Work
Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time by James Suzman
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
Compelling, detailed, evidence-based new history of humankind through the prism of work, from the origins of life on Earth to our ever-more automated present.
From an energy source being bound together a chaos of different molecules to form living organisms. From life progressively expanding across the earth’s surface and evolving to capture new sources of energy, to do work with.
It has been a human evolutionary and cultural journey from our ancestors developing the capacity to master many new different skills, our remarkable purposefulness was honed to the point that we are now capable of finding meaning, joy and deep satisfaction in activities.
🎨 Impressions
This was a detailed, well-written, informative read that divulged a holistic overview of the role of work in our lives. However, at times it went off track and the narrative struggled to come to a concise, easily understood point.
How I Discovered It
Having become fascinated at the topic and construct of work in our lives, through the likes of Paul Millerd, I wanted to delve into understanding the historical routes so I could see the changes, factors and influences that have re-shaped the role of work in our lives. This book seemed like a comprehensive, well-regarded book on this topic.
Who Should Read It?
If you are interested in the future of work, the views of work in the past and are confused at the sudden central focus we place on it, this book will have the answers.
📒 Summary + Notes
Ideas About Work
We work to live and live to work and are capable of finding meaning, satisfaction and pride in almost any job: from the rhythmic monotony of mopping floors to gaming tax loopholes. The work we do also defines who we are; determines our future prospects, dictates where and with whom we spend most of our time; mediates our sense of self-worth; moulds many of our values and orients our political loyalties. So much so that we sing the praises of strivers, decry the laziness of shirkers and the goal of universal employment remains a mantra for politicians of all stripes.
Historical Thinkers Predicting Work
Our anxieties about an automated future contrast with the optimism of many thinkers and dreamers who, ever since the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution, believed that automation was the key that would unlock an economic utopia. People like Adam Smith, the founding father of economics, who in 1776 sung the praises of the ‘very pretty machines’ that he believed would in time ‘facilitate and abridge labour’, or Oscar Wilde who a century later fantasised about a future ‘in which machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work’. But none made the case as comprehensively as the twentieth century’s most influential economist, John Maynard Keynes. He predicted in 1930 that by the early twenty-first century capital growth, improving productivity and technological advances should have brought us to the foothills of an economic ‘promised land’ in which everybody’s basic needs were easily satisfied and where, as a result, nobody worked more than fifteen hours in a week.
Work Means More Than a Job
Acknowledging that for most of human history our ancestors were not as preoccupied with scarcity as we are now reminds us that there is far more to work than our efforts to solve the economic problem. This is something we all recognise: we routinely describe all sorts of purposeful activities beyond our jobs as work. We can work, for instance, at our relationships, on our bodies and even at our leisure.
Work is Not Just Time and Effort
When economists define work as the time and effort we spend meeting our needs and wants they dodge two obvious problems.
The first is that often the only thing that differentiates work from leisure is context and whether we are being paid to do something or are paying to do it. To an ancient forager, hunting an elk is work, but to many First World hunters it is an exhilarating and often very expensive leisure activity; to a commercial artist, drawing is work, but to millions of amateur artists it is a relaxing pleasure; and to a lobbyist, cultivating relationships with movers and shakers is work, but for most of the rest of us making friends is a joy.
The second problem is that beyond the energy we expend to secure our most basic needs – food, water, air, warmth, companionship and safety – there is very little that is universal about what constitutes a necessity. More than this, necessity often merges so imperceptibly with desire that it can be impossible to separate them. Thus some will insist that a breakfast of a croissant served alongside good coffee is a necessity while for others it is a luxury.
Universal Definition of Work
The closest thing to a universal definition of ‘work’ – one that hunter-gatherers, pinstriped derivatives traders, calloused subsistence farmers and anyone else would agree on – is that it involves purposefully expending energy or effort on a task to achieve a goal or end.
Four elements important in terms of making sense of our contemporary relationship with work:
When humans mastered fire, we learnt how to outsource some of their energy needs to flames, and acquired the gift of more time free from the food-quest, the means to stay warm in the cold and the ability to vastly extend their diets, so fuelling the growth of ever more energy-hungry, harder-working brains.
Our ancestors began to routinely store foods and experiment with cultivation, transforming their relationships with their environments, with each other, with scarcity and with work.
People began to gather in cities and towns. Some agricultural societies started to generate big enough food surpluses to sustain large urban populations. The birth of the first cities seeded the genesis of a whole new range of skills, professions, jobs and trades that were unimaginable in subsistence farming or foraging societies.
The emergence of large villages, then towns and finally cities also played a vital role in reshaping the dynamics of the economic problem and scarcity. Because most urban people’s material needs were met by farmers who produced food in the countryside, they focused their restless energy in pursuit of status, wealth, pleasure, leisure and power. Cities quickly became crucibles of inequality, a process that was accelerated by the fact that within cities people were not bound together by the same intimate kinship and social ties that were characteristic of small rural communities. As a result people living in cities increasingly began to bind their social identity ever more tightly to the work they did and find community among others who pursued the same trade as them.
As populations in Western Europe learned to unlock ancient stores of energy from fossil fuels and transform them into material prosperity. They become more crowded, accommodating the rapid growth in the number and size of cities, a surge in the population of both humans and the animal and plant species our ancestors domesticated. They also become far busier as a result of the turbo-charging of our collective preoccupation with scarcity and work – paradoxically as a result of there being more stuff than ever before.
Work is Biological
At its most fundamental, work is always an energy transaction and the capacity to do certain kinds of work is what distinguishes living organisms from dead, inanimate matter. For only living things actively seek out and capture energy specifically to live, to grow and to reproduce. The journey down this pathway reveals that we are not the only species who are routinely profligate with energy; or who become listless, depressed and demoralised when they are deprived of purpose and there is no work to do.
Expending Energy
Strangely, however, we are reluctant to resort to similar explanations for equally energy-profligate displays by humans. After all, many of the things humans expend energy on – from building ever grander, more ostentatious skyscrapers to running ultra-marathons – are hard to reconcile with reproductive fitness or survival.
Indeed, many of the things we do to expend energy risk reducing our lifespans rather than extending them. It may well be that the ultimate explanation for why is that when we have surplus energy, they expend it by doing work in compliance with the law of entropy.
The Development of Skills
Hunting was almost certainly among the selective pressures that encouraged the development of our ancestors’ ability to develop complex language. Equally importantly, hunting in this way may have played an important role in shaping their sociality and social intelligence as well as building up the perseverance, patience and sheer determination that still characterises our approach to work.
Other skills that leave no obvious archaeological traces must also have played a role in increasing the efficiency of our ancestors in their food quest.
Fire and the Creation of Leisure
Perhaps it is because so many see cooking as hard work that we have paid so little attention to what may be among the most important of fire’s many gifts: the gift of free time. For fire was not only the first great energy revolution in our species’ history, it was also the first great labour-saving technology.
If by mastering fire and cooking, we secured greater energy returns for less physical effort, then as their brains grew so did the amount of time available to them to apply their intelligence and energy to activities other than finding, consuming and digesting food.
Also by giving our ancestors more leisure time, fire simultaneously breathed life into leisure’s conceptual opposite, work.
Changing Desires
Wants may be easily satisfied, either by producing much or desiring little.
Hunter-gatherers, he argued, achieved this by desiring little and so, in their own way, were more affluent than a Wall Street banker who, despite owning more properties, boats, cars and watches than they know what to do with, constantly strives to acquire even more.
The stereotypical image of hunter-gatherers enduring life as a constant struggle against scarcity was far too simplistic. Hunter-gathers had much more leisure time compared to stressed-out jobsworths working in agriculture or industry, but the modesty of their material requirements was even more interesting. Hunter-gatherers, had so much more free time than others mainly because they were not ridden with a whole host of nagging desires beyond meeting their immediate material needs.
New Environments
Living in more seasonal environments not only demanded that people did more work but also that they organised their working lives differently, for part of the year at least. Preparing for winter required significantly more planning for them than it did for African foragers.
It was also not always practical or even possible to find fresh food on the basis of a few hours of spontaneous effort all year round. For the several months when the landscape was blanketed in snow and ice, gathering was near impossible and hunting far more treacherous. But living in a vast deep-freeze for months on end had some benefits. It meant that food didn’t decay and that meat butchered when the first heavy frosts fell might still be good to eat months. Large and dangerous mammals were hunted so that they could create a surplus.
Besides occasional hunting, or expeditions to refresh stocks of firewood, many hours would have been spent huddled close to the fire. Busy minds would entertain and be distracted by stories, ceremonies, songs and shamanic journeys. Agile fingers would have found purpose in developing and mastering new skills.
In occasionally storing food and organising their working year to accommodate intense seasonal variations, European and Asian foraging populations took an important step towards adopting a longer-term, more future-focused relationship with work.
Changes in Agriculture
The construction of temples must have demanded a similarly complex division of labour and skilled masons, artists, carvers, designers and carpenters, who depended on others to feed them. It is, in other words, the first unambiguous evidence of a society in which many people had something resembling full-time, highly specialised jobs.
The agricultural revolution not only enabled the rapid growth of the human population but also fundamentally transformed how people engaged with the world around them: how they reckoned their place in the cosmos and their relationships with the gods, with their land, with their environments and with each other.
When viewed against the backdrop of millions of years of human history, the transition from foraging to food production was as revolutionary as anything before or since. It transformed how people lived, what they thought about the world, how they worked, and rapidly increased the amount of energy people could capture and put to work. It also happened in the blink of an evolutionary eye.
But none of those who were part of this revolution thought of themselves as doing anything particularly remarkable. After all, viewed against the span of a single human lifetime or even against that of several consecutive generations, the adoption of agriculture was a gradual transition during which people and a whole series of plants and animals slowly but inexorably bound their destinies ever closer to one another, and in doing so changed one another forever.
Population Growth
Life was a struggle for most. The rapid population growth occurred in spite of declining life expectancies. For subsistence farming societies in other words, the ‘economic problem’ and scarcity was often a matter of life and death. And the only obvious solution to it involved working harder and expanding into new territory. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, despite the fact that hardly any of us now produce our own food, that the sanctification of scarcity and the economic institutions and norms that emerged during this period still underwrite how we organise our economic life today.
Time is Money
The basic correspondence between time, effort and reward is as intuitive to a hunter-gatherer as it is to a packer in a warehouse sealing boxes on minimum wage. Gathering firewood and wild fruits or hunting a porcupine takes time and effort. And while hunters often found joy in the chase, gatherers often viewed their work as no more spiritually rewarding than most of us regard moving down the aisles of a supermarket.
But there are two critical differences between the immediate rewards accrued by a hunter-gatherer for their work and that of a short-order chef flipping burgers, or a stockbroker making a trade.
The first is that where hunter-gatherers enjoy the rewards of their labour immediately in the form of a meal and the pleasure of feeding others, the warehouse packer only ever secures the promise of future reward in the form of a token that can later be exchanged for something useful or to pay off a debt.
The second is that while food was not always plentiful for foragers, time always was and so its value was never accounted for in the granular vernacular of scarcity. To foragers, in other words, time could not be spent, budgeted, accrued or saved, and while it was possible to squander an opportunity or waste energy, time itself could not be wasted.
The Move to Cities
Up until the Industrial Revolution, one in five of the people who lived in cities in the most productive ancient agricultural economies were pioneers of a whole new way of working. As the first large assemblies of people who did not spend any time or effort producing food, they were led by a cocktail of circumstances, curiosity and boredom to find other creative things to do with their energy.
The more energy cities captured from surrounding farmland, the bigger they grew and the busier their citizens got. Much of that energy went into sourcing the materials for building, maintaining and renewing basic infrastructure. This resulted in the emergence of many new specialist trades, like carpentry, stonemasonry and architecture, engineering, hydrology and sewerage.
Lots of energy also went into building temples and sustaining holy orders, to flatter and appease demanding deities with sacrifices and tributes, as well as meeting the entirely novel challenge of maintaining order among large assemblies of people. This required bureaucrats, judges, soliders, and those who specialised in keeping order and binding people together into urban communities with common values beliefs and goals.
It is clear that literacy fundamentally transformed the nature and exercise of power as well. It did this by providing the means for early states to establish functioning bureaucracies and formalised legal systems, by means of which they could organise and manage far larger populations and implement far more ambitious projects. It also provided those who had mastered reading and writing with the ability to claim privileged access to the words and will of gods. There is no doubt that literacy transformed the world of commerce, by enabling the establishment of formalised currencies, the keeping of complex accounts, the creation of financial and banking institutions, and also the possibility of accumulating wealth that often existed only in the form of ledgers.
Cities lived or died on the basis of common rules of behaviour and the ability of their citizens to bind themselves together with shared experiences, beliefs and values, and then to extend these into the countryside that fed them
These tightly bound communities evolved because people who shared skills and experiences unique to their crafts tended to make sense of the world in similar ways, and also because their social status was often also defined by their trade. Unsurprisingly, this remains the case now. Many of us not only spend our working lives in the company of colleagues, but also a fair portion of our lives outside of the workplace in their company too.
Status
Clothing may have been the most obvious and immediate signifier of status outside of the home, but as Britain’s cities began to swell over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, aspirant families sought to emulate the wealthier classes within the home too.
Homewares in particular emerged as important signifiers of status, especially among people living in the rows and rows of undifferentiated houses that were built to accommodate urban migrants. Unsurprisingly, it did not take long for ambitious entrepreneurs to begin to explore opportunities to mass-produce things like affordable porcelain and ceramic homewares, mirrors, combs, books, clocks, carpets and all sorts of different kinds of furniture.
Overworking
People now sadly die from being overworked. Not because of the risk of hardship or poverty but their own ambitions refracted through the expectations of their employers.
Beyond the fact that most of us spend considerably more time in the company of colleagues than our families, and structure our daily routines around work obligations, the work we do often becomes a social focal point, which in turn shapes our ambitions, values and political affiliations. It is no coincidence that when we first test the waters with strangers at social gatherings in cities, we tend to ask them about the work they do, and on the basis of their answers make reasonably reliable inferences about their political views, lifestyles and even backgrounds.
The rise and rise of the service sector may be a testament to our collective creativity when it comes to inventing new jobs to accommodate those ejected from the production lines in the ever more automated and efficient manufacturing sector. But we clearly aren’t that clever when it comes to creating (or rewarding) jobs people are likely to find meaningful or fulfilling.
Book Key Overview/ Points:
To reveal how our relationship to work – in the broadest sense – is more fundamental than that imagined by the likes of Keynes.
The relationship between energy, life and work is part of a common bond we have with all other living organisms
Our purposefulness, our infinite skilfulness and ability to find satisfaction in even the mundane are part of an evolutionary legacy honed since the very first stirrings of life on earth.
Final Point
We need to loosen the claw-like grasp that scarcity economics has held over our working lives, and to diminish our corresponding and unsustainable preoccupation with economic growth. For by recognising that many of the core assumptions that underwrite our economic institutions are an artefact of the agricultural revolution, amplified by our migration into cities, frees us to imagine a whole range of new, more sustainable possible futures for ourselves, and rise to the challenge of harnessing our restless energy, purposefulness and creativity to shaping our destiny.
