I write this sparked by a talk by Alain de Botton on “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work”, which somehow managed to congeal a couple of themes that have taken forecourt in the last decade of my life, both intellectually and in reality. Firstly, that of ‘work’ and secondly, the conflation of love and romantic relationships with the socio-economic practicalities of ‘governing one’s estate’.
“What do you do?”
To touch on the first, the idea that work should take a central focus of one’s life (if not psychologically then usually in terms of time spent) and that one should aim to specialise highly (and narrowly) in what one does was born of an industrial age. Today we adhere to a 40-odd-hour work week, work for wages and often derive self-definition and sense of identity from our jobs (just ask anyone what they do and they typically start off telling you what their job is).
I, on the other hand, have wished quite dearly that every person might have the freedom to delight in work, not for survival, but purely for the intrinsic value of the work itself and for the pleasure of leaving the world slightly better at the end of the day than when they first started out. Surely that is not so outrageous? I think we ought to construct our societies to enable those ends (and suspect that is precisely where growth-oriented economics might fail to get us), for this is the central question ~ ‘should we exist to serve society or should society exist to serve us’? To make people work (and especially for such large portions of precious and finite life moments!) for money and not meaning (and ultimately, of course, for contribution to GDP, for how many countries measure and place explicit value on happiness, or leisure time, or other similar quality of life factors for their citizens?) is to me way more outrageous and the path to neuroticism.
Then there is this other curious idea we have of marrying for love, which was at one point quite unknown ~ there was a time when we married someone from the piece of land that adjoined ours. Today we enjoy being able to marry for love, and of course we think that’s quite wonderful (hmmm)…. but we either forget or do not realise that the institution of marriage is largely a legal and social construct, and co-habitation and the ‘joining of forces’ that comes with marriage can quite often become more about arrangements of practicality and economy than intimacy or romance. And then we interestingly get all upset that our marriages fail, conjure up fancy notions of how flames ought to and can be kept alive (ever heard that it’s no point flogging a dead horse?) and beat ourselves up over what society is coming to because we, in increasingly larger numbers, can’t stay ‘successfully married’ (well, we shouldn’t!). Quite ludicrous.
We do not need marriage to enjoy love, romance or intimacy. So let’s first get that straight. We might need practical and socio-economic arrangements to enjoy certain conveniences in life (yes, cooking for two or a whole family yields higher average productivity than cooking for one, and it helps to have someone around to share the task of taking out the garbage). That I’ll give. But that’s not what we really want our love affairs to be about, do we?
“I do. Ummm, DO I??”
Let me point out that we now approach a point where individuals can quite capably survive and comfortably manage the everyday states of affairs on their own, child-raising included. So marriage can and should now fast become a redundant construct, and be abolished, or at least de-romanticised and recognised for what it is. It is a fixed-term contract (ie. for life?! who the hell came up with that?), well-suited for the practicalities of child-rearing perhaps (and I have my own thoughts on this one, but let’s leave that for another time), asset management and establishing genealogy. But let us not be misguided that it exists to serve the interests of romance or blossoming of love.
We also, by the way, need to leave partnerships of love and romance a private affair, not one that concerns the state, and least of all one that bears scary resemblance to another morbid societal rule ~ life sentence. We should really value the pleasures and fulfillment of love, romance and meaningful intimate relationships more highly in our lives, and do away with antagonists, like marriage, that only threaten their flourishment.
And so it is that how we structure our lives ~ the way we work, the way we think about and conduct relationships and the definition of rules of society ~ is governed by mere ideas. Looking back through history we’ll see how some of our current established practices have come about by some simple, but not necessarily non-radical, change in ideas. We’re ripe for some new ideas to govern work, love and estate management. We could work for meaning. We could remove the necessity of working for survival. We could abolish marriage. We could let love be a private and not a state affair. We could just give all asset management, romantic partnerships or otherwise, the same treatment. And most of all, we could recognise that the economy and society exist to serve people, and most definitely not the other way round.
