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The Invention of Work

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J. Phillip Johnson

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“While Europe appears to maintain more reticence embracing it, in America there is no question that work can only be discussed as a secular sacrament, with all the indignity one might expect from such a degrading genus. The Protestant qualifier to Protestant work ethic long ago dissipated, leaving the peculiarly American artifact of viewing one’s wages as a moral reward, one’s continuous employment as a state of grace and one’s retirement as an earthly paradise merited by one’s good works.”

WorkRetirementWork EthicAmerican CultureWage SlaveryProtestant Work Ethic
Book:The Invention of Work
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“Correct," she said, "but I don't think he even realizes it. You probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially. What was it in this statement that made Clark want to weep? He was nodding, taking down as much as he could. "Do you think he'd describe himself as unhappy in his work?" "No," Dahlia said, "because I think people like him think work is supposed to be drudgery punctuated by very occasional moments of happiness, but when I say happiness, I mostly mean distraction. You know what I mean?" "No, please elaborate.» "Okay, say you go into the break room," she said, "and a couple people you like are there, say someone's telling a funny story, you laugh a little, you feel included, everyone's so funny, you go back to your desk with a sort of, I don't know, I guess afterglow would be the word? You go back to your desk with an afterglow, but then by four or five o'clock the day's just turned into yet another day, and you go on like that, looking forward to five o'clock and then the weekend and then your two or three annual weeks of paid vacation time, day in day out, and that's what happens to your life." "Right," Clark said. He was filled in that moment with an inexpressible longing.”

LifeWorkDepressionCapitalismMeaningExistentialismCorporate Life
Book:Station Eleven
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“To most of the roles society offers, I say, “You are made for more than that.” We inhabit, in the words of Ivan Illich, “a world into which nobody fits who has not been crushed and molded by sixteen years of formal education.” The very idea of having to be at a job “on time” was appalling to early industrial laborers, who also refused the numbing repetitiveness of industrial work until the specter of starvation compelled them. What truly self-respecting person would spend a life marketing soda pop or chewing gum unless they were somehow broken by repeated threats to survival? To participate in our society’s depredations is an indignity. [...] Very few of society’s usual positions can accommodate the enormous creative life-force of an unbroken human being. To keep the world under control demands that we bottle up this creative force and expend as much of it as possible in harmless ways—harmless to the status quo, that is, though not to the individual. All the addicts and alcoholics I have known—all of them!—are blessed (or cursed) with what seems to be an exceptional creative energy that is burned up in their addiction. Other people channel it into obsessions and compulsions, hobbies, nervous tics, excessive exercise, overeating, work, and the like, contributing to a more dilute version of the addict’s sense of life betrayed. When we submit to lesser lives, we cannot avoid a sense of self-betrayal: that we are complicit in the plunder of our most precious possession. The roles society offers do not befit the divine beings that we are. It is not merely that a career as a retail clerk is beneath my dignity; it is beneath anyone’s dignity. No one is meant to do such work for very long.”

WorkSocietyDystopia
Book:The Ascent of Humanity
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