Work AND Life. Not Or.

New Ordinary Gentleman Lisa Kramer (“gentleman” now being neuter, thankfully) has some advice about the home and work. After pointing out to the Front Porcher crowd that the ideal of self-sufficiency and withdrawal from corporate/consumer culture isn’t realistic for most of us – that we have to work to make a living – she says the following:

Work as a means to an end. Go into work on time, take pride in the task at hand, take the allotted lunch hour, leave at the agreed upon end of the day. Don’t ask for or expect a promotion. Avoid the temptation of the rat race by learning to want less stuff. Use vacation days and spend them at the beach in August, preferably one within driving distance. Spend time with friends; never network. Resist getting a Blackberry, and if that is not possible, turn it off every weekend and evening. Always put family first.

I struggle with the work-life tension. I do. But, while I fully admit that not everyone can have a fulfilling career, combine vocation and avocation, etc, I can’t be the only person who finds this vision depressing. The question we’re answering here, implicitly, is the big one: what is the meaning of life? Dadaist answers like 42 notwithstanding, we can parse out two visions from this paragraph – the one Kramer supports, and the one she (apparently) doesn’t.

The vision Kramer supports endorses interpersonal meaningfulness. Family comes first, followed closely by friends. The best times in life take place around a dinner table with good food and wine, and preferably a nice sunset. We work in order to purchase leisure.

The second vision – the modern, consumer- and corporate-oriented one – endorses social meaningfulness. Humanity comes first. We contribute to humanity by doing our jobs: from managing a large company, to doing nonprofit work with homeless shelters, to negotiating peace treaties, to selling groceries. Every service is used by someone, who almost invariably benefits. Together we advance.

These visions are both pretty compelling separately (IMHO), but we have to remember that they depend on each other. The quality of the time we spend with others has a lot to do with the material advances of the past millennia; to pretend otherwise would be sophistry. And those material advances have come on the backs of trade, the division of labor, and industrial production. Meanwhile, the reason we work so hard has a lot to do with quality-of-life issues. We want to eat good food, much of which (spice, for example) comes from afar as well as from home. We want to read good books, and watch good movies – perhaps to share them with our family and friends. We want to spend our time relatively free of disease and disorder, thanks to medicines which cost a lot of money to develop and manufacture, and doctors who cost a lot of money to train. We want to be educated, by educators who cost a lot of money to train. So on and so forth.

I don’t think I need to convince anybody that the second vision is depressing when taken in isolation. It’s the rat race. But I also find the first vision depressing because, by itself, it has no social purpose. How do I contribute to the human existence? How do I improve the human condition? How can I best use my talents and opportunities? I refuse to see these questions as an empty trap, or a mirage. And I refuse to go to a job that doesn’t answer them. If I have to, I look for a new job.

This is well-trod ground, and Kramer comes closer than most to a reasonably synthetic compromise position. But she still casts her advice as pro-family, anti-work, phrases like “take pride in the task at hand” notwithstanding. Yes, take pride in the task at hand. But don’t “never network.” Don’t not consider professional advancement. If you take pride in your work as a meaningful activity, you will inevitably do those things, because you want to improve. You want to improve yourself, and you want to improve the world – which can’t happen if everyone treats their job as a “pays-the-bills” enterprise, just as surely as it can’t happen if everyone blindly pursues their own wealth.

So here is my plea: can we not put together an aesthetic vision of the good life without begrudging the workplace or shortchanging the household? I am confident that we can.

P.S. I understand that evils have come of modernity. Spare me: there have always been evils. Let’s negotiate the evils of our era without wasting our breath in condemnation of anything other than the evils themselves. (To put it another way: go ahead and hate the player, because the game doesn’t exist without them.)