The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work By Alain De Botton

In his new book, Alain De Botton, a philosopher of modern society, looks at the world of modern work and how important it is to our central identity. He takes a look at a wide array of jobs from rocket science to biscuit manufacture, accountancy to art in a search to find what make jobs either fulfilling or soul-destroying. In a recent interview with Monocle Magazine, De Botton said that we have some sort of neo-Marxist view of work – that labor is corruption – but that’s not the whole story. His analysis reveals that people have an attraction to attention and detail, the opposite of which is chaos and decline. When we see people at work, we see something admirable and noble about them.

On the site the author adds:

The strangest thing about the world of work is the widespread expectation that our work should make us happy. For thousands of years, work was viewed as something to be done with as rapidly as possible and escaped in the imagination through alcohol or religion. Aristotle was the first of many philosophers to state that no one could be both free and obliged to earn a living. A more optimistic assessment of work had to wait until the eighteenth century and men like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Benjamin Franklin, who for the first time argued that one’s working life could be at the centre of any desire for happiness. It was during this century that our modern ideas about work were formed—at the very same time as our modern ideas about love and marriage took shape…

If you want to hear more – Alain De Botton is speaking at the New York Public Library tonight in New York otherwise his book is available on Amazon.