Sod work, who’s with me?

Ben Wildsmith

Sundays are a tyranny. The morning is OK, pottering around, lingering over breakfast and absorbing the agreeable lo-energy vibe. By mid-afternoon, though, Monday starts looming over your contentment like a bailiff.

I remember, as a kid, the queasy feeling as the theme for Harry Secombe’s Highway came on television, heralding the late Sunday afternoon truth that homework remained unattempted and would need to be finished on the bus tomorrow.

I’d even force myself through Songs of Praise rather than engage with the realities of responsibility and obligation that had, it was my fierce belief, no place in the minuscule snatches of time granted to me without someone telling me what to do and when. I’m no different now.

Don’t get me wrong. I like my job; it’s interesting and useful enough to have been necessary throughout the Covid lockdowns. Doing the actual job isn’t what endreadens me, it’s the rest of the mandated activities around having a job or going to school that cause my innards to roil at their prospect.

Getting up before I’ve finished dreaming, wearing clothes that reduce me to an anonymous functionary, engaging with work-speak, morale-boosting away-days, team meetings, passwords, training videos, fobs, mileage claims etc. all have to be negotiated before anything useful gets done.

Like warbling miserably through ‘Morning Has Broken’ at Morning Assembly, this all seems like stuff that could be lopped off the working day in favour of living life as I please.

I’m in the ‘workforce’, though, and for politicians and the certifiable workaholics they hang around, my attitude is an unspeakable heresy. They imagine that the country is populated with ‘hard-working families’ who exist in a frenzy of productivity, only stopping occasionally to mop their brows and plan on how best to propel their offspring into lives of even more fevered calorie expenditure.

They are the vanguard of the nation’s prosperity, living life as it should be lived whilst you are round the back of the bike sheds sharing a Rothmans’ King Size with other stains on humanity.

The worship of ‘work’ as an unquestionable virtue in and of itself is so embedded into our social mores as to be immune from the most basic interrogation.

When the hardest working telemarketer in Bangladesh calls you up because his records indicate that you’ve recently had an accident that wasn’t your fault, are you warm in admiration at his up-and-at-em attitude? When Wales’s most motivated semi-retired septuagenarian marches towards your car brandishing a parking ticket, do you shrink before his determination to be useful to the bitter end?

Is the engineer who figured out how to rig emissions tests for Volkswagen to be lauded for his commitment to the company?

If Elon Musk had a year off, would life get better or worse? How much of work is trying to reverse the effects of other work?

Surely, virtue accrues according to what you are working at, rather than how much of it you are doing, doesn’t it?

‘How was work today, darling?’

‘I disadvantaged even more of my fellow humans than I did yesterday, honeybun.’

‘That’s why I married you!’

‘Love you, time for bed.’

Raw output

Despite vogueish HR platitudes about work-life balance, we are hardwired to admire raw output above all considerations when assessing someone’s contribution to society. Attitudes towards work are consequently skewed by the disproportionate influence of workaholics. There are two types of these.

Firstly, you have the grasping megalomaniac sorts for whom money and power over others is the reason for living.

Then there are the psychologically damaged unfortunates who will be overwhelmed by an emotional tidal wave if they cease occupying themselves for longer than it takes to wolf down an energy bar.

Neither seems like much of a role model to me, but for politicians both are the best of us. Their gaping spiritual wounds are badges of ‘aspiration’ and we should cherish them as holy knights.

Covid

You might have thought that Covid would have shaken all this up a bit. At its peak, 30% of the workforce was paid to stay at home and do nothing. In fact, it would have been fraud if they had done any part of their jobs.

When all that was over, you’d imagine that society would have collapsed altogether, wouldn’t you?

Instead, we emerged blinking into the new normal to find the major difference was that hardworking traders had managed to become even richer than they did when they put in 20-hour days to crash the world economy a few years earlier. Something to aspire to, I suppose.

So, enjoy the sunshine, my lovelies. You were born to feel it on your face as you contemplate the exquisite irony of a short life in an infinite universe.

Smile at your loved ones, put on some music, dance maybe, then set your alarm clock because the hardworking guys at the council have dug up the A470 and you need to leave 20 minutes earlier.

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