The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

We spend very large part of our life working. Yet very often (and more emphatically when it sucks) we ask: What's the point of it? In truth, maybe it's not work that we cannot make sense of, but life.

When one works in advertising, the question comes more imminent and paramount with the package offers of long hours, overtime, underpay, the enmity of clients and the stress of deadlines. As the moan and groan are getting heavier and more frequent around, I find myself drawing my thought to the last page of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton. The perplexity of our question may not be answered, but at least it offers a perspective in which we could find a sense of consolation, albeit tinted with irony.

To see ourselves as the centre of the the universe and the present time as the summit of history, to view our upcoming meetings as being overwhelming significance, to neglect the lessons of cemeteries, to read only sparingly, to feel the pressure of deadlines, to snap at colleagues, to make our way through conference agendas marked '11:00 a.m. to 11:15.: coffee break', to behave heedlessly and greedily and then to combust in battle, to work frantically through the night for a million-billing account pitch (or worse just a thousand one) [My addition] – maybe all of this, in the end, is working wisdom. It is paying death too much respect to prepare for it with sage prescriptions. Let it surprise us while we are shipping wood pulp across the Baltic Sea, removing the heads of tuna, developing a nauseating variety of biscuit, advising a client on a change of career, firing a satellite with which to beguile a generation of Japanese schoolgirls, painting an oak tree in a field, laying an electricity line, doing the accounts, inventing a deodorant dispenser or making an extended-strength coil tube for an airline or brainstorming an advertising campaign for a skincare brand [My addition]. Let death find us we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.

If we could witness the eventful fate of every one of our projects, we would have no choice but to succumb to the immediate paralysis. Would anyone who watched the departure of Xerxes' army on its way to conquer the Greeks, or Tai Chan Ahk giving orders for the construction of the golden temples of Cancuén, or the British colonial administrators inaugurating the Indian postal system, or David Ogilvy briefing his account executives on how to make Dove the best selling soap in the U.S. [My addition], had it in their hearts to fill their passionate actors in on the eventual fate of their efforts?

Our work will at least distracted us, it will have provided a perfect bubble in which to invest our hopes for perfection, it will have focused our immeasurable anxieties on a few relatively small-scale and achievable goals, it will have given us a sense of mastery, it will have made us respectably tired, it will have put food on the table, It will have misled us to complain about our unreasonable malicious manipulative over-demanding ungrateful clients (or/and bosses) as our worse nightmare [My addition]. It will have kept us out of greater trouble.  

Revelation No.3

Revelation No.3, Oil on canvas, 8"x10"

I see
I find
I feel
I wonder
I think
I guess
I suspect
I suppose
I realize
I reckon
I believe
I doubt
I believe