Imagine that work has taken over the world. It will be the center around which the rest of life revolves. Then everything else will be subordinated to work. Then, little by little, almost imperceptibly, everything else—the games once played, the songs hitherto sung, the love filled, the festivities celebrated—began to resemble and eventually became work. And then there will come a time, in itself almost imperceptible, when many worlds that once existed before the work took over the world will completely disappear from the cultural annals, sinking into oblivion.
And in this world of total work, how will people think, sound and act? Wherever they look, they will see the previously employed, the employed, the retired, the underemployed, and the unemployed, and there will be no one left uncounted in this census. Everywhere they praised and loved work, wished each other the best for a productive day, opened their eyes to tasks and closed them only for sleep. Everywhere the ideal of hard work as a means of achieving success will be upheld, and laziness will be considered the gravest sin. Everywhere content providers, knowledge brokers, collaboration architects, and new division heads will hear the incessant chatter about workflows and deltas, plans and benchmarks, scaling, monetization and growth.
In this world, food, bowel movements, rest, sex, exercise, meditation, and commuting—carefully controlled and constantly optimized—will contribute to good health, which in turn will serve to be healthier and healthier. productive. No one would drink too much, some would microdoze psychedelics to boost their performance, and all would live indefinitely. There were occasional rumors in the corners of death or suicide from overwork, but such slightly sweet whispering would rightly be regarded as no more than local manifestations of the spirit of general labor, and for some even as a laudable way to carry the work to its logical conclusion. the limit is in the ultimate sacrifice. Hence, in all corners of the world, people will act to complete the deepest desire of the total work: to see themselves fully manifested.
It turns out that this world is not a work of science fiction; it is unmistakably close to ours.
“Total work,” a term coined by the German philosopher Josef Pieper just after World War II in his book Leisure: The Basis of Culture (1948), is the process by which people are turned into workers and nothing else. Thus I maintain that work will eventually become total when it becomes the center around which all human life revolves; when everything else is put at his service; when leisure, feast and play are likened and then become work; when there is no other dimension left in life except work; when people fully believe that we were born only to work; and when other ways of life that existed before the total work won completely disappear from cultural memory.
We are on the verge of full implementation of the work. Every day I talk to people for whom work has come to rule their lives, turning their world into a task and their thoughts into an unspoken burden.
For, unlike a person who has devoted his life to contemplation, the total worker considers himself initially an agent facing the world, which is understood as an endless set of tasks that go into an indefinite future. Following this task of the world, she sees time as a scarce resource to be used with care, always worries about what needs to be done, and often worries both about whether it is the right thing to do now and that there is always something to do. something else. do. It is important to note that the attitude of the whole worker is best captured not in cases of overwork, but rather in a day-to-day manner, when he is single-mindedly focused on the tasks that need to be completed, with increased productivity, efficiency and effectiveness. How? Through modes of effective planning, skillful prioritization and timely delegation. In short, the total worker is a figure of incessant, intense, busy activity: a figure, a useful one. What is so disturbing about total work is not only that it causes unnecessary human suffering, but also that it eradicates forms of playful contemplation associated with what we ask, reflect on and answer the most basic questions of existence. To see how this causes unnecessary human suffering, consider the instructive phenomenology of total work as it appears in the daily awareness of two imaginary interlocutors. First, the constant tension, the overwhelming feeling of pressure associated with the thought that there is something that needs to be done, always something that I have to do right now. As the second interlocutor says, at the same time the question arises: This is the best use of my
th time? Time, the enemy, scarcity reveal the limited capacity of the agent, the pain of worry, the irrefutable opportunity cost.
Together the thoughts of what hasn't been done but needs to be done, what should have been done, maybe something more productive that I should do, and forever waiting for the next thing to be done, conspired like enemies to harass the agent , which is, by default, is always behind in the unfinished now . Second, a person feels guilty whenever they are not as productive as possible. Guilt, in this case, is an expression of an inability to keep up or keep an upper hand over things, with overflowing tasks due to alleged negligence or relative idleness. Finally, the constant, persistent striving to achieve a goal implies that it is empirically impossible, while inside this mode of being, to fully experience things. “My being,” concludes the first man, “is a burden,” that is, an endless cycle of dissatisfaction.
Thus, the burdensome nature of total work is determined by relentless, restless, excited activity, worry about the future, a sense of being overwhelmed by life, nagging thoughts of missed opportunities, and guilt associated with the possibility of laziness. Consequently, the problematization of the world corresponds to the burdensome nature of the whole work. In short, total work necessarily evokes dukkha, the Buddhist term for the unsatisfactory nature of life filled with suffering.
In addition to causing dukkha, total work blocks access to higher levels of reality. For what is lost in the world of total work is the artistic revelation of beauty, the religious glimpse of eternity, the pure joy of love and the philosophical sense of wonder. All this requires silence, immobility, a sincere readiness to simply comprehend. If meaning, understood as the playful interaction of finitude and infinity, is precisely what here and now transcends our concerns and mundane tasks, allowing us to have direct experience with that which is greater than ourselves, then what is lost in the world of total work is the very possibility of our experience of meaning. What is lost is the search for why we are here.