Anthropology professor David Graeber asks the very pertinent question of what ever happened to the increased leisure time that we were promised by John Maynard Keynes? In spite of both the Industrial and Information revolutions, far from now working only 20 hour weeks we are, if anything, working longer than before. While that may not be true if we compare the early 21st century to the late 19th century, and while in some (okay, in many) respects we live in a workers paradise, it does not necessarily follow that we are happier. Mr. Graeber puts this down to the creation of what he calls "bullshit jobs" -- jobs that seem to serve no purpose other than to provide meaningless busy work and which have the collateral effect of merely depressing and distracting the populace.
It is hard to disagree with him -- at least with the sentiment. I agree that it's somewhat depressing that Keynes's prediction did not come to pass, but this line of thought does verge awfully close to conspiracy thinking. It seems to impute that there is some force beyond the market ordaining the creation of non-essential jobs in the interests of social repression. But while this often feels real -- I've often wondered why we have to work 40+ hour weeks, and why most jobs aren't at least shift-based (which would surely maximise opportunities to consume) -- it's not conceivable that thousands of companies are coordinating a campaign of full-time employment merely for the hell of it, or to 'keep down' the people.
The conclusion is perhaps more depressing than the failure of Keynes's prediction: these bullshit jobs exist because, whether through a failure of imagination or technology or both, there is an administrative need for them. It has been said that the invention of the computer created an Information Revolution in the same way that machines and steam power created the Industrial Revolution. But has anyone thought to follow that parallel further? How pleasant was the Industrial Revolution for the average worker, intellectually and aesthetically brutalised as they were by repetitive labour which they had no creative input into? Has the Information Revolution been any better for the average information worker in terms of creative fulfillment? Perhaps what the two revolutions have in common is the same brutalisation of the spirit by mechanisation. Does it matter much, intellectually, whether you're a cog in the computer or a cog in the machine? Of course I'm not comparing the quality of life in physical or health terms, or in many other ways. But as John Ruskin deduced in his famous chapter on 'The Nature of the Gothic' in 'The Stones of Venice', the happiness of a craftsman is ultimately dependent on the amount of freedom that they can exercise in their craft. Without this freedom -- which is also the freedom to be inefficient, to make mistakes, in other words, to learn -- then the creative spirit of the worker is debased by their trade. In this sense, working at the keyboard can be just as brutalising to the creative spirit as working at the loom.
While reducing the working week from 40+ hours to 30 or even 20 would obviously be desirable, it would not necessarily fill the creative void. More opportunities for pleasure do not necessarily lead to pleasure -- they can just as easily lead to anomie and boredom (see the plight of the long-term unemployed). Work provides structure and consistency -- backed by the social obligation to turn up, to not disappoint -- and that does give people a sense of purpose that can often be lacking with unstructured free time (whether unemployed or merely on holiday). What is really depressing about this is that this could simply be down to a colossal failure of imagination -- the imagination required by society to find forms of play (as opposed to work) for people that are not just as compelling as work but that stimulate more personal growth and consequently greater social benefit.
