Last week’s episode of 30 Rock dealt, in some small way, with the effects some people can feel when they don’t have a job to go to everyday. There are those who need the pressure, the stress, the grinding frustration that only a workplace can provide, apparently. This line of thinking is nothing new — the world is full of stories that warn of the dangers of idleness. People need gainful employment, something to do, a sense of being useful, they say.
Well, maybe it’s true for some people; Type A personalities, if you believe in that sort of thing. But I highly doubt that this applies to everybody – or even a large percentage of people. It’s all a little too pat, isn’t it? Can I be an idle rich person someday? No, no – you couldn’t handle it — it would destroy you. Now return to your toil, prole.
Secular society or not, many faith-based ideas are still with us, impacting our day to day lives. The Protestant Work Ethic is one example. Work is a holy thing to many people. Or you could say that they find it’s important to them because it represents greater material wealth, or fulfills some sense of purpose (should they happen to require one), or that some define themselves not by who the are socially, but by what they do professionally, or whatever else. Holy should suffice as a description for now.
Why should this be the way of things? Why should the sudden lack of work be so damaging to the human spirit? Well, if you are in serious financial straights, the answer is obvious. The weight of your debts combined with an inability to pay them off either now or in the immediate future is a tremendous source of justifiable anxiety. Of course not having a job can be crushing those circumstances.
No longer having to work because one doesn’t have to in order to maintain one’s lifestyle is a special case, then. Still, we’re told that not having a job, even if you are financially well-off, can be detrimental to one’s state of mind. The examples we’re often shown have to do with working people who experience sudden windfalls, like winning the lottery.
There might be some bias with regard to these stories — why would the media spend any time covering people who are living comfortably off their winnings via rational resource management? There must be at least one winner out there fitting this description.
Conversely, why — if idle wealth leads to an enervation of the mind and spirit — do we almost never hear stories about whole families of fabulously wealthy non-working people losing their minds due to lack of purpose? Oh sure, we get the occasional story of the dim heiress who forgets to put her underwear on before leaving the house. And sometimes you’ll see a tell-all revealing dirty family laundry from several generations back, but not all that often.
How do they do it? Is it because they read good books? Or is it because of their charity work? Or do they just have enough money to hush these things up? More than likely, it has something to do with the fact that, after several generations of not having to work for a living, the idle classes have developed an innate adaptation to the easy life. An adaptation that people who work for a living, and whose parents worked for a living, do not have.
To some extent, I think this is horse-hockey. I think that the spectrum of human behavior is far too broad to draw the conclusion that toil is necessary if a working class person is to maintain a healthy mind, in all cases. Many people have interests outside of work that they could pursue to great effect if they didn’t have to spend a third of their lives preparing for, traveling to, and working at a place of employment.
Part of the problem that comes with thinking about this issue is simply that it’s impossible to really separate the idealistic, imaginary wonder-world of a post-work society, from the gut-twisting anxiety of real unemployment in the world we live in. In science fiction we see how such worlds might work, where folks don’t have to have a job, but all the interesting people are in Starfleet anyway. We can imagine these worlds, but we can’t imagine interesting stories from our perspective unless there are people on missions who didn’t have to go; or we tell tales of Utopias that are untenable for ethical reasons. Because stories of Edens that don’t end to with a serpent are boring. “Everyone was happy and fulfilled, and had few conflicts with others. Uh, The End.”
The instinct that tells us that not having to work would be a burden is the same one that sours tales of Utopia; it’s the instinct that tells us if we give a human being a good thing, he or she will find a way to fuck it all up. Human nature strikes again! This is why we can’t have nice technological paradises.
I don’t believe that this is necessarily the case. If we somehow found a way to eliminate toil tomorrow, it would no doubt take a generation or two to get everybody settled in. But it would happen, eventually. All those idle rich folks are the ancestors of people who didn’t start out wealthy, after all. If they can do it, I’m willing to bet lots and lots of other human beings could manage it.
Of course, this isn’t likely to happen. At the root, a lot of society and the work it requires comes from the fact that certain resources are scarce. We’re probably lucky that anyone is willing to exchange physical goods for human labor. Imagine having to duel someone or fight a gurrilla war every time you wanted a slice of baloney.
So, in the end we may never achieve a post-work world; the people who’d want it the most are not in a position to fight for it; the people who could don’t have to work, so they don’t care; and there are powerful people out there with a vested interest in the current way things are done.
I’m just saying that, if we didn’t have to work in order to have nice houses, fancy TV’s, and awesome vacations to exotic locales, well, we’d probably be able to handle it. But please, feel free to give me a billion dollars to prove me wrong!
Any billionaires with a good sense of humor who might be reading this?
