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Labor Without Love

Reviewed by Al Gini

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, by Alain de Botton

Pantheon, 326 pages, $26

Alain de Botton is the most widely read English language philosopher in the world today, and if you take into account the many languages his work has been translated into, and the low-threshold requirements for a philosophy bestseller, he is likely the most popular philosopher in the world, period. All told, he has written three novels that received decent reviews and modest sales, four bestselling philosophy texts, and an immensely popular volume that bridged the categories of self-help and literary criticism: How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997).

            The reasons for de Botton’s success are straightforward and refreshingly obvious. First, he is very readable. He is a wordsmith who writes with wit and charm, and although he is well grounded in the history of philosophy, he does not mire the reader down with technical nuances and jargon. Second, without ever saying it, his overall goal is clearly Socratic: “An unexamined life is not worth living.” De Botton wants to examine a theory or a topic for itself. He wants to take it apart to better understand it. He wants to see how and why an idea matters in our lives. Third, he possesses a childlike curiosity and enthusiasm about the world. Big things, little things, even trivial things fascinate him. He finds pleasure in reading pulp fiction and Proust, studying the paintings of Edward Hopper and Vincent van Gogh, traveling to Paris and offbeat ports of call. Though he is a lover of classical architecture, his favorite worldly possessions are the generic-looking stainless steel door handles that grace the interior doors of his house. (They are copies of door handles designed by Ludwig Wittgenstein in the mid-1920s.) Finally, his gifts include the remarkable ability to translate big ideas into bite-sized digestible pieces of prose. For example, in The Art of Travel he writes: “Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships, or trains.”

 

For these reasons, when The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work was released, I immediately purchased a copy and read it straight through. Sad to say, I found more sorrow than pleasure in de Botton’s most recent effort. I was even put off. To be fair, my disappointment is not because Mr. de Botton has necessarily lost his technical skills as a writer and thinker. My disappointment in the book stems from his analysis and his ultimate conclusions concerning the nature and purpose of work.

            The book starts as a “hymn to the intelligence, peculiarity, and horror of the modern workplace.” In the first two chapters, de Botton analyzes the incredibly complex processes required to put food on our tables and to stock our shelves with the hundreds if not thousands of products that we daily take for granted. In describing how human beings manage to get blood-red California strawberries to a British breakfast table, de Botton writes inspired prose appropriate to this feat of logistical ingenuity and wonder. But by the end of chapter 2, de Botton’s hymn turns to mourning: a dirge that laments the boring, deliberating, and deadening quality of most, if not all, forms of modern work.

            Whether intended or not, de Botton’s musings about the jobs we do to earn a living largely echo the attitude of the late Studs Terkel, Chicago’s inimitable proletariat raconteur and author. In his 1974 classic, Working, Terkel would combatively declare:

 

This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence—to the spirit as well as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.

 

For both Terkel and de Botton, work is a negative thing, a bad thing, something we do in order to survive. But there is seldom joy to be found in the actual doing. Terkel says that “most of us . . . have jobs that are too small for our spirit. [Most] jobs are not big enough for people.”

            De Botton contends that modern prosperity has perpetuated the myth that work is supposed to “feed both our savings accounts and our souls.” Our jobs are supposed to offer us meaning as well as money, purpose, and identity, satisfaction and creativity. He argues that although we want meaningful work, except for an exclusive and elusive minority (he never gives us a supporting list), the great majority of us are condemned to spending our days in unfulfilling boredom:

 

Our world of abundance, with seas of wine and alps of bread, has hardly turned out to be the ebullient place dreamt of by our ancestors in the famine-stricken years of the Middle Ages. The brightest minds spend their working lives simplifying or accelerating functions of unreasonable banality.