Three discussions stand out in anthropologist James Suzman’s memory of his short but informative period of work in the corporate world.
The first was early on, when Suzman told a colleague that he didn’t need to spend the half a million pounds that had been allocated for a task because he could do it for free. His colleague was horrified. “If you don’t spend your budget,” he said, “they won’t think we’re doing anything!”
Soon afterwards, Suzman was chatting with a board director about what they would do if they won the lottery. He was surprised when the man told him that he’d continue working.
Later, the same director observed to Suzman and the rest of the senior management team that they spent more time with each other than they did with their families. He said this as though it were just the way work was. But Suzman knew that things didn’t have to be this way.
Not such a struggle
Before he took his corporate job, Suzman had spent some 15 years among the Ju/’hoansi “Bushmen” of eastern Namibia, who were notable for having sustained a foraging society well into the 20th century. And while he lived among them, Suzman witnessed how the hunter-gatherer life was far from the constant struggle for survival many of us imagine it to have been.
In 1966, a landmark anthropology paper had found that the Ju/’hoansi were generally well nourished and lived long, content lives. They used most of their time to rest or have fun. They spent just 15 hours a week looking for food, and they stored little for the future, trusting in the surrounding desert to provide when required. Any individual surpluses were redistributed among the group. With social sanctions for selfishness and self-importance, their economy functioned in such a way as to eradicate inequality and material desires. Anthropologists concluded that the Ju/’hoansi worked almost exclusively to meet their immediate needs and had few wants beyond that.
The demand for growth
By contrast, in the corporate world — where we might work 80-hour weeks largely unconnected to any question of what is required and what is lusted after — our desires seem limitless, driven by an ever-increasing demand for growth and productivity.
To Suzman, the implications of this contrast were seismic. First, it suggested that the assumptions underpinning our modern economy — that we are competitive by nature, that our desires will always exceed our means — were wrong. And second, it meant that, nearly all of our history, while we lived as hunter-gatherers, we enjoyed more leisure time than we do today. In an age of increasing inequality, ill health, dissatisfaction and even desperation around work, it presents a hopeful thought: maybe it doesn’t have to be like this.
“Half the value of understanding hunter-gatherer society is to recognize that lots of these things that we think we are hostage to are actually not a part of our nature,” says Suzman emphatically. “We can trace our work ethic, we can understand why we became obsessed with scarcity, we can understand why it’s different now. Maybe there are other ways of doing things.”
Non-stop work
Our understanding of work as a means to an end has been seriously derailed. It often feels as though we never stop working. We work for free and monetize our hobbies. We work on our bodies, our relationships, our selves. For many of us, work may be our primary identity, possibly to a greater extent than we might like to admit.
“You’re a worker, I’m a worker,” says Suzman freely, when we meet at a cafe in Cambridge, England, where he lives. “I identify myself very much with my work. I’m actually rudderless when I’m not working,” he says. “Doing things like a pure leisure holiday, I find unbearable.” At its most fundamental level, Suzman adds, work is the process of capturing and expending energy.
So, it seems fitting that he should have so much of it.
Suzman looks back on his seven years in a corporate role as “fieldwork in big business”. But he still seems to feel conflicted about the experience, not least when he tells me who he worked for: the diamond-mining giant De Beers. He joined in 2007 as its global director of public affairs, attracted by its talk of wanting to go green and give back. Under his leadership, the company was repeatedly recognized by the industry for its reporting practices on sustainability, and for its environmental and social performance. As an anthropologist, Suzman learned the company culture and quickly scaled its ranks. “But the longer I was there, the more I internalized it,” he says. “I began to dislike myself terribly, sitting there thinking: ‘How’s my bonus going to look this year?’”
Back to the Kalahari
During the 2009 recession, De Beers’s profits fell by 99 per cent, forcing a company restructuring and redundancies that gutted his team. “I was just miserable,” he says. Suzman ended up walking out of the job in 2013. “It was one of the happiest days of my life, marching out of there — and then I went straight back to the Kalahari.”
Suzman set up the Anthropos think tank, offering anthropological approaches to present-day problem-solving — at a corporate rate of up to £1,400 (€1,550) per day, half for NGOs — and he wrote a book, Affluence without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen, about what the Western world could learn from the Bushmen.
Suzman says his time at De Beers taught him to empathize. “It’s really easy to make a caricature of business people, but they’re cultural creatures. We all try to establish meaning and legitimacy around what we do with our lives.” Many of us are unsuccessful.
Bullshit jobs
This has normally been seen as a workplace issue. Actually, says Suzman, “it is a problem with the nature of work”. It reflects the 20th-century boom in what the late American anthropologist David Graeber called “bullshit jobs”, creating work for work’s sake. Suzman says a whole class of people appeared “who were utterly invested in this idea that they were actually creating value”. This included “human relations” departments, which exist to improve attitudes to work and, with it, productivity, and to pay and bonus structures that further favour top earners. The key to corporate success is convincing everyone else you’re important and valuable, as Suzman learned for himself at De Beers.
“You developed vast bureaucracies which were ultimately pointless, but that was the skill. The bigger your bureaucracy, the more power you wielded and the more important you became. I established this vast empire. I don’t think it made a lot of difference to anything when I got out.” For a self-identifying worker, it was an important reminder: if work is a transaction of energy, our own is finite.
We had a dream
Not long ago, we dreamed of being liberated from work altogether. In 1930, the British economist John Maynard Keynes imagined a future in which technological innovation, efficiency gains and long-term capital growth might lead to a “golden age of leisure” in which we could satisfy our needs by working no more than 15 hours a week.
But a century of efforts to reduce work disappeared after the Second World War. Though labour productivity has increased roughly four- or five-fold in industrialized nations since then, average weekly working hours have stubbornly remained at just under 40 hours a week. This is in part a result of our innate drive to keep ourselves occupied, says Suzman: “People like to be busy. This is an absolute fundamental thing: we like to be skilled, we like to whittle, we like to carve.”
The mantra of hard work
In his latest book, Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time, Suzman takes his readers through thousands of years of milestones to trace our contemporary relationship to work. He concludes that the problem is a “very simple set of assumptions about human nature, which are clearly and demonstrably wrong”.
The key problem is our preoccupation with scarcity, a hangover from the early agricultural state some 12,000 years ago, when we went from foragers to farmers. Somewhat paradoxically, in being able to cultivate and store food, we became fixated on the possibility we might not have enough — even as our productivity was turbocharged by the agricultural and industrial revolutions.
The necessity — not to mention moral good — of hard work was a cultural mantra that became hardwired over time and persisted even as our main motivation switched from survival to financial capital. The emergence of cities 8,000 years ago created a whole new kind of work, driven not by our material needs but by our desire for status, pleasure, wealth and power.
Greed and wealth
“Greed became institutionalized with cities,” says Suzman. Our new physical proximity to wealth also exacerbated our anxiety over scarcity, focusing our minds on how we were lacking. “Suddenly there was now this confrontation, this contrast in wealth, and I think that began to shape people. It created this melancholy of constant aspiration.” And social media works as an “ostentation-amplifier”, he says, reassuring ourselves of our success but further escalating our material desires.
A recent report by the organization Tax Justice, which campaigns for a more progressive and effective tax system in the UK, found that Britons think accumulating wealth is positive and morally right. It also found that Britons are broadly supportive of the ultra-rich, believing them to have been rewarded for sacrifice and ambition.
Who benefits?
Interestingly, however, even the ultra-rich have not made it off the treadmill, tending to work longer hours and spend less time on leisure. But growth has become such an obsession, says Suzman, that “we now spend most of our energy doing utterly pointless things”. This is damaging not only to our health but to that of the planet through emissions. As an ex-smoker, Suzman likens it to a nicotine addiction. “We pump crap into the atmosphere. It doesn’t make us happy. I can’t work out who benefits.”
As Suzman is talking, I am thinking that work has been the source of both my greatest satisfaction and my most miserable lows. I’d continue to do my job, and maybe even periodically burn out, even if I had no material need to do so. My relationship to work may be the most significant relationship in my life, but I am often made uncomfortably aware that the feeling isn’t mutual.
For me, I tell Suzman — as I have told successive therapists, and with no small sadness — the hollowness emerges from a system that makes it seem both joyless and endless. “It’s that at the moment,” he agrees. “But it’s that feeling that makes me vaguely optimistic that we won’t put up with this any more.”
An opportunity to change
The coronavirus crisis has made clear much of what wasn’t functioning in the world of work and created an opportunity for change. “Essential workers” have been celebrated and shown to be undervalued and underpaid. The successful switch to working from home may make punishing commutes — and inner-city business districts — a thing of the past. Social media has abandoned the slogan “every day I’m hustling” in favour of a new one: “You don’t have to be productive during a pandemic.” Support for once fringe ideas that might improve our work-life balance, such as a universal basic income (UBI) or a four-day work week, has been voiced even from conservative corners.
This is proof to Suzman that as “stupidly intransigent” as humans can be with regard to culture, “they do change when change is forced upon them”. It’s a hopeful thought for the looming climate crisis. What we must do now, Suzman says, is to seize the opportunity to explore new approaches to organizing capital.
“We know that there’s a problem: there’s the environmental aspect, the misery aspect. What we have to do is acknowledge that we actually have these problems and take experimentation seriously.” Testing a UBI, or ways of turning office blocks into homes, are two such possible steps towards a “future world order”, says Suzman.
Lessons to be learned
Even the Ju/’hoansi could not return to a hunter-gatherer economy today. But their view of the world as “fundamentally a sharing place cascaded through everything about their society,” says Suzman. “There’s a recognizing that when you take things out of a hierarchy, there’s a great deal more freedom.”
In imagining a new way to work, we might start by asking ourselves whether our desires really are infinite and what we are prepared to pay for them. Suzman is hopeful. “I don’t know anybody with infinite desires,” he says. “I think for most people, they’re pretty modest.”
© Guardian News & Media 2020