I'll confess right away: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is the only book by Alain de Botton I've read. Somehow, reviewers of his work have not evoked my interest in the slightest. The only thing I know about him is that he is a best-selling author and that he has written one book on Proust and another one on the consolation of philosophy (apart from one on travel, another on love and a third one on architecture). I picked up a copy of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work as I was aimlessly ambling through the luxurious shops of Hong Kong airport, eager to hop onto my plane and forget all about the place. And even though the book did not live up to my fears - that it'd be 300 pages or so of self-help-ish musings on how to make work more fun - it still fits the restless, chilly and blasé atmosphere of an airport.
So, what is this? It is not self-help lit nor is it philosophy. de Botton writes what I would call a philosophical style of journalism. Among the ten chapters in the book we find essays on biscuit manufacturing, career counselling, entrepreneurship and rocket science. The intention of the book seems to be to address aspects of work that are somehow overlooked in the day-to-day business of our lives.
Is de Botton a successful philosophical journalist? Um, no. de Botton's style is eloquent and lofty, and the overall impression I get from reading the book is that he looks down on work with humorous contempt. As another reviewer has pointed out, de Botton's approach towards work is like one would ask Oscar Wilde to write a report about the manual labor done in a cookie factory. As a social reporter, de Botton's book lacks depth and direction.
de Botton perceives work as potentially admirable - he writes about the hidden impressiveness of pylons, the grandeur of cargo ships along with the intricacies of accounting and the awe elicited by aviation. But as much as he expresses his admiration of work, the text abounds with an endless string of remarks about the futility and frivolity of work. Every now and then, the author chooses to talk about the work people do from a "cosmic" perspective. And, de Botton tirelessly reminds us, career planning or cookie industries or accounting crumble to dust from the perspective of eternity. Accountants, he writes, are reconciled with the thought that their work will leave no trace in history. "They are well adjusted enough to have made their peace with oblivion. They have accepted with grace the paucity of opportunities for immortality in audit." I react to this in the same way as I react to the style of thinking about work in Hannah Arendt: if we cannot admire work for the heroic traces it leaves in history, we are left in the dark. In distinction to Arendt, de Botton opts for a glorification of the fleeting, oh-so-futile sense of meaning that work, no matter how dull and absurd the tasks that occupy us, somehow fills us with.
But why is it this angle, or that of history-from-stone age-onwards - that looms over the text? Frankly, I have no answer but that this is an expression of a peculiar form of aesthetic view of life subscribed to by de Botton. The sad thing is, that even though some passages could have developed into sound critique of work-related phenomena (alienation/consumerism...) his way of writing nivellates every thing that has to do with work to what comes to appear as a pile of waste. Towards the end of the book, I am not surprised at all to read a litany of the following kind:
Death is hard to keep in mind when there is work to be done: it seems not so much taboo as unlikely. Work does not by its nature permit us to do anything other than take it too seriously. It must destroy our sense of perspective, and we should be grateful to it for precisely that reason, for allowing us to mingle ourselves promisculously with events, for letting us wear thoughts of our own death and the destruction of our enterprises with beautiful lightness, as mere intellectual propositions, while we travel to Paris to sell engine oil. We function on the basis of a necessary myopia.
Sorry, Alain, but this comes across not as a quietly sobering "existentialist" meditation, but as depressing blurry-eyed resignation. If you want to say that we are necessarily suffering from myopia, go ahead, but I don't find that attitude very far-reaching philosophy-wise - or any-wise.
Of course, I do recognize this way of talking about work. But when expressed by my parents, the idea of work as a necessary distraction does not take the shape of a philosophical "truth". Rather, it is an expression of a overwhelmingly regrettable pessimism that I fight not to inherit from them. But, by contrast, de Botton invests nothing in his "revelation". It is deeply unclear what he takes himself to be saying. What is the aim of the book? Is he critical of any particular phenomenon? Well, sometimes he fires away one or two sour remarks about the folly inherent in the gravely manner in which we deal with the topic of work. Amen, I say to that, but de Botton leaves it at that. Nor does he seem to be interested in structures of power/ inequality/ oppression, even though he dedicates one chapter to the uncanny journey of a tuna from the Maldivian seas to a supermarket in London. Do I learn anything about tuna fishing & the transportation of consumer goods? Well, to be honest, not a great deal, over and above what I already know: many consumers have but a hazy idea how the content of their shopping bags ended up there.
de Botton is very successful in evoking the Uncanny: he leaves me with something utterly fuzzy - he serves eloquent platitudes rather than evoking an urgency in the reader to struggle with her own feelings about work. When I am finished reading his book the impression overwhelming me is that of dread and fatigue. I find this very counter-productive, because I am not led into any new or interesting ways of thinking about the world of work. Instead, de Botton lures me into glaring onto the world as a place that can be admired if we are lucky enough to take the position of observers but if we get into details what people do is either silly or boring - and mostly, de Botton seems to say - both.
According to the blurb on the back sleeve, de Botton sets out to investigate what makes work fulfilling or soul-destroying. And even though he pays visits to a biscuit factory, an aviation exhibition or a large accounting firm, I never get the sensation that de Botton is really interested in what those he talks to has to say. One passage is especially revealing. He meets up with an employer, called Renae (most male workers are not referred to with their first name only) who is involved in biscuit brand performance. For some reason, de Botton has made up his mind that "Renae" is a meaningless cog in the cookie-wheel, that the value of her existence is crushed under the business weight of Cookie Brands. Let me quote de Botton:
I wondered out loud to Renae why in our society the greatest sums of money so often tended to accrue from the sale of the least meaningful things, and why the dramatic improvements in efficiency and productivity at the heart of the Industrial Revolution so seldom extended beyond the provisions of commonplace material goods like shamoo or condoms, oven-gloves or lingerie. [....] Renae had little to add to this analysis. A terrified expression spread across her features and she asked if I might excuse her.
But hello! Mr de Botton, you scurry into this lady's office, lecturing her on the insignificance of her work - and then you have the guts to point out her lack of reply. In fact, we know nothing about "Renae's" ideas - nor about her thoughts about Mr de Bottons elegant "analysis". In quite a few places, the same pattern is repeated; instead of giving a serious and honest report about his interlocuters' thoughts and feelings, he delivers shallow and belitteling smirks that in quite a few places elicit embarrassment - on behalf of oneself and on behalf of the author.
So: my verdict upon this book is that it is entertaining to a fair extent - the photos that accompany the text are pleasant to look at, for example - but it does not reveal very much about the world of work, not from a social perspective, nor from a philosophical or political point of view. And if we are to take de Botton's perspective in this book seriously, one might end up with a bullet in one's head. Life is a frivolous affair, after all, as biscuit, shopping and tax tables, if we listen to de Botton, occupy the most important place in our lives.
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