my memory of it from the time was of a tragic love story and a masterpiece. I was disabused of this notion in two ways. First, I’m not sure it’s actually that good, even by the standard of the time. It’s baggy and repetitive and, while the prose is often very good, the narrative framing that I once though masterful is actually just a bit clunky and contrived. More than that though, I was shocked to find that it wasn’t a love story at all, but a tale of cruelty and intergenerational trauma and domestic violence. I don’t reread a lot of books in general, but it’s fascinating to see how my lens has shifted over time. Maybe I should do it more. 

Drinking. I went back to Manchester this week for one night for a potent nostalgia trip and was reminded of some absolutely top tier pubs (Briton’s Protection, Peveril Of The Peak). I absolutely love living in London, but if there’s one thing I would complain about, it’s the lack of pool tables. Manchester wins on that count. 

Playing. It’s the news nobody has been waiting for: I’ve finished playing Elden Ring. My verdict is that the mechanics are immensely compelling and enjoyable, and the player freedom is great, and the design of the world is basically unrivalled. BUT the storytelling is obtuse to the point of tediousness and the whole thing is an illustration of the fact that writing a mystery doesn’t work when the writers themselves haven’t got a clue what’s going on. It’s an 8/10 and I’ll almost certainly pour dozens more hours into it at some point. 

Looking at. I’ve started using a 12-hour clock on my phone and I’m never going back. The 24-hour clock is redundant in most day to day situations. This is my newest conviction.

Thanks for reading! More of this next time.