The tyranny of modern work

"As if there was something romantic and glamorous about hard work...if there was something romantic about it, the Duke of Westminster would be digging his own fucking garden, wouldn't he?"

Jeffrey Bernard

I've written extensively in this blog about the tyranny of work, having had the scales fall from my eyes when I went freelance in 2009 and having realised how much I loathed the world of full-time white-collar work. That life took my free time, my brain space, my physical freedom, my mental and physical health. Yes, it gave me a decent salary in return, and I would never patronise the millions of people who are currently working for pittances, minimum wages or less, by acting like that salary wasn't and isn't important. Of course it is. But I decided to use my immense privilege - the fact I could live without the stability of that salary coming in every month - to take my life back. And I've never been sorry that I did it.

I've never worked a 'full time' job in the 8 years since. Please note, that is not the same as saying I haven't worked, or that I haven't worked hard, or that I haven't carried out tasks the average office worker would baulk at (have YOU ever manually evacuated a person's bowels, hmmm?!). I've temped, I've done contracts, I've done every imaginable kind of care work, I've tutored teens and adults, I've put suncream on cats (don't ask!!). And 8 years later, I'm an internationally published author and journalist, and I'm so, SO bloody happy.

However, this isn't about me having a good old brag. It's a reflection on how the culture of work has changed in that time, and how it's only become more demanding, more obnoxious and more insidious. And it's a chance for me to say NOPE NOPE NOPE to all that once again, and encourage you to do the same.

The above quote resonated fiercely with me when I spotted it in a newspaper yesterday. That's right, a physical newspaper, not an online one! And I was reading it while seated in a coffee shop, taking my time to leisurely eat, drink and read rather than rushing through the place with a takeaway cup. I'm trying this mindfulness lark, you see, because it's supposed to be good for mental health. And you know what mindfulness entails, nay demands?

Slowing. The. Hell. Down.

Which is NOT what current Western society, or current working culture, encourages at all.

The modern world as it stands encourages you to speed up. Multi-task. Do five things at once, even if that means you do a poor job of all five instead of doing one thing well. 

It encourages you to be on your computer with your phone and tablet by your side demanding your attention like persistent pets, for 18 hours a day. It means you can't even queue for something without being on what Joshua Ferris accurately termed 'the me-machine' (and what I'm rapidly beginning to refer to as The Twat Machine!). 

As a society we're increasingly incapable of Just Being. No wonder yoga retreats, mindfulness courses and even sleep pods at work (don't get me started on the fucking irony of that!) are so in vogue right now. No one knows how to relax any more, or if they do, they're afraid to because they think they'll get sacked.

I've found myself falling into the terrible habits of this bullshit culture too, albeit only briefly. Answering emails at 9 at night. Responding straight away in order to show willing, even when a response isn't really needed or the sender of the email isn't likely to reply for 5 hours, or perhaps ever because they're clearly multi-tasking too much themselves. Emailing when a telephone call would actually do the job much better. Pestering others when I could easily have left them the hell alone to have their lunch hour, or their evening, or their weekend, in peace because let's face it, my work is never going to be a matter of life or death and neither are 95% of jobs out there.

But then I realised it was compromising my mental health, and I talked to my psychiatrist about it,  who said something along the lines of "You are not paid enough to be available 24/7," and I put a stop to that nonsense. 

I deleted all distracting apps off my devices - Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, LinkedIn etc. Come on, folks, as if those massive companies don't hold enough power over us already. The feckers can live without being on your phone or tablet, I promise you. Their browser sites still work.

I made copious use of airplane mode on my phone, or simply switched the bugger off. I promise you, the world does not cave in if you do this. Especially if you do it at evenings or weekends. Your family will thank you for putting down the me-machine and doing stuff in the 3D world. My parents have already commented on how much more present I seem when I go to see them - often that's because I've deliberately left the Twat Machine back at my house, so I can immerse myself in the experience of seeing the people I love.

I stripped down my social media activities to mostly those that will benefit my professional life, left groups that I never participated in but got constant notifications for, regularly hit "MARK ALL AS READ" on notifications (I promise you, it's a wonderful feeling), deleted 'friends' that I never talked to, and had a complete moratorium on the Twat Machine from 10pm to 8am. I don't even have my phone in my bedroom any more. I leave the evil little git downstairs, turned off, and when I wake up the first thing I do is drink some water and look at the sky, NOT at a tiny screen.

My cat is also grateful for these changes. He's getting a lot more real-time love and undivided attention too, rather than fighting with glowing screens for my attention.

Oliver Burkeman is absolutely on the money when he says "Office communication comes at the cost of precisely the kind of focus that's essential to good work. "

Cal Newport echoes this, saying "We hook up to email addresses and Slack channels and then just rock'n'roll with messages all day long....hoping busy-ness will transmute into value."

This kind of performative work culture was exactly what drove me mad about office life, and utlimately drove me to leave it. I never understood why people were so keen to look busy, to seem productive even when things happened to be quiet, to make a big song and dance about getting in to work early, working through lunch and staying late. I was often bored and under-utilised, and frankly wondered why, if it only took me 3 hours to complete my day's work, did I have to stay in a fluorescent-lit, air-conditioned box for 6 more hours, pretending to be occupied?! 

I know that many people are simply afraid, because in this insecure economic climate they need that job and they don't want to rock the boat. But as someone who can afford to say Fuck All That, I feel it's my duty to stand up and say it as loudly as I can on behalf of all those frightened souls.

Now, of course, I make my own schedule and I work as long and hard - or as briefly and effortlessly - as I wish. I'm typing this on a proper desktop computer (with an ergonomic keyboard, because too much time on the Twat Machine and other devices has made my RSI flare up - CHEERS THEN), and my phone is on silent and in a different room. No radio and no TV are playing, no other browser windows open. I can hear birdsong and I can see the trees gently waving outside. This is what office life might have been like 20, 30, 40 years ago, when we did less emailing and more actual work. 

Try it some time. I think you'll like it.

Ingrained and Insane

I left full-time work five weeks ago, and I'm only now beginning to see how long it's going to take to adjust to having my time to myself. It's only in the last few weeks that I've had some unadulterated days by myself - prior to this I've either been doing agency work, or been rushing between agencies undertaking all the admin that working for them requires. It being the school Easter holidays now, there's not a lot of call for classroom assistants so naturally things have gone quiet. What's noticeable though, is how guilty not working every day still makes me feel.

When you've resigned yourself to unquestioningly handing over 9 precious hours of your waking day to a corporation you neither like, nor respect, nor even see the point of, it's a sharp decompression and switch of routine to suddenly find yourself with all that time plonked back in your lap. Some of it I have unapologetically spent sleeping, as I will never be one of those people with a natural disposition to spring out of bed at 6.30 of a morning - about 9.30 is just fine, thank you. Some of it I've spent, as planned, writing, which has been fantastic yet still feels like such a guilty pleasure, probably because it feels 'naughty' to actually do work I'm enjoying. At my last job, enjoyment was what I got from the occasional surreptitious surf on the net, sarcastic email to a colleague or typing up exercises for my private tuition students. You'll notice that my actual job was absent from that list, because it was composed of tasks so tedious that it was simply impossible for the human mind to take any pleasure from them. Yet it was expected that I would smile sweetly and surrender the majority of my time to such work. Now that I've rejected that idea, it's still taking a lot of getting used to the idea that working can be pleasurable, and can sometimes not even feel like work. I suppose I'm just not quite convinced yet that I can really make a career from writing, and as I'm still doing part-time work, the days when I have an organised schedule are still the ones that feel 'authentic', whereas the days I spend at home writing feel slackerish.

I suppose it's just going to take time to shrug off the oppressive mantle of the 9-5 world (not that anyone is actually allowed to work such skimpy hours any more, but you get the idea), and whilst my own career is up in the air things are bound to feel uncertain and scary. Still, I do think it's worth noting just how much the workaday world of offices warps you into feeling that, unless you're sitting in the same chair for 8 hours a day, doing something you get no pleasure from, it's not really 'work'. I mentioned this to a friend and she pointed out that this is a 'learned response', which made me consider just how much of the pressure we put on ourselves is a result of conditioning. I recently read a fantastic book called 'Willing Slaves: How The Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives', and as the self-explanatory title implies, it took to task the despicable trend of people working longer hours for no reward and using this as a tool to ingratiate themselves with bosses and try to 'psyche out' their colleagues. What the book identified was that, rather than being 'policed' by bosses breathing down your neck (although there's plenty of that still going on in offices, believe me), people are pressured into working insane hours by their own colleagues and an unspoken culture of expectation around you. Your contract may say your working hours are 8.30-5.30, but when you see people getting in at 7.30 and not leaving til 7, you're going to start feeling wrong-footed fairly soon if you refuse to surrender your precious extra hours too. At my last job I never bought into this bollocks, as I frankly resented working even my contracted hours, when I often found myself with little to do having completed my day's work by lunchtime. Sadly, I saw other workers who I liked and respected falling victim to the long hours propaganda, and I felt deeply sorry for them. I vowed it would never be me, and I suppose by leaving I have guaranteed that - for now. However, I've realised I was more conditioned by my workplace than I thought I was.

Another point the book made was that the vague, open-ended concept of 'leisure time' has been replaced by planned activities shoe-horned into the day so we can convince ourselves we are getting some of our time back by playing squash with Steve at 7.30, or taking the kids for a swim at 6. The idea of leisure time that doesn't have a definite beginning and end and can be filled with anything or nothing, seems to have become a taboo in the modern quest to be constantly justifying your existence with activity. Not that there's not still great swathes of society happily versed in doing Sweet FA - talk to a teenager or a student and they'll gleefully remind you that there's a whole world of time wasting out there, and you just need to jump right in. But I do think once you get into the world of work, and adapt to the idea that 'your time' is only evenings and weekends - and even then that time may just be spent collapsing and regrouping in time for the next daily grind - you forget how to simply bugger about, be lazy or unproductive, because you're so aware that your free time is limited. You don't want to waste your holidays 'doing nothing' - you feel obliged to justify them by undertaking travel or cultural pursuits. Lie-ins, lazy mornings, afternoons on the sofa reading all feel like deeply guilty pleasures, and they shouldn't be - they should be an option for everyone. Unless, of course, you have kids, in which case I don't know how much I can stick up for your right to be lazy seeings as you've voluntarily created a being which will persistently and vocally object any time you refuse to entertain it or crave a few minutes to yourself.

It would certainly be easier to feel content that I can spend days with only my laptop, books and chinchillas for company if I wasn't watching my bank account slowly start to empty itself out whilst I wonder and wait where my next piece of work is coming from. It'd also be easier if some more success on the writing front was forthcoming, but I'm aware it's an industry in which patience is going to be a seriously required virtue. But more than any of this, I'm pissed off that I've been so conditioned by a job I hated and only did for over a year because I was too depressed and demotivated to find a way out, that I can't relax now my time is my own. A pretty clear warning about letting the world of work consume your life, I think. Even those with nothing but contempt for the corporate world can't leave it unscathed by its insidious attempts to shape your world. I'm just glad I've got the insight, the strength and the brain to recognise it for what it is and say NO THANKYOU.