Work puts food on the table and a roof to keep the elements out; beyond that most people don’t think too deeply about the nature of their daily toils. Not so Alain de Botton, a British essayist and novelist.
Book Examines Ten Areas of Work
In his 2009 book, “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work,” Alain de Botton takes the reader on a journey to try and find an answer to the question of why people are happy or unhappy in their work.
He finds some occupations that keep the people who have them “appropriately alive to some of the most astonishing aspects of our time.” Meanwhile, there are others whose jobs keep them “ignorant...surrounded by machines and processes of which we only have the loosest grasp.”
The Futility of Work
The author doesn’t have a lot that’s good to say about work beyond its ability to earn money in a cash-driven society.
In one passage he writes: The “start of work means an end to freedom, but also to doubt, intensity and wayward desires... How satisfying it is to be held in check by the assumptions of colleagues, instead of being forced to contemplate, in the loneliness of the early hours, all that one might have been, and now never will be.”
He adds: “What is interesting is that we may take it upon ourselves to approach tasks with utter determination and gravity when their wider nonsense is clear.”
A reviewer at the BBC found this attitude disdainful: “…because he’s (de Botton) never had to work (his dad is a super-rich Swiss banker) it all feels a bit patronizing. This is a book that smells of the kind of expensive aftershave that no-one can afford any more.”
Essays Examine Different Work Situations
In 10 chapters de Botton looks at the labour of everything from people who make cookies to work that actually is rocket science. On one level, the making and marketing of a chocolate and shortbread cookie called “Moments” is pointless. But, what about the physicists and technicians whose knowledge enables a satellite to be placed in geosynchronous orbit so that a television channel called WOWOW TV can be beamed to millions of Japanese children?
He also covers the nature of work in an accountancy office, and career counselling. And, he follows the journey of tuna from the time’s it’s caught in the Indian Ocean to the time it shows up on the dinner plate of a child in Bristol, England.
Book is Written with Wit
In a review in The Economist (28 March 2009), de Botton is praised for his humour” “Here, for instance, is what he has to say about the swimming pool at his Mojave desert hotel…‘Unfortunately, most of the budget for the pool had apparently been squandered on proclaiming, in an enormous illuminated display by the roadside, that it existed, leaving few resources for it actually to do so.’ ”
Rupert Taylor - Rupert Taylor is the editor of a magazine that provides background to current events.
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