I’ve felt strongly about the place of work in our lives for the longest time. Steve Biddulph, I recently found, devoted an entire chapter to it in his book “The New Manhood”. Here are a couple of paragraphs I feel compelled to capture and share here.
“A ‘job’”, Steve writes, “the exchange of your life’s time for money, is a very modern idea. As we know, for most of history people did not have jobs, they caught or grew their own food, clothed themselves, built their own shelter. Their ‘workmates’ were their friends and relatives, and there were seasonal rhythms of rest and work… Anthropologists working across the world have made the same observation: hunter-gatherers usually met all their material needs with a couple of hours’ effort a day. In work-life balance terms, they make us look such losers!
Today we assume a job is a necessity, and it probably is. We shouldn’t accept this too passively or without carefully assessing the options. A job is a huge thing: it takes up most of your life, unless you come to a different arrangement. And it can be a terrible trap: unless companies and organisations are prevented from doing so, they can literally suck the life out of their employees. Their goals for you are not the goals you would have for yourself. For men seeking to be whole and to live a larger life, the work question is one of the most important of all.”
