What's Bad About Bad Work? #051

Aristotle on lazy work

Welcome back to Every Dawn! Today we want to talk about how lying low at work and how doing bad work can actually be detrimental to society in total – how when somebody tries to escape work, they are not only harming themselves, but they are harming the rest of society, according to Aristotle.

I’m Andy, I’m a philosophy lecturer, and if you watch this video to the end, I hope that you will get a better understanding of how we should, according to Aristotle, relate to our work in order to reach more happiness and more satisfaction in our lives.

So today we continue our thoughts about work. We said that Bertrand Russell, a famous philosopher of the 20th century, was thinking that work is necessary for us. It is not only annoying, as we often perceive it, or boring or repetitive. Often we think that, you know, if we had only free time our lives would be much better. But actually, as you know perhaps from your holidays, many of us say, “Okay, now I’m not doing what I want, you know, perhaps I have a hobby, perhaps I’m painting or I’m, you know, making music – mus – and writing poems or whatever it is. And when my holidays begin, then I will finally, you know, have time and do a lot of that and really enjoy it.” But then the holidays come and go and you find at the end of them that you did not do the things that you wanted to do because somehow being in the world of work is actually beneficial for our activity even outside of work. It is actually good to have these deadlines, it is good to be in this mood of work so that you can continue working when the working time is over. And when you are in this mood of laziness and of holiday, then you don’t get to actually produce anything very often. I don’t think that I’m exception – so at least this is the case for me. So the busier I am in my everyday life, in my teaching, in my duties for the university, the more I work actually on these videos, the more I work on other projects. And when I have my lazy times, where I’m sitting on a beach, you know, in my holidays, then I’m – I’m not going to produce anything.

So this is one thing that has to do with the psychology of holidays and of work. But another, more important point is that Russell says if we really avoid work… And the world of work is very harsh for young people. There is a lot of competition, there’s very hard to get in, and after you have a job, there’s a lot of exploitation, uh, there is very little in terms of workers’ rights or of – I mean, they are on paper, but it’s very little in reality. And because there is this big supply of people who can work and want to work, and there is a relative scarcity of good positions for work, if you have such a good position, you’re always pressured to show that you are actually doing the maximum work that you can, benefiting the company maximally and so on. And this leads to situations like in Japan where people, you know, die from overwork – they’re just falling over at work. Or recently there was a case, a few days ago, one person died in in their cubicle, you know, at work and was there for four days sitting there dead and nobody noticed. So these are tragic cases in which this world of work has become so filled with pressure to perform and so impersonal that workers cannot actually identify with it anymore.

And very often young people will say, “If I’m going to be exploited anyway, and if my work is meaningless – because it seems meaningless to me, it’s not clear to me what I’m actually doing… I mean, even in a high-paying job, you might be in a bank, you might be in a situation where you get a lot of money, but then what is this bank actually doing except making money? Is it doing anything for society? Perhaps it invests in fossil fuels, perhaps it invests in weapons, perhaps it profits from all kinds of, uh, international problems and conflicts.” And you realize that and you think, “What am I doing here? Why am I working at this bank? I would like to work, you know, in a more meaningful situation, but I cannot, because we cannot all go and work at Greenpeace, right? And – and they don’t need so many people there.”

So this is a problem young people have – this wish to have meaningful work and to enjoy their work and to work perhaps together with others on something that excites them and they’re passionate about, but then these things are not necessarily available. And so they are stuck with work that is not fulfilling and that is exploiting them. And one of the reactions is to say, “Okay, I don’t work. I just do the minimum necessary so that they cannot fire me and I lie low so that I don’t, you know, stick out in any way. I just do whatever is required, but I prefer that my boss does not know my name and then nothing bad can happen to me, and I can keep, you know, coasting, uh, sailing along without actually doing much.” And this is very much understandable as a reaction, but I think that both Aristotle and Russell would say that this is very wrong. And it’s not only wrong from a personal perspective – we talked about this previously, if you like, you can go back and watch it – it’s not only wrong because I am not, you know, fulfilled myself if I do this. I feel bad personally, even if nobody ever finds out, I feel bad if I’m not using my abilities, if I’m not challenged by my work, if I don’t do anything interesting, if my work is only, you know, trying to pass the eight hours without working. I feel bad, I don’t feel fulfilled, I don’t do anything, I don’t exercise my skills, I don’t develop any skills. So people need meaningful work in order to grow as persons.

And this is the one side of it, why this is not a good idea. But there is this other side also that is a more social side, and it has to do with this idea that we all work together in society, and only when we all work together in the best possible way can we make a society. And this is similar to how from an Aristotelian perspective we would talk about nature, about ecology – that a tree, for example, is not only benefiting itself when a tree is, let’s say, a “happy tree” – it has lots of leaves and so on, it’s healthy – then it’s not only benefiting itself, it’s benefiting its whole environment. It provides shade, it provides fruit for the birds, it provides, you know, a place for the birds to nest, it brings the water up from the underground and, you know, creates a more humid environment in which other animals can live and other plants can flourish and so on. So there is all this benefit of being around a flourishing tree. And in the same way there is a benefit like this in society, when I’m around a flourishing company – a company that does something well. Let’s say, you know, whatever, makes a pen and makes this pen well, then the customers who buy this pen now can write easily, they’re not frustrated, they’re happy using the pen, so they use it more, they work more themselves, they have a happier working life – to the small extent that their working life is influenced by the pen. But this adds up, right? Another company is making a desk. If this is a good desk, the person with the good pen would like to sit at the good desk. If the desk instead, you know, is, um, not solid enough or not straight or everything rolls off or it moves when you touch it, you know, and makes weird noises, then, you know, then the person cannot work on this desk, so their work will be worse. And this person who is sitting at the desk is in turn, you know, producing something again for somebody else. And if this doesn’t turn out well, then somebody else is going to suffer.

So in the end, we all profit from work done well. And you clearly you experience it yourself in your life when you use products that have been made well. This is sometimes, you know, a car that is well-built. I – I used to have an old Toyota Picnic, which was a brilliant car. It was, uh, cheap, um, affordable, not a flashy car, but everything worked in this car. And if something did not work, it was cheap and easy to fix and then it worked again, and I was perfectly happy with this. And then I went and bought, you know, a more flashing car, but now it turns… all kinds of things don’t work, you know, the air conditioning doesn’t work and it does weird things and the – the wipers do weird things when I press the button and… But it’s not – they’re not broken, it’s just that the car is badly designed and the seats don’t move properly as they should and, uh, the – it’s leaking when it rains and all kinds of problems with this thing. So, you know, the one car was contributing to my life in a positive way, the other car is making my life worse.

And now this is something that all of us have influence on because whatever you do, the outcome of your work is going to be used by somebody else. What you produce in your work – this can be, you know, a physical thing or it can be like in my case, education. Um, if I teach well, you know, my students then learn something well and it is fun for them and they are motivated. If I teach badly, I create a situation in which the students are demotivated, they don’t want to listen, they don’t hear anything, they don’t get educated. So – so in the end, I have made the world worse. I’ve not only, you know, made my own satisfaction worse, but the whole world is a little bit worse because of that. And I think we should today perhaps just look at our work: where does your work actually influence other people? What you are making surely has some kind of influence, you know, even if you have a job that does not have much initiative, like being on a helpline, being, uh, the – on the phone talking to customer, you know, being the customer service talking to customers who have a problem. You can do this job well, you can have happy customers who have been helped, or you can do it in a bored way, in a way that will leave everybody unhappy. Your customers in the end have not solved their problem, they’re are frustrated, they’re angry, and nobody is happy about that. So think about it, how you can perhaps in your own work improve a little bit. It doesn’t need to be, you know, a total change within a day, but just being aware that our work does not end after eight hours, it – it doesn’t end because the product of your work, whatever it is, goes on, it exists for somebody else in their lives and it makes their lives better or worse. So the better your product is, the more somebody else will be happy and able to be themselves, more productive, and this has a value for the whole of society.

If you like, tell me something more about your own work and your satisfaction in work, and do you think that I’m right or do you have work where this really does not matter how you do your work? Does your work not affect other people? It would be nice to hear your opinion on this. Now if you want to learn more about work according to Aristotle and why it’s important that we work, then I would propose that you watch this video in which we talk about the importance of work for Aristotle and for Bertrand Russell.

Thank you and see you next time!