Today, there are, of course, still a few furniture designers around – some of them very well known – but this cannot disguise that what we call ‘design’ is quite a niche field employing a minuscule number of actors. The majority of those involved in the making and selling of furniture will have no opportunity to put their own character into the objects they are dealing with. They belong instead to a highly efficient army of labour that aims for rigorously anonymous execution.
Without intending to be mean-spirited or inherently hostile to the pleasures of work, capitalism has radically reduced the number of jobs that retain any component of personalisation.
For example, the Eames Aluminum Group chair was designed by American husband-and-wife team Charles (1907–1978) and Ray Eames (1912–1988) in 1958. It is a highly distinctive creation that reflects the ideals and outlook of the couple who designed it. If they had been artisans, operating their own small workshop, they might have sold a few dozen such chairs to their local customers in their lifetime. Instead, because they worked under capitalism for Herman Miller – a huge commercial office and home furniture manufacturing corporation – many hundreds of thousands of units have been, and continue to be, sold. A side effect of this triumph has been that the demand for well-designed, interesting chairs has been substantially cornered. Anyone wanting to make an office chair nowadays has to face the fact that it is already possible to buy a nice example, designed by two geniuses and available for rapid delivery by a global company at a competitive price from a highly efficient network of local branches.
Charles and Ray Eames, Eames chair, 1958.
We are familiar with the idea that the wealth of the world is being ever more tightly concentrated in the hands of a relatively small number of people – the infamous ‘1%’. But capitalism doesn’t only concentrate money. There’s a more poignant, less familiar fact that only a small number of people – a sometimes overlapping, but often different 1% – have interesting, as in ‘personalised’, work.
It is telling that we are, at the same time, obsessed with the romance of individual genius. Our society has developed a near-fetishistic interest in the exploits of brilliant startups, colourful fashion gurus, and idiosyncratic film-makers and artists – characters who flamboyantly mould parts of the world in their own image and put their individual stamp on the things they do and make. We might like to think that we turn to them for inspiration, but it may be more the case that we use them to compensate ourselves for a painful gap in our own lives. The stories of successful personalisation have come to the fore just when the practical opportunities for personalised work have diminished. In a similar way, it was in the 19th century, during mass migration to cities, that novels about rural life achieved unprecedented popularity among newly urban audiences. We may, through our addiction to stories of lone creative geniuses, be trying to draw sustenance from qualities that are in woefully short supply in our own day-to-day working lives.
The prevalence of stories of individual creativity feed the illusion that personalised work is more normal than it really is. The many interviews and profiles mask the fact that, for almost all of us, it will prove nearly impossible to compete against the great forces of standardisation. For this reason, far more than because of anything we have done ourselves, many of us are likely to find a considerable portion of our work awkwardly tedious and dispiritingly free of any opportunities to carve our own gargoyles.
IV
Commercialisation
A complaint regularly aired around many careers is that, in order to succeed at them, there is no option but to ‘sell out’. It appears that we will inevitably face a choice between authenticity and penury on the one hand, and idiocy and wealth on the other. We are familiar with this complaint in the arts, of course. But the same dilemma shows up when an interesting restaurant seems unable to make a profit; when a specialist bread company goes into receivership; when a garden supply firm focusing on rare native plants can’t get a foothold in the market; when a sincere news site can’t turn a profit, or when an ethically based investment firm is doomed to operate on a tiny scale in comparison with its less high-minded competitors.
Behind the complaint lies a very understandable but ambitious yearning: that our most passionately held beliefs and enthusiasms should, relatively painlessly, and by virtue of their merits, become high priorities for others. Our instincts lead us to suppose that what we are convinced of should prove equally compelling to strangers.
Young children are particularly prone to this assumption. On meeting a new adult, they may enthusiastically suggest that they join them in playing a favourite game, perhaps brew something on the miniature kitchen stove, or impersonate one of their dolls, which shows how hard it is for a child to grasp how alien his or her pleasures might be to another person. Children aren’t silly; they are just highly attuned to their own natures and are convinced that others will share their tastes. In a naive but representative way, they illustrate an instinct that stays with us all of our lives: the supposition that others will and must be moved by what moves us; that their value systems are, or should be, like ours; and that what we love can automatically be what the world loves.
The reality is often humiliatingly and enragingly different. A novel that is filled with subtle character analyses and that takes inventive risks with plot structure might sell only modestly, while one that pits good against evil in a predictable way, relies on well-tried narrative tricks and arrives at an implausibly happy ending will dominate the bestseller lists. A high-street chain might do a fabulous trade in cut-price dark grey polyester-cotton socks, while a thoughtful, original brand involving striking colour combinations and materials ethically sourced from Peru will fail to find a market.
It is tempting to arrive at a despairing conclusion: that the economy is inherently devoted to delivering a personal affront to the better aspects of human nature. The truth is much less vindictive, but the tendency for the market to overlook or at least remain cool in relation to our more sincere and earnest efforts is nevertheless real – and founded on a raft of identifiable and stubborn forces in economic and psychological life.
One of the most basic of these forces is choice. It is in the nature of a growing, successful economy always to expand the range of choices offered to a consumer, and thereby, always to minimise the a priori claims of any one product or service. We can track the characteristic features of this development in relation to media. In 1952, a BBC radio broadcast of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony attracted an audience of five million listeners – approximately 16% of the UK’s adult population. Today, such a broadcast would claim a fraction of these numbers. What explains the difference is not – as some cultural pessimists might claim – that the UK population has over a few generations become less sensitive to the emotive force of German Romantic music; the fundamental difference is that today’s audience has many more options. In 1952, there were very few competing sources of entertainment. People listened en masse to the classical end of BBC radio because there was nothing much else to do. A producer who worked in the corporation had a great deal more authority than today’s equivalent, not on the basis of superior genius, but because his listeners had few viable alternatives. This, rather nicely, gave certain high-brow things more opportunity to be attended to; but it also meant that many substandard services and products could enjoy a far larger role than their intrinsic merit warranted.
We know from the study of certain natural habitats that in situations of abundant choice (the warm seas around the Seychelles, for example), attention goes towards members of the species that appear colourful, variegated and theatrical. Much the same holds true for companies amid the din and buzz of the human marketplace. What is brusquely called ‘selling out’ typically refers to a series of moves no more and no less sinister than the elaborate signalling to which all living things must submit in their efforts to be noticed. Amid plenty, products and services must throw their qualities into dramatic relief, puff out their
virtues, sound more confident than they perhaps are, and lodge themselves in the minds of their distracted audiences with unabashed insistence. It is understandable if those who are committed to higher values may balk at such demands, resentfully condemning the pitilessness of an unfeasibly vulgar system.
There is another reason why modern audiences are likely to sidestep opportunities for high-minded consumption: because they are exhausted. Modern work demands a punishing amount from its participants. We typically return from our jobs in a state of depletion: frazzled, tired, bored, enervated, sad. In such a state, the products and services for which we will be in the mood have to be of a very particular cast. We may be too brutalised to care much about the suffering of others, or to think empathetically of unfortunates in faraway tea plantations or cotton fields. We may have endured too much tedium to stay patient with arguments that are intelligently reticent and studiously subtle. We may be too anxious to have the strength to explore the more sincere sections of our own minds. We may hate ourselves a bit too much to want to eat and drink only what is good for us. Our lives may be too lacking in meaning to concentrate only on what is meaningful. To counterbalance what has happened at work, we may instinctively gravitate towards what is excessively sweet, salty, distracting, easy, colourful, explosive, sexual and sentimental.
This collectively creates a vicious circle. What we consume ends up determining what we produce – and, in turn, the quality of jobs that are on offer. So long as we only have the emotional resources to consume at the more narcotic and compromised end of the market, we will only generate employment that is itself challenged in meaning and compromised in dignity – which will further increase our demand for lower-order goods and services. We seem hampered by our existing conditions of employment from properly developing the sort of temperaments that could strengthen the sincerity and seriousness of our appetites and so expand the range of meaningful and non-depleting jobs we could have access to.
The price we pay for a marketplace that refuses to support high-minded efforts is not just practical and economic; it is also at some level emotional. One of our greatest cravings is to be recognised and accepted for who we are. We long for careful, insightful appreciation of our characters and interests. This was, if things went tolerably well, a little like what happened to us in earliest childhood, when a kindly adult, through the quality of their love, spared us any requirement to impress or, as we might put it, to market ourselves. In those early years, we did not need assiduously to ‘sell’ who we were; we did not have to smile in exaggerated ways, sound happier than we were, put on seductive accents or compress what we had to say into memorable jingles. We could take our time, hesitate, whisper, be a little elusive and complex and as serious as we needed to be – sure that another would be there to find, decode and accept us. Everything we learnt of love ran counter to the mechanisms of commercialisation.
It is no wonder if we harbour within us a degree of instinctive revulsion against commercial strictures. The need not to sell ourselves aggressively was not just part of an earlier, simpler point in the history of the world (as scholars rightly point out); it was, more poignantly, also a moment in each of our personal histories, to which we may always long to return.
V
Scale
One of the strangest aspects of work is that we don’t do it solely, or sometimes even principally, for money. This makes us vulnerable not just to poverty, but also to crises of a more psychological kind. We harbour a demanding ambition to find work that can provide us with something that can best be captured by the word ‘meaning’. We hunger for this meaning quite as much as we crave status or enrichment. Meaningful work comprises any activity that impacts positively on another’s life, either by reducing suffering or increasing pleasure – a definition that can encompass everything from the life-saving interventions of the cardiac surgeon to the seductive efforts of a pastry chef or Anatolian rug-weaver.
In truth, the vast majority of jobs contribute in some way to the welfare of others. Only a very few are properly devoid of meaning; for example, a career devoted to making fake remedies for hair loss or cancer, or one encouraging those on low incomes to gamble more. However, crucially, a great many jobs are in the odd position of being meaningful while not in any way feeling meaningful.
This problem is rife in the modern age for a very particular reason: the changes in the scale and tempo of work ushered in by industrialisation. Most work now takes place within gigantic organisations that are engaged in a variety of large, complicated and slow-moving projects – and where it can therefore be hard to derive, on a daily basis, any tangible sense of having improved anyone else’s life in any way. The customer and the end product are, in the gigantic structures of modernity, simply too far-flung in space and too distant in time. It can be hard to reassure ourselves of our worth and purpose when we are only a single unit among a 20,000-strong team on four continents pushing forward a project that might be ready in five years.
There are sound reasons why the work practices of large organisations proceed at a glacial pace. Product development in sectors such as aeronautics and banking, oil and pharmaceuticals cannot happen overnight. The time frames are logical, but in terms of individual experience, they go directly against our natural, deeply embedded preference for a rapidly unfolding story.
The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (385 BCE–323 BCE) observed that a key requirement for a satisfying piece of theatre was that it should be over relatively quickly. There might be tensions and complications and unexpected changes of direction, but in a few hours and three acts, there should be a feeling of genuine completion.
It’s not just in theatre that speed is attractive. The concentration of action also helps to explain the appeal of sport. In ninety minutes, a football match can take us from a perfect, neutral start to a precise result. However, if football were like modern work in terms of scale and pace, one can imagine it unfolding on eighteen pitches with twenty-two balls and 10,800 players kicking around for thousands of days without any overview of the progress of the game. By the standards of our innate longings, our work unfolds in a disordered, overextended and confusing way.
Our labour feels meaningful not only when it is fast, but also when we get to witness the ways we are helping others; when we can leave the office, factory or shop with an impression of having fixed a problem in someone else’s life. This pleasure too is threatened by scale. In the massive organisations of modernity, we may be so distant from the end users of our products and services as to be unable to derive any real benefit from our constructive role in their lives. Spending days improving terms on contracts in the logistics industry truly will lead to a moment when a couple can contentedly enjoy some ginger biscuits together in front of the TV; optimising data management across different parts of an aerospace firm – along with thousands of other coordinated efforts – truly will contribute to the moment when a young family can bond together on a beach holiday. The connections are genuine, but they may be so extended and convoluted as to feel dispiritingly flimsy and unreal in our minds.
It’s a tantalising paradox, and a kind of tragedy, that because of the unavoidable scale of modern work, we may pass our lives helping other people – and yet, day to day, be burdened by a harrowing feeling of having made no difference whatsoever.
VI
Competition
At the heart of how all individuals function, there is a dream of security: security from humiliation, penury, dependence, arbitrary dismissal and uncertainty.
At the heart of how a modern capitalist economy functions, there is a dream of competitive advantage: one based on the intelligent exploitation of invested capital, on the effective deployment of technology, raw material and labour to reduce costs and improve quality and the triumph over competitors so as to maximise shareholder return.
At certain points, these two longings – those of individuals and those of capitalism – seem inherently aligned. At other points, it can se
em as if our own well-being has grown entirely irrelevant to the economic machine in which we are enmeshed. We generally don’t kick the machine; we are far more inclined to blame ourselves. There is, after all, always enough evidence of people who thrive and succeed to suggest to us that the fault must lie with something we have done. But in our more politically engaged moments, we may dare to complain that the system is not working ‘as it should’.
Ironically, at precisely such moments, it is probably working very well; it’s just that it was never intended to work in the way we would like – for our own well-being. Capitalism does not place the longings and aspirations of the labour force at the heart of its operations (the clue to its essential concerns lies in its name). It was not made to ensure that we have secure, good lives, plenty of time off and pleasant relationships with our families; it was made to maximise shareholder return. Labour has exactly the same status within capitalism as other production inputs, neither more nor less. Alongside rent, the price of fuel, plant, technology and taxes, labour (people) is just another cost. That it happens to be a ‘cost’ that cries, needs time off, has fragile nerves, sometimes catches the flu and in extremis commits suicide is – at most – a puzzling inconvenience. We should not believe that there is anything faulty about capitalism simply because we have minimal security of employment, little time to see our families, a lot of stress and an uncertain future. These belong to the very conditions that help the system to work well. Our mistake, which has imposed a heavy internal burden on us, has been to confuse our own ambitions for happiness with the goals of the overall economy.
The Sorrows of Work Page 2