Work Daze (fwd)

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 24 Jun 2002 09:09:57 -0400
From: R. A. Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
To: Digital Bearer Settlement List <dbs@philodox.com>, fork@xent.com
Subject: Work Daze
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/23/magazine/23WWLN.html?todaysheadlines=&pagewanted=print&position=bottomx¿¾June 23, 2002
Work Daze
By ROB WALKER
Even as he rhapsodized about the division of labor in an 18th-century pin
factory in ''The Wealth of Nations,'' Adam Smith made this observation:
''The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations . . .
has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention. .
. . The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or
bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any
generous, noble, or tender sentiment.''
More recently, I happened on one of those online lists showing which
wire-service articles have been e-mailed most frequently. The leader of the
pack, by a great margin, was a Reuters article headlined ''Boring, Passive
Work May Hasten Death: Study.'' In the prior six hours, it had been
e-mailed 870 times, compared with the second-place item, a nutty news story
about a groom who forgot to attend his own honeymoon, which had been sent
391 times. Apparently a nation of people sitting at their desks and
avoiding whatever simple operations they are supposed to be performing
found a certain resonance in the idea that, as the study put it, ''the
meaningfulness of work may be an important contributor to the mortality
experience.''
Yet how can it be that ''torpor of mind'' still clouds so many professional
lives, after a decade in which the idea of work was relentlessly
romanticized in scores of books and articles as a potential site of
personal expression and a source of deeper meaning? In a thoughtful and
provocative book called ''The Rise of the Creative Class'' (from which the
Smith quotation was borrowed), Richard Florida is the latest to make the
case that work today is more creativity-packed than ever, pegging the
membership of this ''great emerging class of our time'' at 38 million
people. Of course, to get to such a big number he has to include not just
authors and software engineers but also lawyers and even ''management
occupations.'' He also notes, but with rather less fanfare, the existence
of a far larger group, the 55-million-member Service Class (cashiers,
clerical workers and so on). So while it is true, for instance, that the
Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that software engineer (a ''creative''
job) is very likely to be the fastest-growing job category in percentage
terms, the story is different when you look at raw-number projections.
There, the Top 10 is dominated by ''combined food preparation and serving
workers,'' ''customer-service representatives,'' cashiers, security guards
and the like -- thousands and thousands of new jobs that sound more boring
with each passing day.
Maybe the real curiosity is that so many of us would expect anything other
than boredom from work. But that was a great promise of the 1990's boom:
sure, we would have to give up the security the work world once offered,
but we would participate in the creation of something new and better --
something presumably less boring. And besides, everything seemed less
boring when you could break up your day by checking your portfolio's value
online. But the appeal of that particular pastime has diminished, and it
turns out that despite living in what we're constantly told is an age of
wonder, boredom is apparently with us more than ever -- and especially in
our supposedly revolutionized workplaces.
Florida contends that the economy is moving away from ''manufacturing and
services toward higher-value-added creative sectors'' and argues hopefully
for ''tapping the creativity of the many'' for the benefit of both bored
broom-pushers and society at large. Perhaps more pragmatically, Benjamin
Amick, whose research at the University of Texas School of Public Health at
Houston was behind the e-mailed article, simply advocates more enlightened
management that lets workers at all levels at least feel as if they have
some control over what they do and how they do it. On the other hand,
boredom has always had its defenders, on the theory that the idle mind is
inspired to create. A book by Patricia Meyer Spacks called ''Boredom: The
Literary History of a State of Mind'' (which is more interesting than it
sounds) quotes Bertrand Russell arguing for boredom as ''one of the great
motive powers throughout the historical epoch.'' Charlie Citrine,
protagonist of Saul Bellow's ''Humboldt's Gift,'' sets out to write a
history of boredom, musing that perhaps it is ''a kind of pain caused by
unused powers, the pain of wasted possibilities or talents.''
But the trouble with boredom in the workplace -- and the reason it persists
even when more people seem to be doing more interesting things than ever --
is that its definition is so fluid. In the most dynamic economy, the
cutting edge can get dull fast; the threshold for nonboringness is
constantly ratcheted up. And the big-project, labor-dividing, industrial
mind-set seems alive and well even in the metastasizing tech sector, and it
seems just as likely that today's creative jobs will evolve into the rote
and meaningless boredom-spawners of tomorrow. After all, isn't Dilbert a
software engineer?
The trend-watchers at the Yankelovich Monitor, an annual study of
consumers, actually declared a ''boredom boom'' a couple of years ago:
''Boredom . . . is a call to action. It fuels resentment toward businesses
that flood the market with boring options.'' Now, however, Yankelovich says
that all this boredom has faded a bit, although it is not entirely clear
why. Are we more stimulated than before, or just more easily satisfied?
Perhaps we're bored with boredom itself. Just days after that news story
topped the most-e-mailed list, it had fallen completely off the charts. You
could almost imagine the thousands of creative information workers, peering
through the day's torpor at their computer monitors, clicking and scrolling
and asking, ''What else have you got?''
Rob Walker is a columnist for Slate. He lives in New Orleans.
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"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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