The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

by Alain De Botton

  The sight of the chairman’s furniture brings to mind W. H. Auden’s poem ‘The Managers’ (1948):

  In the bad old days it was not so bad:

  The top of the ladder

  Was an amusing place to sit; success

  Meant quite a lot – leisure

  And huge meals, more palaces filled with more

  Objects, books, girls, horses

  Than one would ever get round to, and to be

  Carried uphill while seeing

  Others walk…

  But Auden knew where leadership was headed. In modern times, he wondered,

  Would any painter

  Portray one rising triumphant from a lake

  On a dolphin, naked,

  Protected by an umbrella of cherubs?

  Of course, power has not disappeared entirely; it has merely been reconfigured. It is by posing as a regular employee that the chairman stands his best chance of preserving his seniority. His subordinates admire the sincerity with which he pretends to share their fate, while he privately recognises that only a convincing show of normalcy will prevent him from ever having to be normal again.

  The chairman has also been forced to surrender his right to bark orders. He cannot scold graduates of INSEAD and Wharton. The one tool left to him is persuasion. Three or four times a month, in various corners of his empire, he therefore steps up onto a podium, takes off his jacket, looks out across an audience of three thousand accountants and, against a backdrop of PowerPoint slogans, tells them what admirable professionals they are, before adroitly slipping in a recommendation for improvements to their methods in the humble and supplicating manner of a preacher in an age of declining faith.

  It is evident that success in his job will ultimately depend less on anything he might do than on his relative luck in aligning his reign with auspicious currents in economic history. He is like a general on a battlefield vainly striving to maintain an appearance of control amidst the chaos of sporadically exploding munitions.

  Perhaps the chairman senses my concerns. He seems to regard our interview not as a chance to impart useful information but as a perilous test of his ability to avoid saying anything which might return to haunt him – in other words, to be as boring as possible. He persists in speaking to me in the same congenial but impersonal tone he might use to address a crowd. I ask him to expound on the company’s future: ‘No one is under any illusion that we face some significant challenges. However, there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that we also have some fabulous opportunities.’ What is his ambition for his employees? ‘All of our people and partners want to be part of a winning, successful organisation, an organisation that is winning market share and is therefore growing opportunities for all of its people.’ Does he like travelling? ‘We are fortunate that we are already part of a successful global business, but we must do more to commit fully to our global organisation and the global market.’ How does his firm differ from its competitors? ‘Our people are our brand in our clients’ eyes, and a differentiated client experience can only be created through our people living our values.’

  After twenty minutes of this, I am tempted to ask when he was last troubled by his bowels in a meeting. But perhaps he speaks like this not so much because he wishes to keep secrets as because years of circumnavigating the earth, breathing conditioned air and headlining conferences, have hollowed out his personality. It may have been a decade since he was left alone in a room with nothing to do. I feel my boredom turn to pity for someone who one might otherwise imagine had precious little to be pitied for.

  6.

  Lunchtime comes around, bearing with it a seductive smell of fried food which rises up through the atrium to the upper floors. Employees can look up the cafeteria’s specials on the intranet. Fridays feature a ‘battered catch of the day, tartar sauce and a lemon wedge’; Wednesdays are for curry; and on Thursdays there is a ‘roast with all the trimmings’. To spare prospective diners any unanticipated delay, a webcam transmits live images of the queue.

  However, not everyone is able to relax over the midday meal. At the very top of the building, in a series of executive dining rooms, senior partners are embarked upon the complex task of securing millions in fees from representatives of the country’s largest enterprises, while pretending to be interested in nothing but their recent holidays and their children’s education. Although the sums at stake here are incomparably greater than the ones dealt with by ordinary retailers or telephone salespeople who beg for custom in the soiled world below, the partners have learnt to adopt the serene and detached air of doctors or university professors.

  Mark, the partner lunching in the east wing, perfected his approach during a training course entitled ‘Delivery at the Client’, the aim of which was to help attendees to develop their ‘C’ skills: Confidence, Commerciality, Communication, Capability and Commitment. The course was held in a hotel at the edge of a forest outside Northampton where, during an evening session, a pair of foxes peered in through a window at Mark as he sat at a table with his paper plate and plastic cutlery, while rehearsing the proper way to eat a meal with an imaginary client.

  Now there is a real one sitting across from him called Arun, the chief financial officer of England’s third-biggest manufacturer of dental equipment. The conversation is halting. The first course has not even arrived yet, and the men have already covered cricket, Lake Como, Formula One racing, the relative ineffectiveness of solar panels and London pigeons. Mark is feeling especially tired today, for he returned home late last night from an oil-industry conference at the Marriott Hotel in Aberdeen, on the mechanics of using forward swaps and options to collateralise loans and advance cash flow to fund development costs. At least there is an impressive view out the window, and several more minutes can be devoted to sorting out which is the Lloyds Building. There is also art on the wall. The company likes art, and when it first moved into its new headquarters, it gave a firm of art-buyers a brief to equip almost every space with provocative and intriguing pieces by young artists. The dining room accordingly sports a large photograph of a cow who appears to be throwing herself into a muddy brown river. The setting may be India; the cow may be committing suicide.

  Meanwhile, Guilherme is doing the rounds. Forty-two years old, from Bagé in southern Brazil, he has been employed by an outside catering company to wait tables during the lunchtime and evening sittings. He has in his day met with chief executives from the Axon Group, Braveheart Investments, Dana Petroleum, Indago Petroleum, the Omega Diagnostics Group and Zytronic PLC – though it might be fairer to say that he was in the same room with them for a brief period of time, for they are likely to have no particular recollection of this handsome, brown-eyed father of six, who once bestowed upon them a flour-dusted bread roll from a silver basket.

  Today there is a starter of crab linguine, followed by a tuna steak with rösti potatoes. Hiring Mark to think on your behalf will cost you five hundred pounds an hour, whilst Guilherme can be had for just seven pounds – a difference explained not only by the history and relative prosperity of the two men’s native countries, but also by Mark’s three years of studying for a legal degree, a further two years spent at BPP college in King’s Cross to acquire command of PAR (Principles of Auditing and Reporting), his membership in the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants and fifteen years’ worth of graft, as he ascended from associate to partly qualified executive, from qualified executive to assistant manager, from manager to senior manager and finally from partner to senior partner.

  Many months later, with the help of tickets to Così fan tutti and the opening of a show of Renoir’s landscapes, Arun will at last respond favourably to Mark’s carefully couched entreaties for money. For his part, Guilherme will have been unwillingly repatriated after the expiry of his visa.

  7.

  The period after lunch is strangely quiet, as if an ancestral memory of the siesta were muffling the normal energies of the day. On the seventh floor, workers sit
at their desks, concentrated over keyboards and documents. Printers occasionally whirr into life, ejecting pages which give off preternaturally the intense and lingering heat of newly toasted bagels.

  Defying the expansive regularity of the open-plan arrangement, where desks are identified only by stark acronyms like ML6W.246, employees have succeeded in imposing a subtle individuality on their work stations. There are family photos pinned to felt boards, and occasional mugs and trinkets honouring sports teams and holiday destinations. Crouching on the floor, one can see how many people have removed their shoes and are rubbing their stockinged feet back and forth on the carpet, a motion which produces not only the intriguing friction of nylon-rich fibres felt through cotton but also the impression of having in a minor way broken the rules and brought a hint of the intimacy of home into the working realm.

  The office veterans are adept at domesticating their environments. They know where to hide their food in the communal kitchens and how to time their bathroom visits so as to reduce the risk of being forced into conversation over the sink with a colleague beside whom they have lately been seated in the redolent and tense atmosphere of a cubicle. Bursts of productive activity are punctuated by arrangements for dinner, updates on love affairs and trenchant analyses of the antics of film stars and murderers. How few are the moments of the day when money is truly being made, and how many are on either side given over to daydreams and recuperation.

  Through the windows, people are walking by the river in casual clothes. Their leisure makes one wonder as to the deeper logic of the work unfolding in the building. However, large questions have a habit of feeling irrelevant when one is in the middle of an activity; one is simply preparing a document for a four o’clock meeting, or because André has requested it or Katrin needs it for a presentation in Bangalore. Then again, the accountants are experts at summing up the meaning of our working lives. The company derives the greatest share of its income from its employees’ skill in preparing year-end financial statements which declare, following lengthy preambles about operational assets, capital receipts, loans and liabilities, that the whole point of a year may be summarised as follows:

  Current Year (in £) Previous Year (in £)

  Turnover 50,739,954 30,719,640

  Gross Profit 10,305,392 7,003,417

  Such numbers express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable – yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant or irritating – than an evolutionary biologist’s proud reminder that the purpose of existence lies in the propagation of our genes. The starkness of the year-end accounts only emphasises the extent to which generating money is really an excuse to do other things, to rise from bed in the morning, to talk authoritatively in front of overhead projectors, to plug in laptops in foreign hotel rooms, to give presentations analysing market shares and to yearn at the sight of Katie’s knee-length grey woollen shorts. Long before we ever earned any money, we were aware of the necessity of keeping busy: we knew the satisfactions of stacking bricks, pouring water into and out of containers and moving sand from one pit to another, untroubled by the greater purpose of our actions.

  8.

  About those shorts: Katie is the twenty-two-year-old assistant to the head of the Northern European Retail division. Today she is putting together an itinerary for her boss’s tour of Scandinavia in two weeks’ time. She has a copy of Discover Copenhagen on her desk. She has booked him into a quiet upper room in that city’s Imperial Hotel and scheduled a 7:30 breakfast with key staff from the local office, including Søren Strøm, Lasse Skov Kristensen and Morten Stokholm Buhl.

  But Katie herself may be the only person in the vicinity able to concentrate on anything other than the captivating nature of her face and figure. So insistent and inappropriate are the thoughts that her beauty generates, it is easy to slip into a severe, impatient manner with her which may be mistaken for disinterest or even rudeness. Yet the company’s code of conduct explicitly states: ‘We have no tolerance towards sexual harassment in the workplace. Sexual harassment includes demeaning comments about a person’s appearance; indecent remarks; questions about a person’s sexual life; and physical contact that violates a person’s dignity or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive working environment for them.’

  Superficially, the code seems wholly and admirably concerned with championing the rights of innocent parties. There may, however, be a more cynical and less altruistic aspect to this unsparing paragraph, for what is really being protected is perhaps not a particular individual afflicted by indecent attention so much as the corporation itself. The feelings elicited by Katie’s shorts are incendiary because they threaten to subvert the firm’s entire rationale. They risk bringing to light an awkward truth: how much more interesting we might find it to have sex than to work.

  There is nothing surprising about the corporation’s jealousy. Every society historically has had to regulate the sexual impulse in order to get anything done. It is only our naive belief in our own open-mindedness which prevents us from recognising the extent to which an old-fashioned sexual repression has to be buried in our codes of professional conduct.

  Yet equally, and paradoxically, such repression has disproportionately sexual consequences, for it is an essential feature of the erotic that it thrives most fully precisely where it is most forbidden. There were few places in the fourteenth century as sexually charged as the convents of the Mother of God, just as there are few settings today as libidinous as the laminated open-plan spaces of our corporations. The office is to the modern world what the cloister was to medieval Christendom: a chaste arena with an unrivalled capacity to excite desire.

  If these two institutions have imposed harsh penalties on those who display signs of transgressive behaviour, it is because each is, or was, the locus of its society’s most cherished values: the teachings of Christ on the one hand, and money on the other. Money is to the office as God was to the nunnery – and whether physical desire is condemned in the language of a sexual-harassment policy or in terms of sin and Satan, it stands as a comparable heresy, for it has dared to deny canonical goals, impudently implying that there may be elements more valuable in the world, and more consuming, than the stock price or the Redeemer.

  The repression has paid dividends in one area, at least: logically enough, the office and the nunnery have been singularly popular in the imaginations of pornographers. We should not be surprised to learn that the erotic novels of the early modern period were overwhelmingly focused on debauchery and flagellation amongst clergy in vespers and chapels, just as contemporary Internet pornography is inordinately concerned with fellatios and sodomies performed by office workers against a backdrop of work stations and computer equipment.

  9.

  The office starts to empty out at six, and an hour later, only those working on urgent presentations and reports are left, some of them facing a long night at their desks, punctuated by the arrival of Cokes and pizzas at around one in the morning.

  The sun is nearing the horizon, throwing an orange light across the tower’s glazing. What has been accomplished today? One employee advised a client on the tax implications of importing apples from Slovenia. Another wrote a paper comparing sales taxes in five West African countries. A third handed out name badges and logged in three hundred incoming calls. These achievements will no doubt lose some of their significance with the perspective of time. Three years from now, the diary of the afternoon of the twenty-ninth of July will have become almost unintelligible, when it had once been sharply divided into pressing hour-long increments, devoted to appointments with colleagues whose very names and faces will have grown indistinct.

  An employee from Advisory Services heads for London Bridge station and his commute back to Kent, stopping off on the way at a supermarket for a bottle of wine and a chicken breast in cheese sauce. He did not leave the building all day, for he was busy drawing up a spreadsheet analysis of an investment made by an American medical diagnostic
firm and responding to emails from colleagues at work on a project in Denver. He is surprised, on stepping out of the air-conditioned atrium, to find how warm it is outside, how immemorial the river looks, how many people there are alive, what varied sizes they are and demeanours they wear.

  Exceptionally, the train tonight allows him half a carriage to himself. He has been making this same journey for the past twelve years. In the slanting summer light, when the smell of cut grass enters the windows from across the open countryside, he falls prey to feelings of nostalgia. He puts his feet up on the seat opposite and is carried back to other evenings which looked almost exactly like this one, which were of the same temperature and clarity, but happened when his mother was still alive, before his children were born, when he was not yet divorced. He contemplates all that has been difficult, unnecessary and regrettable but from a position of distance, with a calm and poignant vantage point over his imperfections and missed opportunities, as though his life were nothing but a bad sentimental film and he its half sympathetic, half repugnant hero. He has reached the age of reminiscence, though right now, somewhere in the scattered houses outside, there is a sixteen-year-old boy for whom this will be the one central hot summer of longing and discovery, the one remembered in thirty years on a train which is not yet made and remains as iron ore in the red scrub of the Western Australian desert.