Barbelith Underground > Conversation

Tempting little fantasy he describes in his article: the ludic revolution. It would be easy to pick holes in his argument but I think he concedes that.

I have always worked, not having been gifted with rich parents or a lottery win. I've experienced the full range from brainless, monotonous, can't-bear-the-thought-of-another-day-of-it jobs to some (a few, granted) that were so much fun I would bounce out of bed and hare in there every morning. I couldn't afford not to work but I was able to choose to do a less well paid job because it would be more enjoyable, or at least less of a grind.

I'm not entirely sure that I do envy the workless. I would love to be able to decide whether and when to get up out of bed or not but I think, given my personality, I would be miserable when frittered-away day began to succeed fairly pointless day. And there would be no dosh to fuel any displacement activities.

But perhaps I am simply a product of my early training at the hands of two working class Scots steeped in a protestant work ethic. The actual "work" I have done for the past 25 years plus has usually been of the socially useful kind and generally not the sort of thing most people would volunteer for. If I'd been rich enough not to have to work I doubt I'd have been philanthropic enough to have been of use to society in that, or other, ways.

I'd have been like many spoilt little rich kids I've nursed who flushed their lives down the toilet because they could always do whatever seemed like the most fun at the time and that was usually excessive pleasure seeking with nothing much to ground them in reality. That's what your teenage years are for but you need to wise up and get real at some point. Even the Epicureans didn't want to partayyy all day. They proposed a balance.

However, have to say that your working conditions can be considerably improved by climbing the ladder a bit and thereby gaining some more autonomy and freedom to manoeuvre. Technically you may have more responsibility to handle or more demanding work to do but you don't suffer the disempowerment of being bossed about all the time.

I wouldn't want to go back to "clocking" on and off and begging for time off when I needed it. The research shows it's not the highly paid power dressers in their swanky offices who suffer the highest rates of heart disease, stress, depression and alcoholism but the workers on the shop floor, just doing what they're told.

Ask me again tomorrow and I might make an entirely contrary agrument though. I am curiously pro-work for a Monday. Perhaps because I have been skiving all morning.

Work