End Hard Work Now!
12 December 2008
NOW IS THE season to make resolutions and my advice is: don’t! Of all the depressing and spirit-sapping inventions of the Puritan Revolution, this idea of making resolutions to behave better in the future is one of the most futile and absurd. The usual one is “work harder”. Well, what a nonsense! Where has all our hard work got us?
Resolutions are always broken and therefore they make you feel bad twice: once when you were making them in a spirit of strict self-criticism, and the second time when you break them, which makes you feel like an awful loser. The answer is to stop making any effort in anything and abandon yourself to Providence. It was an excess of effort and zeal that got us into this mess in the first place.
Now more than ever you need to be easy on yourself. It’s surely becoming clearer that hard work does not lead to happiness. Not hard work for other people, at any rate. All that hard work that people put into their job, only to be told that they are losing it due to a complicated set of financial shenanigans that was nothing to do with them at all. All that hard saving people put into their pensions, only to find out that it’s gone, all gone, thanks to the reckless greed of someone in London.
I would dearly love to send out a message to the newly idle of this country: fear not! A new world of hanging around at home and enjoying everyday life is around the corner! Jobs are the most over-rated creation of the Industrial Revolution. Even the sober Work Foundation admits that two thirds of us are miserable in them. So why be miserable if you lose it? This should be a time of great cheer! And think of the small fortune you will save in tax, morning lattes, bus fares, taxis, suits, ties, dry-cleaning bills and drinks after work with colleagues you don’t like?
Now job-free, you will be able to loaf around at home and start up a modest business or do some part-time work. Retrain as a carpenter and rediscover joy in work. Sit around doing nothing at home all day while your children get to know you again. Take naps after lunch, Thank the kind Lord who has freed you from the mind forg’d manacles of late capitalism and allowed you to enter the élite leisured class, who control their own hours of work and leave much time over for reading, meditating and contemplating. The Ancient Romans had no taste for work.To them it was slavish to sell your time to an employer.
Sure they may be some losses. Holidays, cars, cleaners. But really these are small sacrifices when you consider the beneficial effect on family life, all the time that you will be able to spend at home pottering about, making chutney and strange things out of wood.
I know this to be true, because we’ve been through our own self-inflicted financial crisis at home. It happened six yearsago when I gave up high-earning work to live in a rented farmhouse and write a book. My income was reduced to a fifth of its former level. But we never starved, we were never cold, we always had plenty of beer, wine and meat. To a yeoman of 1450, we would have been seen as living at the height of luxury.
So there is nothing to worry about. With thrift comes a great sense of responsbility and satisfaction. To be thrifty is to be creative, to take control. Our real needs can be met cheaply. It’s also true that when you fall out of that old system, you rediscover the power of community. You start to meet them. People start to help each other.
We’ve been reading Little House on the Prairie in the evenings. It’s wonderful. Here is a family who built their own house out of nothing, who were thrilled beyond belief when Pa brought back eight panes of glass from town for their windows. And how little Laura and Mary help round the house! That is the spirit we need to bring back: children are for chores! Yes, there are many reasons to be cheerful this year! Truly, this is the year of the truly idle parent!
ENDS
