We Will Never Be Modern
Blurring the lines between life and work
This week I’m sharing a longer essay, originally published in the 81st edition of the Griffith Review, titled The Leisure Principle. The piece explores themes within numerous conversations I’ve had with friends over the years, particularly since the pandemic, but it’s only a starting point. There is so much more to be interrogated in our relationships to life and work, keeping in mind the influence of the broader political context, colonial histories, and the power of the narratives that surround us.
Let me know what you think in the comments!
MY INSTAGRAM FEED, an information-stream cosplaying as a hyper- relevant town square, has undergone a radical transformation in the past few years. Whereas once that endless deluge teemed with benign yet revealing snapshots of friends moving through the motions and milestones of life – brunches, holidays, weddings and pregnancies – today’s experience is far removed. Swimming between algorithmically selected carousels of memes and adverts for beauty products is a new ideological riptide. Gone is the hustle-hustle-girl-boss era of the 2010s – unceremoniously swept out along- side disgraced entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes, controversial former CEO Audrey Gelman and any societal consensus on vaccines. The artifice of the ‘Rise and Grind’ mentality has been exposed. Cloaked in the guise of indi- vidual empowerment, expressed in language co-opted from radical Black feminists, it rings out a new clarion call: Folks, gather round. Forget everything else. The time has come for you to Live Your Best Life!
Sounds pretty good, right?
Whether it’s broadcast in the home of the mommies and millennials (Instagram) or the playground of tired teens (TikTok), the message is the same. This era is for the pleasure of the self. Pastel-haired influencers speak from aesthetically pleasing, light-filled rooms, instructing us to ‘protect our peace’, ‘set boundaries’, ‘live deliciously’ and ‘treat yourself’. People of all ages share stories of how they are reclaiming their time and lives through a renewed focus on the being they’d been travelling with but ignoring this whole time: themselves. The more ‘feminist’ of young women will evangelise to the appropriate soundtrack, Paris Paloma’s viral song ‘labour’ a common choice:
You make me do too much labour. All day every day
Therapist mother maid
Nymph then a virgin
Nurse then a servant
Just an appendage
Live to attend him
So that he never lifts a finger. 24/7 baby machine
So he can live out his picket-fence dreams
It’s not an act of love if you make her
You make me do too much labour.
It makes sense, this inward turn – it’s a direct response to the winds of our time, termed the ‘cycle of distrust’ by the Edelman Trust Barometer. The majority of nations surveyed by the Pew Research Center in 2022 believe ‘their country is more divided now than it was prior’ to the outbreak of COVID-19. Widely shared prosperity seems impossibly out of reach, particularly for the young; this is compounded by economic recession, wage stagnation and a collapse of trust in democracy, media and each other.
Gen Z, now entering a workforce irrevocably moulded by the deregulatory polices of Reagan and Thatcher, refuse to play the game, delighting in everyone’s utter confusion – what is this rejection of productivity, dismissal of obligation to the workplace, deep uninterest in the hustle? The quiet quitting, the great resigning, the expectation that the workplace work for them and around them instead of the other way round. These trends have spawned panicky think-pieces galore, bafflement mixing with frustration. It appears, for this generation and those inspired by them, that resistance and revolution don’t necessarily take place on the street (although the climate-change movement illustrates that this isn’t completely ruled out). Resistance, instead, is in one’s individual choices. In rejecting the status quo, refusing to meet the expectations of the neoliberal, patriarchal order. These individual acts of resistance float atop a dark, apocalyptic current. Why not be invested in only the individual, since in this unstable, uncertain world, the one thing you can control is ostensibly the self? If you believe the world is doomed anyway, à la the disaster film Don’t Look Up, you might as well enjoy yourself while it all burns down.
This desire to separate one’s self from one’s labour may seem like a worthy aim. Yet it runs the risk of becoming a new form of binary entrapment – one masquerading as liberation.
IN HIS 1991 book We Have Never Been Modern, French philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour speaks of the ‘modern’ as one who understands the world as divided into ‘nature’ and ‘cultures’, separate domains, ‘purified’. The realm of politics is distinct from science, which is distinct from economics, which is distinct from religion, and so on. Although they might interact with each other, according to ‘modernity’, separate domains should not be confused. The law is only the law once religion is filtered out. It is dangerous for economics to be contaminated by politics, or science by sociology. Such purification or categorisation of life into domains is a cornerstone of Western ideas of modernity.
The ideal of ‘modernity’ is vital, as it distinguishes the Western person from the ‘pre-modern Other’, Latour argues. It creates a temporal divide between the ‘modern us’ and ‘primitive them’, since to be ‘modern’ implies an archaic and traditional past that’s now been surpassed. (The author of this essay notes it is uncertain on which side of this ‘Great Divide’ she sits.)
But, as Latour points out, the reality of modern life is that these realms are not at all separate. Moderns might consider science ‘objective’, but in doing so they ignore the politics of academic and scientific funding, the ambitions of scientists, the interests and involvement of corporations. The development of a Covid vaccine, and its subsequent rollout, is one such illustration of the clash between the modern ‘ideal’ and the reality of our society. A scientist may argue that the vaccination project was purely a scientific endeavour – but the vaccine would not have been developed without the involvement of government funding (a political choice) or the support of corporate bodies with research and development capabilities, as well as shareholders to please and a profit motive to pursue. A country like Australia might say that there is separation between religion and politics, yet on entering parliament or testifying in a courtroom, individuals are still compelled to swear an oath on ‘a holy book’. Western modernity relies on this ‘purification’ for its sense of superiority, but the same ideology that gave them the self-anointed role of ‘colonising in the name of civilising’ tells an incomplete story.
IN THE MODERN’S approach of purification to our contemporary existence, ‘work’ and ‘life’ are posited as distinct domains – thus the constant discussion of ‘work-life balance’. Life, we are led to believe, does not happen in work. ‘Life’ is what occurs outside the hours we are paid for our labour. Life is family, fun, friendship, leisure. Life is pleasure.
But this articulation, this bifurcation and categorisation of our time and therefore our lives, obscures our lived reality. Paradoxically, while we are encouraged to think of ‘work’ and ‘life’ as separate domains, we are simultaneously told to ‘do what we love’ so that we ‘never have to work a day in our lives’. This idea has its roots in capitalist exploitation, writes Sarah Jaffe in her 2021 bestseller Work Won’t Love You Back. As factory-based industries migrated to cheaper labour markets overseas in the 1970s, corporations co-opted critiques of capitalism for their own benefit. They could get away with paying workers less if the value of work was in the pleasure it provided. Precarity was sold as flexibility; income levels below the poverty line were dismissed as personal failure.
This tonal shift coincided with another transformation: the definition of productivity. Productivity in an economic context, writes Cal Newport in The New Yorker, can be traced back to Adam Smith’s 1776 treatise The Wealth of Nations, which described the term as ‘labour that added value to materials’. In previous eras, increasing productivity was a challenging task: it required the optimisation of factory lines alongside supply chains and complex, macro level systems. But by the mid- to late twentieth-century, as knowledge-work became the bedrock of the American economy, the burden of optimisation shifted from the systemic to the individual: ‘Productivity, for the first time in modern economic history, became personal.’
No wonder we are collectively buckling under the strain. This blurring of boundaries between the professional and personal – while we’re still urged to keep the two domains separate – poisons the wells of both. It suggests we need a different way of thinking about the role work plays in our lives.
‘I KNOW CAPITALISM is bad and everything,’ a friend said to me recently as we shared a quiet afternoon at the local park. It was a rare sunny day in London, ducks and preening swans crowding our feet, barking for attention. We were sitting at the edge of a lake, my face growing warm under the eggshell-blue sky. Although I had writing to attend to, I was content to spend time on this peeling wooden bench.
The friend, a freelancer like me, twirled a lock of hair between their fingers. ‘But I really feel, like, lost when I’m not working.’
We both watched a small bird dip its head under the surface of the lake, then come back up and shake off the droplets of water with a charming honk. ‘I don’t even need to do it for money,’ my friend continued. ‘I just want to be doing something.’
I murmured something encouraging – 2023 has been a rough year for every self-employed creative I know – and reflected. If I were to listen to the blunt messaging surrounding me, this urge to work – one I share – is a result of the normalisation of productivity and hustle culture. But on closer reflection, I realised I had conflated two separate ideas.
Yes, there is danger in the idea that we as individuals are human bits of capital that must be maximised at all costs. Yes, we should be pushing back against monetising every act, asset and skill we have. Literature abounds to support these positions; I myself have published an essay, ‘In Defence of Hobbies’, that rails against the commercialisation of my pastimes. This was why my friend whispered to me quietly at the park, as if confiding a terrible secret. It felt transgressive – taboo, even. But it shouldn’t have been. My friend didn’t say, ‘I feel I am lost when I am not making money.’ They said, ‘I feel I am lost when I am not working.’
Is all ‘work’ contributing to the project of free-market capitalism? I would argue not. But we seem to have created a false equivalence between the idea of ‘work’ and the idea of ‘capitalism’.
Here, we have a critical distinction. Is all ‘work’ contributing to the project of free-market capitalism? I would argue not. But we seem to have created a false equivalence between the idea of ‘work’ and the idea of ‘capitalism’. Not all work is necessarily about a profit motive or an economic imperative. By accepting modernity as the foundation of Western society, by believing all domains of our lives are pure and separate, we have created a mental framework which forces us to think that the role of work is purely its economic imperative. In this scenario, to resist the demands of the economic necessity, to fight the oppression of individualist, neoliberal capitalism, means rejecting work. Rejecting work therefore means committing wholly to leisure.
John Maynard Keynes tends to this modernist leap in his 1930 essay ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’. Thanks to the progress wrought by technological advancement, Keynes argues, ‘larger classes and groups of people’ will have the ‘problems of economic necessity...practically removed’. If the economic problem is solved, ‘mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose’, which opens up whole new realms of possibility.
Keynes seems excited by a world in which the economic imperative no longer exists, one where leisure, or ‘the art of life’, is the individual’s primary pursuit. ‘We have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy,’ he writes, implying the two are distinct and mutually exclusive states of being. Yet even Keynes notes that something doesn’t quite add up in this equation. Those in the wealthy classes, he observes, without the economic imperative, have ‘failed disastrously’ at living the enjoyable life he imagines for the masses. Somehow, though, Keynes believes future people will do better: ‘We shall use the new-found bounty of nature quite differently from the way in which the rich use it today, and will map out for ourselves a plan of life quite otherwise than theirs.’
Keynes predicts that this world will arrive by 2030, so long as (among other things) the population is ‘controlled’, war is avoided and we trust in science. Simple tasks, surely. Given that we are in the early 2020s and the economic imperative is still chief among the majority of the global popula- tion’s concerns, I dare say we needn’t worry too much about living in Keynes’ predicted future.
THERE IS, HOWEVER, one suggestion in the essay that comes close to revealing a deeper truth. ‘The old Adam’ in us, Keynes writes, will be so strong that ‘everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented’. We will spread the work ‘butter thin’ to share it as widely as possible. Here, Keynes is making another move that is ‘modern’, but one that moderns often deny as part of their world view: he hybridises. He acknowledges there is contentment in work that is not related to economic necessity, thus conjur- ing a realm that is of more than one domain, that is both, a combination of ‘nature-cultures’. Modernity is full of hybridisations that sit alongside the pure domains, argues Latour. Indeed, the very technological innovations Keynes’ future world depends on are the result of such hybrids, of bringing nature and culture together to create new possibilities.
But why does modernity not acknowledge this hybridisation? Why does Keynes feel it necessary to suggest that once the economic imperative is transcended, life will be pure enjoyment, pleasure, leisure, while admitting in the same breath that man also needs work to feel contented?
If modernity acknowledges its hybrids, it ceases to be special. Latour’s point is that those in the West who claim superiority due to their ‘modernity’, their defined domains, their separation of nature and culture, are drawing a line in the historical sand. But if they admit that they do bring domains together, do have realms of nature and culture as hybrids, then they must admit they are no better than the pre-modern savages they claimed to civilise. ‘Without the myth of the Great Divide, modernity floats on quicksand, without foundation,’ observes American author and theologian Peter Leithart.
But perhaps ceasing to be special is what we all need. Perhaps we are all due a humbling. Perhaps we must accept that the myth of modernity is holding us back.
Rather than spending time on Instagram proselytising about living one’s best life at the expense of all others, we can consider what living our best life with others might look like. Instead of conceiving of pleasure as a realm completely distinct from work, we might consider what pleasure looks like within our work. Not at the behest of an oppressive employer, but for ourselves, for our communities, for our souls. We can understand resistance as a form of work and find the pleasure inherent in fighting for a better world. For the old Adam in us needs tending, after all.
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Yassmin
This is so interesting and helpful in critiquing the conflation of capitalism and work. I wonder how this sits for people who for one reason or another have to work jobs they don't like or find meaningful but need money to live.
I think your last paragraph hints at it in making our work meaningful, and perhaps I might add that the work that earns our means of survival doesn't have to be the same as the work we find meaningful?
As someone born in the 2000s, I have felt nothing but disdain towards 'hustle culture', but I also don't really see the appeal of induvidualised, instagrammable ideas of self-care. To me, both seem like an uncritical response to doomerism. Thank you for sharing this! I always look forward to reading your posts. Sending much love <33