The Sorrows of Work
Page 4
The problem with the modern world is that it does not stop lending us extremely high expectations and inviting us to dream, and then leaving us with a bitter sense of failure.
A firm belief in the limitations of life was once one of humankind’s most important assets; a bulwark against bitterness and envy; a wisdom cruelly undermined by the ideology of infinite expectation proclaimed by the modern worldview. Feeling ‘successful’ might not be so much about having many things, as a matter of having what we long for. Success is not an absolute. It is relative to desire; every time we seek something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources.
Insofar as advanced societies provide us with many options for success, they appear to be helping us. But in truth, the net effect may be to humiliate us: through a language of unlimited opportunity, these societies keep open a permanent gap between who we want to be and what we have achieved. There are two ways to make people feel more successful: to give them more success, or to narrow their ambitions. Modern capitalism has in certain areas succeeded spectacularly at the first option, but, by stretching our aspirations, it has left a painful gap between our hopes and our reality – a gap we are left to fill with shame and rage.
IX
Meritocracy
Modern politicians across the political spectrum show remarkable agreement on one goal: that of creating a fully meritocratic society, a society in which all those who make it to the top do so because of their own talents and abilities, rather than due to unfair privilege, upper-class parents or connections. The stated aim is to create a hierarchy based on ability, replacing chinless halfwits with the meritorious, wherever they may be found and whatever age, colour or gender they might be.
This meritocratic ideal has brought opportunity to millions. Gifted and intelligent individuals who for centuries were held down within immobile, caste-like hierarchies are now free to express their talents on a more or less level playing field. We have largely turned the page on a world that was filled with rulers who were too sick or stupid to govern; lords who couldn’t manage their estates; commanders who didn’t understand the principles of battle; peasants who were brighter than their masters, and maids who knew more than their mistresses. No longer is background an impassable obstacle to advancement. An element of justice has finally entered the distribution of rewards.
But there is a darker side to the idea of meritocracy: if we truly believe that we have created (or could one day create) a world where the successful truly merited all their success, it follows that we have to hold the ‘failures’ exclusively responsible for their failures. In a meritocratic age, an element of justice enters into the distribution of wealth, but also of poverty. Low status comes to seem not merely regrettable, but also deserved.
Succeeding financially (without inheritance or contacts) in an economic meritocracy endows individuals with an element of personal validation that the nobleman of old, who had been given his money and his castle by his father, had never been able to feel. But, at the same time, financial failure has become associated with a sense of shame that the peasant of old, denied all chances in life, had also been spared. The question of why, if one is good, clever or able, one is still poor becomes infinitely more acute and painful for the unsuccessful to have to answer (to themselves and others) in a new meritocratic age.
There has turned out to be no shortage of people willing to answer the question on behalf of the ‘failed’. For a certain constituency, it is clear that the failures owe their position to their own stupidity and degeneracy. With the rise of an economic meritocracy, in certain quarters, the failures have moved from being described as ‘unfortunates’, the target of the charity and guilt of the paternally-minded rich, to being described as ‘losers’, fair targets of contempt in the eyes of robust self-made individuals, who are disinclined to feel ashamed about their mansions or shed crocodile tears for those whose company they have escaped. In the harsher climate of opinion that can gestate in meritocratic societies, it has become possible to argue that social hierarchy rigorously reflects the qualities of the members on every rung of the ladder so that conditions are already in place for the good people to succeed and the dummies to flounder – attenuating the need for charity, welfare, redistributive measures or simple compassion. To the injury of poverty, a meritocratic system has added the insult of humiliation.
It is a symptom of our faith in meritocracy that it has largely become impossible to explain away professional failure as the result of ‘bad luck’. Although it is granted that luck maintains a theoretical role in shaping our careers, the evaluation of people proceeds, in practical terms, as if they could fairly be held responsible for their biographies. It would seem unduly (and even suspiciously) modest to ascribe a victory to ‘good luck’ and, more importantly in this context, pitiable to blame defeat on the opposite. Winners make their own luck, insists the modern mantra, which would have puzzled the ancient Roman worshippers of the Goddess of Fortune.
We are paying a heavy price for our faith in a fairer world: that of having to take full responsibility for what we achieve and, more poignantly, fail to achieve, in the course of our lives.
X
Conclusion
We need an extraordinary run of good fortune to make a success of our careers: an early understanding of our talents and interests; the right educational opportunities; the best kind of inferiority complex; a benign political environment; physical and mental health; confidence, stamina, friends; a lack of scandals; a propitious number of lucky breaks; clumsy enemies; supportive relationships; an untragic sexuality; an upbeat temperament… And all this needs to be in place not for one or two years, but – so that we’ll be more than mere flashes-in-the-pan – for four decades at least.
We should not be surprised if we don’t quite get there. We were not uncommonly stupid. We were tricked into misunderstanding the statistics of success, in mistaking the unique for the possible. We longed for glorious destinies, of which there are always far fewer than there are numbers of the aspiring and the ardent. The game is close to rigged so as to cause heartbreak on a mass scale, although the sadness rarely recognises itself as collective, and is experienced in each individual soul as a uniquely personal defeat.
Our minds are partly to blame. We are hardwired for ambitious plans. It isn’t our nature to rest with what is already to hand or easy to reach. We are inherently ungrateful, and feel alive only when we have taken on a struggle that has a good chance of crushing us. Even those we think of as successes will secretly nurse dreams they have had to forego. There is always a gap between achievement and desire. Feeling like a failure is the inevitable price for harbouring any sort of ambition.
We would be mad not to strive for success, but we will end up demented if we don’t also, over time, develop capacities for making peace with defeat. The task begins with forewarning, with a secure, calm, dark knowledge that we will inevitably be tripped up along the way.
We need to be free of a sense of persecution in this regard. It truly was not personal. Our dreams are like a fragile house of twigs exposed to a hurricane. We should stop fixating on what life has done to us, and check in with what it is doing to others every day – the ones who never make it into the magazines; the legions of the quietly despairing and dying. It is no loser’s counsel to work with a vivid sense of how much worse it might, and will still, get.
We should make ourselves at home with mediocrity.
‘Failure’ sounds like too extreme a word for something that is so normal. We should be more alive to its ubiquity and wear it with greater ease, as something – like death – that is coming for us all. We might laugh defiantly at its embrace, refuse to be cowed by it and mock our pretensions without remorse or self-importance.
It isn’t easy, of course, that we are typically surrounded by people trapped in a toxic ideology of ambition. The first question we will be asked when meeting almost any new person is: ‘What do you do?’ If our answer is insufficiently el
evated, we will at once notice the loss of interest and our total dispensability to most members of the race.
These things continue to matter more than they should. We should try to be gentle on ourselves. We could reduce how often we’ll be exposed to this sort of judgement. We might attempt to develop an identity not so exclusively connected to achievement, so that who we are becomes bound up not just with salary and rank, but also our character, our relationships, our interests and our unmonetised and unpublished skills.
We should learn the wisdom of a degree of melancholy in relation to our work, founded on an understanding that the sorrow isn’t just about us; that our suffering belongs to humanity in general. This should not make us desperate, but rather more forgiving of our failure, kinder to that of others and better able to focus on what really matters, while there is still time.
Picture Credits
p.31
Gargoyle Sailsbury Cathredral, Wiltshire
Coombs Images / Alamy Stock Photo
p.32
Sussex chair, c. 1860
Webb, Philip Speakman (designer)
Morris & Co. (maker)
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London
p.35
Aluminium Chair EA 103
Charles & Ray Eames
Photo: Marc Eggimann © Vitra
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