Work isn’t working, it’s killing us

We mistake the nature of work and our purpose within it.

Cameron Wiltshire-Plant

Cameron is a curate in Leicestershire

Two people sit beside each other working on laptops, One looks askance to the other who frowns.

Resume Genius on Unsplash.

What is work for? In our individualist society we perhaps might zoom in on the minutiae of the specific role that we fulfil. Work is for the success of the company I work for, work is for building up my CV, work is to earn money enough to live, work is for seeing people I don’t have to live with. But what about work? The burden that humans have always had to gather enough resources to provide for themselves. We are mistaking the nature of work and our purpose within it, and it is beginning to kill us.

Each of the recent generations have had different, and askew, attitudes to their work. Baby boomers- those who got a job and a sensible haircut in the 60s, conceived work as a contract. They worked well at almost anything and the reward was home ownership, resources to provide for a family, and saving for leisure. The purpose of their work is the lifestyle it creates. To some extent, their successors in Gen X had the same perception and the same contract- stick at any industry and the reward will be generous enough to make the graft worth it.

But what happens when that contract is broken? When work no longer leads to those rewards? The Millennial answer is to seek out work that gives purpose, to accept the reward will not be fulfilling and so to find the purpose in the end of the work itself. Even if that means a lifetime of renting and scrimping, because the reward is not to be found in the payment.

A slow generational drift from the true purpose and boundaries of work has left us confused about its point and struggling to engage.

The Gen Z answer to this broken contract is the most fascinating of all; a reluctance to work at all. There is ‘quiet quitting’ whereby you do as little as possible whilst remaining employed, ‘bare minimum Mondays,’ and, of course, ‘lazy girl jobs.’ The purported aim of this generation is to find jobs where they can work from home, do almost nothing, and still receive a generous salary. Others are living the ‘soft life.’ They move in with mum and dad (usually boomers who have run the rat race and received the benefits of the contract) and do something creative part-time, earning little but doing little. It's a bit of the old baby boomer attitude seeking pleasure outside work but without the corresponding work ethic or career mindset.

On top of this is the mental health crisis, which prevents many of Gen Z from working, with one in three non-graduates out of work with mental health conditions. Bosses receive calls from parents of those in their 20s explaining that their children are too unwell to work.

I suggest that these things are linked, and a slow generational drift from the true purpose and boundaries of work has left us confused about its point and struggling to engage. We must look outside ourselves to understand what work was created for. In Genesis, the Christian origin story, God conceives work as a place of dignity and purpose. What Adam and Eve did in the garden mattered- they were the leaders of creation, and God even gave them the responsibility of naming other creatures. Humans were made to have responsibility, made to express this in their work. Even in the drudgery of repeated physical, administrative, or household tasks, we have the freedom to find purpose. We can take pleasure and pride in making things, fixing things, restoring things, even if just to the state they were in when we cleaned last week.

Find the purpose in the making, fixing, restoring, the very task itself.

The ‘quiet quitting’ of Gen Z or the dry contract of the boomers will not cut it. Even in jobs we don’t like, or tasks we find overwhelming, the same reframing is needed, perhaps even more so. Work itself brings purpose, and that is worth giving our whole selves to, otherwise listlessness and sadness will get us. We were made to find purpose and joy in the task of whatever is in front of us, no matter how simple.

Millennials have swung the pendulum too far in the other direction. Yes, this generation have found the importance of purpose in their work. But only in work that has an end outside of itself. Work has been created with an internal, permanent purpose. Suggesting that meaning only comes from employment with obvious altruistic ends means that any other kind of work, domestic or employed, is devoid of this meaning. The same listlessness ensues in any role not found to have such an end.

St Paul elevates work explicitly even beyond this created place of purpose. In his letter to a church in Colossae, he writes, ‘Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.’ In other words, work is an act of worship, acting as if the task we are completing is for God, and putting the requisite effort in.

Of course, this is a massive challenge. How many of us put as much work in to satisfy our bosses as we would if they were the ultimate director of our eternal destiny? But it does redeem those moments where we wonder what the point of what we’re doing is, who will see it, and if it is really worth doing properly at all. God sees. God knows. And that makes it worth doing properly.

Paul also makes it clear here that work is not just what we get paid for. Work is everything we do that is not rest. Whatever we do - employed, at home, inrelation to our families. And this allows those who cannot work, in an employment sense, to take part in God’s purpose for humanity by working in a way in which they can. Whether it’s caring for a relative, nurturing a tiny veg patch, creating a piece of art, or hoovering the carpet. Find the purpose in the making, fixing, restoring, the very task itself. Do it as if God were watching. And feel yourself become more human.

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Comment

General Election 24

Politics

7 June 2024

4 min read

Who’s right when hurling charges of hypocrisy?

Accusations highlight the risk of self-deception.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A newspaper headline, text and an image of the subject of the article.

Ashcroft's charge against Raynor.

David Yelland, X.

Lord Ashcroft launched an extraordinary new attack on Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, in the Mail on Sunday at the start of this week, claiming that his investigation into where she lived, allegedly for tax purposes, was never about money.

“Hypocrisy was always the charge against Angela Rayner,” he intoned, “not tax avoidance… And the stain will dog her for years to come.”

Leaving aside whether stains dog people or the other way around, this is extraordinary not because Ashcroft attacks a senior Labour figure – day follows night, etc – but because it’s the sort of volte face that journalists call a reverse ferret.

Had Rayner been found by investigating police officers to have committed a tax-fraud or electoral offence (and, to be clear, they didn’t), we need to ask ourselves whether Ashcroft would have run with the same line.

Imagine: “Angela Rayner has committed a crime, but this is really about hypocrisy.” Do you think he’d have gone with that? Neither do I.

Usually, charges of hypocrisy are levelled at politicians who use social privileges to which they’re opposed in principle.

Hypocrisy is invariably the charge when there’s nothing else to go with. And that must raise questions about what hypocrisy really is.

It’s clearly not just about telling lies. In the first televised debate this week between Rishi Sunak and his rival for premiership, Keir Starmer, the former repeatedly (12 times) claimed that Treasury officials had independently calculated that the latter’s spending plans would add £2,000 to the tax bill of every family in the UK. A published letter subsequently showed that the Treasury had specifically told the Government that this figure was bogus and not to be used.

Was this hypocritical? No, it was just plain wrong – in the sense of both inaccurate and immoral. The opportunity for hypocrisy came when both leaders were asked whether they would use private healthcare for a family member in need. Sunak said he would; Starmer said he wouldn’t. If Starmer now ever uses private health facilities, Mr Hypocrisy will be ringing his door bell.

From this, we deduce that hypocrisy is pretending to be what you’re not. So Donald Trump poses as a great statesman, the saviour of his nation, but goes down for all 34 felony charges of falsifying accounts to hide his pay-off of former porn actor Stormy Daniels, in order to protect his electoral prospects. That’s hypocrisy, precisely because he’s pretending to be someone he isn’t.

That hypocrisy is exacerbated when Trump holds up a Bible to support his authority – or, indeed, publishes his own. Likewise, when a rich TV evangelist is convicted of sexual abuse (there are, tragically, too many examples to choose from).

By contrast, is Rayner pretending to be something she isn’t because her family has used two properties? Very probably not. Similarly, we might like to ask whether SNP deputy leader Kate Forbes is a hypocritical politician because she’s a Christian, or a hypocritical Christian because she’s a politician. Very probably neither. Being both is who she is.

Usually, charges of hypocrisy are levelled at politicians who use social privileges to which they’re opposed in principle. Like when Labour MP Diane Abbott sent her son to a fee-paying school. Private education, like private healthcare, is only meant to be available to those who support it ideologically, rather than just financially. Otherwise, it’s hypocrisy.

The problem here is the presumption that the private sector is only available to those who endorse it. So it’s hypocritical for socialists to use it. But that presumption moves very close to the view that working people should know their place (a social order, incidentally, that the Christian gospel defies).

There is no inconsistency – and consequently there can be no hypocrisy – in wanting the best for our own children, while concurrently wanting the best for all children. One might even call such a policy something like levelling-up, should such a thing exist.

We may not know what Angela Rayner’s shortcomings are, but simply having them doesn’t make her a hypocrite.

A biblical definition of hypocrisy might be the hiding of interior wickedness under an appearance of virtue. In Matthew’s gospel, it’s the charge levelled at Pharisees whose good deeds are entirely self-serving.

In this manner, moral theology would point to hypocrisy being the fruit of pride. But simply to hide one’s own shortcomings isn’t necessarily to be construed as hypocrisy, because there’s no moral obligation to make them public.

In that context, we may not know what Angela Rayner’s shortcomings are, but simply having them doesn’t make her a hypocrite. Otherwise, we’re all hypocrites (and there may be some truth in that).

It reduces to resisting the temptation to point to the mote of hypocrisy in our neighbour’s eye, while failing to attend to the beam in our own. That would also be to avoid self-deception. The kind of deception that pretends that one’s actions are in the public interest, when clearly they are only serving your own. Which, neatly enough, brings us back to Lord Ashcroft.