Work is a pie-eating contest

Too much of a good thing

I had two conversations this week with friends who do not want financial freedom. They might want it abstractly, like it would be nice. But it gets down to it, they don’t like the idea of not working. After all, who would they be without their careers?

Now, everything I write below has to be filtered through this truth: I’m a fundamentally lazy person. In school, I cut a lot of class. Didn’t do the reading. As a worker, I liked cutting corners. Left work early. My friends have made an observation: “Douglas doesn’t do anything he doesn’t like to do.”

More charitably to myself, I would say that I like working but not that much. I simply lack the stamina to work forty hours a week. My attention span and energy levels aren’t eight hours a day, especially if it bleeds into weeks, then years. Not for work, but honestly, not for anything.

A long time ago, I used to be a corporate lawyer. When I was a young associate, a mid-level associate took me aside and told me:

“Becoming a partner at this law firm is like winning a pie-eating contest … and the prize is more pie.”

I think that I like pie, but not that much. A couple bites is lagom for me, thank you very much. Eating a whole slice is mostly OK, but I don’t desire another slice the next day. Or the days after and after. So when I watch hard-working person go after it, I always think: “Too much pie!” and wonder what’s driving them. What’s the emotional need behind this need to work so much. Fear? Ambition? Status?

Doing less is better living

Almost one hundred years ago, the great 20th century philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell wrote an insouciant and provocative essay In Praise of Idleness. This was his thesis:

“I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by the belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.”

Russell wrote that we could produce enough for everyone’s needs in about four hours of work a day. And that was in 1932; my rough calculation is that we have eight times more today than back then.¹ Russell believed that working beyond four hours a day simply reinforces and strengthens the existing power structure. Leisure is, in fact, a form of resistance to oppression.

Everything we choose to do matters. But everything we do and didn’t choose, that which we do that is hidden and unconscious, is more important. We live our lives with many bad hidden assumptions and unspoken falsehoods, given to us by the people who taught us. Theorist Slavoj Žižek said that ideology is the thing we do without realizing we’re doing it. Of course, ideology is the ultimate form of control of the powerful over the less powerful, because an unfree mind has no idea it’s being controlled. As Verbal Kint once said:

According to Russell, the ideology of work-as-virtue is the devil that keeps the poor poor and the rich rich.² Working four hours a day would strip the powerful of power and center humanity around a sense of enough. In more practical terms, meeting our needs rather than chasing endless material acquisitiveness would take away profits (i.e. money and power) from the rich and deliver agency and self-determination to the poor. Instead we keep reinforcing the ideology of the eight-hour workday onto each other. By both excessively spending and working more than necessary, we pushing the poor further behind. This is the natural consequence for our preference for work and consumption over time and liberation. Who would it harm if we reversed that: time and liberation over work and consumption?

Speaking of ideology, do you believe that with four hours of work a day, we could meet everyone’s needs? It’s easy to agree with intellectually but hard to really let in. Americans have been conditioned to the eight hour workday, to accept their own exploitation as normal, because well, fear, ambition, and status. It’s hard to free your mind.

Leisure and enoughness

We are in an imagination battle. - Adrienne Maree Brown

I was at a psychedelics conference this weekend, where someone said psychedelics are a way of “interrupting stories.” I think back to my two friends who don’t want to stop working. Funny, because both of them have had recent sabbaticals, so they’ve had a taste of what life without work is. But stripped of employment, they don’t have a story of themselves that gives them purpose and a sense of belonging. Their work is the central hub of their ego identities. It also suggests to me that my two friends don't think that they are enough as they are, independent of the work they do in a capitalist system³ I’m reminded of Elizabeth Gilbert, who talked about how to try to justify our existence:

"And y'know that there are some times I think: I have no value. I'm just loved.

I love to offer that to people as an alternative to the American purpose-driven life that says you don't have any value unless you're serving a purpose and what is your purpose and all of us are born with a purpose and you have to find your purpose and then you have to change the world with that purpose. All of that just makes the tendons in my neck stand out and gives me hives of anxiety that I'm doing it wrong or that I might never get there or that I had a purpose but then I failed and it should have been this one. All of that is just so tremendously anxiety-producing. 

It's so inhumane to teach people that that is what the point of their life is -- is to *earn,* somehow, their presence on this earth through purpose and through what they contribute and it better be good. It's just so mean. 

The reality is that you are not required to have a purpose at all -- that's what it means to be loved. You are not required -- *nothing* is required of you. Nothing is required of you. You are part of all of this. And could not be if you tried. And that, I think, is real peace."

Nothing is required of you is such an anti-American statement. It’s counter to culture to say you don’t have to earn your existence. What we’re talking about is grace. And in so many ways, capitalism is anti-grace.

It’s all so inhumane and anti-liberatory. The belief that we must find our central purpose and sense of belonging through work means that we don’t belong to ourselves. When our identities are so wrapped in what we do for work in a capitalist system, we’ve lost a sense of who we are independent of laboring in capitalism.⁴ Leisure, the full enjoyment of doing nothing, or doing things for their own sake,⁵ is anti-capitalist, and the only way we're ever going to come home to ourselves.

“Leisure is only possible when we are at one with ourselves. We tend to overwork as a means of self-escape, as a way of trying to justify our existence.”  ― Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture

Why are we trying to self-escape? I think we’re not comfortable with ourselves in this system. Our deepest needs can’t being met in a system that only justifies itself with the production and consumption of more things and experiences. Why? Well, because more things and experiences will never meet our deepest needs. We’re squandering our time and attention on trifles.⁶ (If you need more evidence, see bonus note on car buying below.)

And in doing so, something precious is lost: the presence necessary to show up and truly love one another.

To love, we need to be sensitive to those around us, which is impossible if we are always racing through life engrossed in all the things we need to do before sunset. - Eknath Eswaran

Most of the Christian seven deadly sins, defined by Dante in Inferno, are simply excessive, perverse, or corrupt versions of good things. What if purposeful work was a virtue that promotes engagement and human flourishing but taken to excess, a vice that corrupts and destroys the world? Too much pie can be a bad thing.

SUGGESTION

Want to interrupt your stories about money? My next Financial Freedom 1 cohort is October-November. Two months of taking control of your finances to live the life you want.

BONUS: CAR TALK

I read yesterday the following facts: the average transaction price for buying a new car has gone up 15% in the last year to $48,182. About 40% of US households buy a car every year. If you stripped car purchases out of inflation, inflation would be less than 6%. Our addiction to scarcity and consumption, and our need to work to pay for that, is truly scary.

1. 3% productivity doubles every 25 years. Then use the miracle of compound interest etc.

2. When more is produced, the rich get richer.

3. One of them works in nonprofit work, but still.

4. My mentor Vicki Robin wrote about the purposes of work. Excerpted with permission here.

5. “Autotelic” for you word nerds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autotelic

6. C.S. Lewis, writing in a different context, called us ignorant children who wants to go on making mud pies because we cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. He wrote, “We are far too easily pleased.”