The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

by Alain De Botton

  Everyday Biscuits, despite their lacklustre name, account for nearly a third of all sales and include Digestives, Rich Tea, Ginger Nuts and Hob Nobs. The Digestive, often dipped in tea for added moisture, is alone worth £34 million a year. For their part, Everyday Treats, evenly poised between the ordinary and the indulgent, are typically bought on Thursdays and Fridays by women between thirty-five and forty-four and number among their rank Jaffa Cakes, Cadbury’s Fingers and Fox’s Chocolate Viennese. As for Seasonal Biscuits, they are marketed only between the start of October and the end of December and come in highly decorated tins that comprise combinations of Cottage Crunch, Shortcake, Shortbread Finger and Chocolate Chip biscuits.

  Much to the frustration of experts in both fields, Crackers & Crispbreads and Savoury Biscuits are routinely confused. To be clear, Crackers & Crispbreads are non-sweet biscuits intended to be eaten either as part of a diet or as an accompaniment to cheese or a spread, while Savoury Biscuits are to be enjoyed on their own and offer greater interest than standard crackers, usually thanks to the addition of a cheese or barbecue flavour. Activity in this final category has tended in recent years to be focused on the introduction of diminutive products such as the Mini Cream Cheese and Chive, the Baked Mini Cheddar and the Snack-A-Jack Mini Barbecue.

  2.

  Hayes itself was surprisingly devoid of charm. There were few restaurants, only one bowling alley and no cinemas. Such were the limitations of the place, a young woman I met in the course of my research told me that she would only ever accept a date with someone in nearby Hillingdon – a town which did not for that matter, at least on a cursory drive through it, strike me as having any notable advantages over its neighbour.

  The biscuit company occupied a three-storey beige-brick building on a business park. It had for the previous five years been owned by a pair of private equity firms, one of which, the Blackstone Group, was headed by a financier legendary for buying the most expensive duplex in the history of Manhattan. Among the company’s most popular brands were McVitie’s, go ahead!, Twiglets, Hula Hoops, McCoy’s and KP Nuts. It also produced the prawn-flavoured cocktail snack Skips, known for its uniquely fizzy reaction with human saliva. A brochure in the lobby explained that United Biscuits took its social responsibilities seriously and that it had, through its Jaffa Cake Division, donated a number of shirts with logos on them to an under-seven football team in the town of Ruislip.

  Laurence met me by the lifts, under the shadow of a giant bag of crisps. He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his tracks to peer inquisitively into his guest’s eyes for signs of boredom or mockery, being intelligent enough to be unable fully to believe in his own claims to significance. He might, in a past life, have been a particularly canny and sharp-tongued royal advisor. One might have supposed that our mutual premature baldness would have led to a rapprochement, but the shared disability only generated an unwanted point of identification.

  Laurence led me to the boardroom, where a table had been scattered with boxes of Moments, a six-centimetre-wide biscuit made of chocolate and shortcake, launched in the spring of 2006 at a ceremony (during which Laurence had made a speech in French) in a manufacturing plant in Belgium, following a two-year-long, £3 million development programme. Laurence was the biscuit’s author.

  3.

  This was not to say that Laurence knew how to bake, though he grew swiftly defensive in response to my expression of surprise at his inability. Biscuits are nowadays a branch of psychology, not cooking, he advised sternly.

  Laurence had formulated his biscuit by gathering some interviewees in a hotel in Slough and, over a week, questioning them about their lives, in an attempt to tease out of them certain emotional longings that could subsequently be elaborated into the organising principles behind a new product. In a conference room in the Thames Riviera hotel, a number of low-income mothers had spoken of their yearning for sympathy, affection and what Laurence termed simply, with aphoristic brevity, ‘me-time’. The Moment set out to suggest itself as the plausible solution to their predicament.

  While the idea of answering psychological yearnings with dough might seem daunting, Laurence explained that in the hands of an experienced branding expert, decisions about width, shape, coating, packaging and name can furnish a biscuit with a personality as subtly and appropriately nuanced as that of a protagonist in a great novel.

  Early on, it became evident to Laurence that his biscuit would need to be round rather than square, given the associations drawn in almost all cultures between the circle and feminity and wholeness. It was similarly imperative that it contain small pieces of raisin and whole chocolate chips to convey an impression of kindly indulgence – though because it was not outright decadence which was being evoked, no cream would be involved.

  Laurence spent a further half a year working with colleagues on dilemmas of packaging, eventually resolving that a mere nine biscuits should be settled into a black plastic tray encased in a glossy twenty-four-centimetre-long cardboard box. Laurence now initiated a debate about what to call the biscuits. Extensive consideration was given to Reflections, Retreats, Delights and, in a direct allusion to the biscuit’s founding concept, My Times – before the right name came to Laurence in what could kindly be described as a flash of inspiration.

  It was time for attention to be paid to the choice of fonts. The designers’ initial layout had had the word Moments running in a romantic Edwardian script across the box, but there were concerns among some executives that this belied the product’s projected function as a pleasant supplement to real life rather than a means of escape from it – an issue addressed by a last-minute change in the m and s to a more vertical orientation, as befitted a snack which respected the realities of life even as it offered temporary relief from them.

  4.

  It is perhaps because many of us know what it is to spend an afternoon baking biscuits that there is something striking about encountering a company which relies on the labour of five thousand fulltime employees to execute the task.

  Manoeuvres which one might briefly have carried out on one’s own in the kitchen (readying an oven, mixing dough, writing a label) had at United Biscuits been isolated, codified and expanded to occupy entire working lives. Although all employment at the company was ultimately predicated on the sale of confectionery and salted snacks, a high percentage of the staff were, professionally speaking, many times removed from contact with anything one might eat. They were managing the forklift truck fleet in the warehouse or poring over the eighty or so words written along the sides of a typical packet of salted nuts. Some had attained extraordinary expertise in the collection and analysis of sales data from supermarkets, while others daily investigated how to ensure a minimum of friction between wafers during transit.

  Along with such specialisation came a raft of esoteric job titles: Packaging Technologist, Branding Executive, Learning Centre Manager, Strategic Projects Evaluator. Careers ploughed along deep and dedicated furrows: a start at Hula Hoops might be followed by promotion to Ridged Tortillas, a sideways shift to Baked Mini Cheddars, a management role at McVitie’s Fruitsters and a swan-song post at Ginger Nuts.

  The unremitting division of labour resulted in admirable levels of productivity. The company’s success appeared to bear out the principles of efficiency laid down at the turn of the twentieth century by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who theorised that a society would grow wealthy to the extent that its members forfeited general knowledge in favour of fostering individual ability in narrowly constricted fields. In an ideal Paretan economy, jobs would be ever more finely subdivided to allow for the accumulation of complex skills, which would then be traded among workers. It would be in everyone’s best interest that doctors not waste time learning how to fix boilers, that train drivers not sew clothes for their children and that Biscuit Packaging Technologists leave questions of warehousing to
graduates in supply-chain management, the better to concentrate their own energies on the improvement of roll-wrap mechanisms. In a perfect society, so specialised would all jobs be, that no one would any longer understand what anyone else was doing.

  During a series of often bewildering conversations with members of staff, I came to realise that a Paretan utopia was now a realistic prospect at United Biscuits. But however great the economic advantages of segmenting the elements of an afternoon’s work into a range of forty-year-long careers, there was reason to wonder about the unintended side effects of doing so. In particular, one felt tempted to ask – especially on sombre days when the eastward-bound clouds hung low over the head office in Hayes – how meaningful the lives might feel as a result.

  5.

  When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others. Though we are often taught to think of ourselves as inherently selfish, the longing to act meaningfully in our work seems just as stubborn a part of our make-up as our appetite for status or money. It is because we are meaning-focused animals rather than simply materialistic ones that we can reasonably contemplate surrendering security for a career helping to bring drinking water to rural Malawi or might quit a job in consumer goods for one in cardiac nursing, aware that when it comes to improving the human condition a well-controlled defibrillator has the edge over even the finest biscuit.

  But we should be wary of restricting the idea of meaningful work too tightly, of focusing only on the doctors, the nuns of Kolkata or the Old Masters. There can be less exalted ways to contribute to the furtherance of the collective good and it seems that making a perfectly formed stripey chocolate circle which helps to fill an impatient stomach in the long morning hours between nine o’clock and noon may deserve its own secure, if microscopic, place in the pantheon of innovations designed to alleviate the burdens of existence.

  The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives and half a dozen different manufacturing sites. An endeavour endowed with meaning may appear meaningful only when it proceeds briskly in the hands of a restricted number of actors and therefore where particular workers can make an imaginative connection between what they have done with their working days and their impact upon others.

  It is surely significant that the adults who feature in children’s books are rarely, if ever, Regional Sales Managers or Building Services Engineers. They are shopkeepers, builders, cooks or farmers – people whose labour can easily be linked to the visible betterment of human life. As creatures innately aware of balance and proportion, we cannot help but sense that something is awry in a job title like ‘Brand Supervision Coordinator, Sweet Biscuits’ and that whatever the logic and perspicacity of Vilfredo Pareto’s arguments, another principle to which no one has yet given a convincing name has here been ignored and subtler human laws violated.

  6.

  Matters were compounded because, whatever the modesty of the ends at United Biscuits, the means to produce the Moments and their siblings nevertheless required the dedication and self-discipline that might otherwise have been called upon to run a hospital or become a ballerina. A question of motivation appeared: whether the company could succeed in providing its staff with a sufficiently elevated set of ideals in whose name they were to exhaust themselves and surrender the greatest share of their lives.

  Many of the proceedings at United Biscuits had to them an air of gravity akin to that which might obtain in an airport control tower. This was because, for all their questionable taste and negligible nutritional value, biscuits made money – and in the sort of quantities which would have overwhelmed the exchequers of the greatest monarchs of history. To look at the biscuit profit figures in the light of graphs by the modern historian of the Tudors, Sir Geoffrey Elton, the company was pulling in more money in profits every year than Henry VIII and Elizabeth I had succeeded in doing in their entire reigns combined – all this from a beige-brick office block in the north-eastern corner of Hayes, only twenty minutes by car from the gilded state rooms of Hampton Court.

  Accordingly, even the head of the Blackstone private equity group (a man whose personal fortune outstripped the wealth of all the kingdoms of sub-Saharan Africa since the discovery of fire), had on occasion left behind his penthouse in order to genuflect before pastry. The company headquarters might have borrowed its aesthetic from a roadside motel, but only because, unlike the inhabitants of Versailles and the Escorial palace (distracted as they had been by thoughts of God, power and beauty), the leaders of the biscuit company harboured no doubt as to which divinity they were worshipping.

  Perhaps for this reason, I was to encounter no jokes at any biscuit’s expense. The minders of the Ginger Nut and the Rich Tea, of the Jaffa Cake and the Moment, resembled a flock of patient, grave-faced courtiers ministering to the needs of a nursery of wilful infant emperors.

  7.

  Late one afternoon, after darkness had fallen across the business park in Hayes, rendering particularly visible the lights of aircraft (many of them wide-bodied jets coming in from Asia) as they descended towards Heathrow, I passed by a corner office in which an employee was typing up a document relating to the brand performance of the Moments range. It had been almost a year since the biscuit’s launch. Renae’s expression was thoughtful and absorbed, and though I could not immediately have said why, something about her brought to mind a painting by Edward Hopper which I had seen several years before at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.

  In New York Movie (1939), an usherette stands by the stairwell of an ornate pre-war theatre. Whereas the audience is sunk in semidarkness, she is bathed in a rich pool of yellow light. As often in Hopper’s work, her expression suggests that her thoughts have carried her elsewhere. She is beautiful and young, with carefully curled blond hair, and there are a touching fragility and an anxiety about her which elicit both care and desire. Despite her lowly job, she is the painting’s guardian of integrity and intelligence, the Cinderella of the cinema. Hopper seems to be delivering a subtle commentary on, and indictment of, the medium itself, implying that a technological invention associated with communal excitement has paradoxically succeeded in curtailing our concern for others. The painting’s power hangs on the juxtaposition of two ideas: first, that the woman is more interesting than the film, and second, that she is being ignored because of the film. In their haste to take their seats, the members of the audience have omitted to notice that they have in their midst a heroine more sympathetic and compelling than any character Hollywood could offer up. It is left to the painter, working in a quieter, more observant idiom, to rescue what the film has encouraged its viewers not to see.

  A comparable dynamic seemed in play in the head office at Hayes, where there was a marked imbalance between the importance accorded to the supposed centres of interest – the biscuits – and the neglected value of humans like Renae who laboured to meet their demands. I wondered whether the biscuits might not be part of the very problem that they had been designed to address, whether their production and marketing was not indeed contributing to precisely the feelings of emptiness and nervous tension which they claimed to alleviate.

  I wondered out loud to Renae why in our society the greatest sums of money so often tended to accrue from the sale of the least meaningful things, and why the dramatic improvements in efficiency and productivity at the heart of the Industrial Revolution so seldom extended beyond the provision of commonplace material goods like shampoo or condoms, oven-gloves or lingerie. I told Renae that our robots and engines were delivering the lion’s share of their benefits at the base of our pyramid of needs, that we were evident experts at swiftly assembling confectionery and yet we were still searching for reliable means of generating emotional stability or marital harmony. Renae had little to add to this analysis. A terrified expression spread across her features and
she asked if I might excuse her.

  Later, caught in a traffic jam on my way out of Hayes, in a landscape of discount-furniture warehouses and chemical storage tanks, I lost my temper and wished a biblical plague on the house of biscuits, so that its directors might learn to tremble before the right gods. I remembered a passage from John Ruskin’s The Crown of Wild Olive, written in 1866, eighty-one years before the invention of the Jaffa Cake: ‘Of all wastes, the greatest waste that you can commit is the waste of labour. If you went down in the morning into your dairy, and you found that your youngest child and the cat were at play together, and that the boy had poured out all the cream on the floor for the cat to lap up, you would scold the child, and be sorry the milk was wasted. But if, instead of wooden bowls with milk in them, there are golden bowls with human life in them, and instead of leaving that golden bowl to be broken by God at the fountain, you break it in the dust yourself, and pour the human blood out on the ground for the fiend to lick up – that is no waste! What! you perhaps think, “to waste the labour of men is not to kill them.” Is it not? I should like to know how you could kill them more utterly’.

  Well-meaning friends advised me that I appeared to be slipping into an unfamiliar and somewhat hysterical mood, and might benefit from an interval of less stressful ‘me-time’.