The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

by Alain De Botton

  Whatever his stated strengths, it appeared that the one area in which Sir Bob excelled was anxiety. He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others’ mediocrity – suggesting that a certain kind of intelligence may at heart be nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction. He admitted to a thoroughgoing distrust of all his employees and subcontractors, to an insistence on personally signing off on all expenses accrued within any of his companies and to a habit of staying up for much of every night scrutinising an array of spreadsheets – no doubt long after Edward van Noord of 1-2-3 Stop Fire had slipped into an unvexed sleep in his house in the suburbs of Amsterdam.

  We tend to cling to the notion that all human qualities should cohere, that we may be at once beautiful and thoughtful, vigilant and relaxed, gifted and well balanced – but it seemed clear that, admirable though Sir Bob’s achievements and energy might be, it would surely not be such a treat to be his wife or son.

  At least Sir Bob was inspiringly democratic. In any area of business he happened to contemplate, he refused to believe that success would be impossible for someone like him. His varied activities had furnished him with an unusually keen sense of how things worked, freeing him of the naive and childish perspective from which most of us still see the world. He regarded the large artefacts of finance and industry which surround us, and which we often assume to be as inevitable as the earth’s natural features – our warehouses, shopping centres, control towers, banks and holidays resorts – not as the products of remote or obscure processes, but of efforts by people a little like himself, plucky and hard-working types who felt that destiny was theirs to mould. He knew how things fitted together: he knew how to finance a supermarket and go about building a fifty-two-storey skyscraper. He knew which city lawyer could help him to acquire an oil platform and how to negotiate with the government of Australia to buy up private schools in New South Wales. He could look out across any landscape and be confident that it was not the gods who had made it, but people a little like himself. He was – in this sense, at least – a true adult.

  There was time allowed for questions after the talk, and a studious-looking man seized the opportunity to stand up and ask why Sir Bob had decided to leave his fortune to a university library. To judge from the latter’s monosyllabic response, the inquiry either irritated or bored him. His detachment reminded me of the attitude of the many barons throughout history who had spent their careers plundering the earth and hounding their employees, but who then, nearing death, had quietly dropped their loot into foundations which to this day continue to distribute money to impoverished souls afflicted by a strong desire to write monographs on early Assyrian pottery or to play the bassoon – as if the barons had ultimately felt they had no other option but to redirect their ambitions and their avarice in order to wind up seeming good in the most conventional of ways.

  5.

  I left the entrepreneurial gathering feeling at once inspired and chastened. I recognised my admiration for visionaries such as Mohsen Bahmani (of the floating shoes), whose fledgling businesses sought to pick up on and exploit desires overlooked by more mainstream enterprises. Yet I also appreciated the extent to which the aims of these energetic men and women were undermined by their obvious misunderstanding of how people actually went about making decisions on such matters as how to cross a lake or eat crisps, how to store products in the bathroom or put out a fire. These individuals were writing their stories in a subgenre of contemporary fiction, the business plan, and populating them with characters endowed with deeply implausible personalities, an oversight which would eventually be punished not by a scathing review by some bright young person from the London Review of Books but by a lack of custom and a prompt foreclosure.

  By contrast, Sir Bob’s grasp of psychology could not be faulted. He apprehended the public’s love of spacious parking-lots and prominently advertised deals on discounted bathroom furnishings. He knew how panicked we could be made to feel about the girth of our thighs but also how greedy we could become upon spotting a competitively priced sausage (his holding company had just a few years earlier acquired a profitable stake in a Hamburg-based fast-food chain, Goldene Bratwurst). Yet for all his understanding of worldly concerns, when it came to fathoming the deeper meaning of his own furious activity, Sir Bob displayed the sort of laziness for which he himself had no patience in others. He appeared to have only a passing interest in the overall purpose of his financial accumulation and evidently did not care to study whether commerce could by itself deliver any of societal benefits he so mockingly relegated to the pious and unmanly field of charity.

  Still, an imaginary merger between the best sides of the visionaries and of Sir Bob yielded something resembling a picture of the ideal entrepreneur. In character a judicious fusion of the utopian and the practical, he or she would succeed not only in identifying an important need but also in mastering the challenges of bureaucracy and finance in order to give the resolution of that need an institutional form, and thereby affect others’ lives in ways that theory alone could never do.

  This ideal was not, in the event, limited to the realm of the imagination: there were a tantalising array of real-life cases in which entrepreneurs had succeeded in founding innovative schools and progressive political groupings, new forms of community and life-enhancing technologies. I knew how deeply I admired them, because any accounts of their exploits that I came across in the media or (even worse) heard from old friends at parties had an exceptional capacity to catapult me into spasms of envy and inadequacy. These enterprising types had not – like me – fled back into their own dreams at the first mention of a sales tax or an employee ledger; they had instead managed to survive the challenges of finance, law and recruitment and, as a result, they had been able to give their flights of fancy a lucrative and consequential dimension. These paragons bore much the same relation to the mere intellectual as a restaurant-owning chef might to a writer of cookery books.

  If there is any excuse for making such bathetic confessions of envy in public, it is that my feelings in this context are unlikely to be unique. A striking number of us (that is, we who have yet to become who we are) are apt, in our private moments, to express our understanding of how the world could be altered for the better by picturing to ourselves various businesses we would like to start. In our more self-indulgent moods, we may even entertain detailed musings about what the awning should look like above the shop or how the advertisements for the new service ought to be phrased. These pleasing and all-consuming daydreams appear to spring from those very same aspects of our personalities which led us as children to delight in running a grocery store out of a corner of the kitchen or to open a hotel in a cardboard box in the garden – as though there was some sort of innate and enduring human impulse to lend entrepreneurial form to certain of our deeply held enthusiasms and insights.

  I pledged that I would return to the fair one year with some floating shoes of my own.

  1.

  During a time when I was finding it hard to write anything and often spent whole days on my bed wondering about the point of my work, I received a phone call from a Slovenian newspaper, which I had never heard of until then, asking if I might want to travel to Paris on their behalf in order to write an article about the airshow at Le Bourget airport, a major biannual event in the aerospace calendar, where manufacturers gather before the world’s airlines and air forces and try to interest them in wheels, radars, missiles and cabin curtains.

  The editor hoped that I might be able to convey to his readers, some one hundred thousand people in Ljubljana and its surrounding hills, what he termed ‘the ecstasies of flight’ and encouraged me to keep an eye out for any technological breakthroughs which might be poised to transform aviation (‘Showers in the sky?’ he suggested by way of an example). Though he apologised for a meagre fee and accommodation in a budget hotel overlooking a motorway into Paris, he added that he had passes to many important press conferences, i
ncluding one at which a member of the royal family of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Ahmed Bin Saif Al Nahyan, was scheduled to announce an order for twenty-two A380s, with which he planned to cement his emirate into a pre-eminent place on the duty-free map of the globe.

  Because the fair was, at least in its first couple of days, tightly restricted to aerospace professionals and the press, it had an atmosphere of calm and easy conviviality, of the kind one might find between guests at a wedding. It was not uncommon to chat to people in the queue for bottled water or, above the sound of a G550 spy-plane pirouetting around the skies of the Ile-de-France, to strike up a conversation with a stranger eating a pain au chocolat on an adjoining seat, thereby opening one’s eyes to new horizons, for example, to the tenor of life as a colonel in the air force of Gabon.

  The exhibition halls next to the runway had been divided up by country, which revealed national tempers as these were articulated in aircraft parts. The Swiss specialised in flight instruments, the Brazilians were pre-eminent in propellers and the Ukrainians were attempting, against many odds, to establish themselves in landing gears and metal alloys.

  Although the goods on sale were uncommonly expensive, customers shopping for aircraft equipment were presumed not to be impervious to the techniques of the high street and hence to the appeal of a former Miss Sweden dressed in a catsuit, or the lure of a raffle for a free weekend at Euro Disney. At lunchtime, many companies cleared space on their stands to serve up food from their regions, in the hope that a prospective buyer who had decided against a mid-air refuelling tanker from Galicia might glance more favourably upon it in the wake of some slices of dry-cured ham. The representatives of a factory from the foot of the Urals had brought with them a large, linen-wrapped cheese which they carved with a penknife into small cubes, arranging them around the pedestal of a flag of the Russian Federation to inspire goodwill towards the enterprise’s chief offering: wheel braces for military cargo aircraft.

  Pathos naturally gathered around some of the less frequented stands. It was evident that in no part of the aerospace industry could one be certain of escaping from ruinous competition. Even extreme specialisation – in anti-oxidation systems for wing flaps, for example – carried little guarantee of immunity from rival suitors. There seemed to be no item in the world that five alternative manufacturers had not already simultaneously embarked upon producing. Nevertheless, the bankrupt nature of a business was not always a sufficient argument against it. High up in the Saudi Arabian government, a decision had been taken to reserve a stand representing the nation’s aerospace industry, notwithstanding that no such thing could, in fairness, have been said actually to exist. Twice the size of a normal stall, the Saudi showcase boasted chandeliers, leather sofas and walls wrapped in a sandy felt evocative of the colours of the Taif Mountains. But because there was little for him to discuss, the manager mostly sat by himself, dressed in a maroon suit and tie, silently surveying a stainless-steel platter of dates. To have omitted to come to Paris would have been tantamount to admitting that Saudi Arabia did not build planes, hence that it was uninterested in technological innovation and had abandoned any claim to be counted among forward-looking nations. And yet to have attended, and in such style, only offered surreptitious confirmation of the very problem to which the stand had been proposed as the daring answer.

  The displays manned by Russia and its sister states tackled their difficulties with greater vigour. Aeronautical purchases which further west would have required compliance with drawn-out bureaucratic regulations were here sanguinely waved through. It was possible to make an immediate downpayment on a missile system or a Soviet-era satellite, items frequently promoted with the help of short films, perhaps representing a manager’s first efforts at cinematography, and which showed machines blasting into the air to the accompaniment of a muscular American-inflected commentary. After being ignored for so long, the arts of salesmanship were now practised with unusual alacrity by people who had assiduously read translations of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Unfortunately, as in so much of the consumer world, recognisable brand names were an essential means of providing reassurance, an issue which the Volga Advanced Passenger Aircraft Company appeared to be finding no easy way to circumvent.

  In search of technological breakthroughs, I made my way to a display touting a Japanese manufacturer’s new seventy-seat commuter plane, which promised significantly lowered operating costs thanks to certain improvements, whose precise nature was hard to grasp, in its wing design. A full-scale replica of the interior had been shipped to Paris in crates from Yokohama and could be toured by appointment. After an exchange of business cards, I was led inside by two diffident men, in charge of sales and marketing, who locked the door of the quasi-jet behind me, took seats on either side of the aisle and stared mutely ahead towards an imaginary cockpit. I hoped that through some piece of fun-fair trickery, the machine might now seem to fly, but it appeared that the visit (which good manners dictated would have to last a while) was to have no particular theme or focus, being designed solely to allow customers to examine the seat fittings and the galley – on whose quality I dutifully complimented my hosts, as if they had made them themselves. With the door closed, the noise of the fair had died away, causing the three of us to become uncomfortably aware of the difficulties of human communication. I began to imagine that we had in fact left the outskirts of Paris and were journeying through a part of the stratosphere informed by the purple light which washed in through the windows from the adjoining Pratt & Whitney stand. After an age, the door was reopened, we made our way out and the head of marketing handed me a set of postcards of the plane, adding that he looked forward to meeting me again – though I sensed an atmosphere of melancholy around the enterprise which made me question whether the company would ever succeed in achieving its desired supremacy in the medium-sized regional jet market.

  At the stand of the world’s second-largest engine manufacturer, I spent some minutes observing an unusually attractive young saleswoman with shoulder-length chestnut hair, dressed in a beige suit, who was biting the nail of her left index finger and crossing her slender legs whilst leaning against a large fan blade. She was not the first of her type I had seen that day, but something about her appearance left me thoughtful. I had until then believed that the vendors’ frequent and deliberate reliance on feminine appeal was merely a vulgar stratagem intended to win over airline executives, through an implicit suggestion that a purchase might bring them closer to intimacy with a sales agent. Now I began to see the matter differently: it seemed obvious that no order, however lucrative, would actually render these women available to buyers, so their presence on the stands took on a more poignant and commercially effective dimension. Their real function was to serve as a reminder of the unavailability of beauty to an overwhelmingly male, middle-aged and harried-looking base of customers. The women were goading the men to lay aside all romantic ambitions and to focus instead on their business and technological agendas. Rather than seductresses, they were in truth spurs to sublimation, and symbols of everything that the buyers would be better off if they forgot about in order to concentrate on the thousands of pieces of precisely engineered equipment arranged around the halls.

  For my part, led on by the priorities of the Slovenian news paper, I went to a few press conferences. There was almost always an initial problem with the microphone. Men sat at tables decorated with the flags of their respective companies and announced deals before handfuls of journalists. It was often difficult to discover what the significance of these agreements might be, for they were framed in a language of acronyms that repelled the curiosity of minds nourished on the undemanding fare of the ordinary press. I read in Flight Daily News that UPS had chosen ADS-B for their next generation avionics, while Aviation International reported that Klimov was putting a VK800 against the P&WC PT6. The obscurity of these events, on which depended the livelihoods of many in factories across continents, only served to underline the marginal
ity of the stories normally found in the daily paper, which has no option but to focus on murders, divorces and films, for its readers cannot be expected to follow in detail any of the real developments which unfold obscurely in the realms of science and economics and on which our future depends.

  Many countries had sent military delegations to survey and order new equipment. On the way to the fair from the hotel, it was not uncommon to encounter a high-ranking member of one of the world’s poorer air forces sitting on a commuter train, his row of medals hinting at martial achievements far removed from the routines of his fellow passengers bound for the office. It was on just such a train on the last morning of the air show that I began chatting with three representatives of a central Asian republic. Each of them was carrying a small bag, containing a towel and a change of underwear, because their hotel, which forced me to re-evaluate the merits of my own, had a broken boiler and the airmen had heard that there were shower facilities in the exhibition halls.

  They were principally interested in twin-engine strike aircraft. Though they could not lay claim to the sums required for a Typhoon Eurofighter, they nevertheless approached its manufacturer with the confidence of well-seasoned negotiators, their haughtiness implying that they would have no trouble finding a range of alternative delta-winged machines elsewhere if suitable terms could not be agreed.

  The Eurofighter salesman led them up a small ladder to the cockpit. There seemed to be a struggle for leadership among the men and some harsh-sounding words were exchanged before they worked out the order in which they would have their turns at the controls, while each of those left waiting looked on suspiciously at his two colleagues, alert for any signs of unfavourable treatment. Through the glass canopy, the view across the runway was of a row of small terraced houses, many with washing hanging on the line. But when my new friends took the joystick, their eyes appeared to be somewhere else entirely, perhaps imagining the aircraft at Mach 2 over the Pamir Mountains heading down along the Fedchenko Glacier, after unloading on their enemy a battery of Storm Shadow air-to-ground missiles, thereby putting behind them the humiliations of former conflicts, with freezing nights in caves and the smell of camels’ breath in the dewy dawn.