Sure, it sounds obvious, but it’s not quite that simple. What we usually hear is that we work to live. In other words, that work is something we do out of obligation so that we can build a full, satisfying life. However, it is neither possible nor advisable to separate work from life. In O Trabalho como Vida (Work as Life), Dietmar Kamper discusses the harmful relationship we create when we distance work from leisure, from play, from worship, from life. We believe that work spreads like a weed and takes over life. Everyone is tremendously busy with work and, as a result, they don’t live. According to Kamper, work tends to become boundless and life tends to become helpless.
The same society that put work on a pedestal and valued it as what gives life meaning now hates it and represses it, while being unable either to give it up or to incorporate it into life. But work is present in every sphere of life, in leisure and in love. Life can also be hard, and work can also be pleasurable. We are what we create; we are the result of our work, the Frankenstein we have created, and the consequences of bringing it into the world. The work we do doesn’t need to be understood as what dignifies life, but as one of the variables that give it meaning, one that also brings a burden along with it. We need to learn to measure this work without dissociating it from life. We talk so much about “not taking work home” or “separating professional and personal life,” but is that even possible? There is no on/off switch, no lever that shifts from one way of living to another. They are all interconnected in our emotions. We imagine that life should be faster and more accelerated so that it could be more productive. Idleness and leisure are ways of interrupting this accelerated pace of work; they offer resistance to time.
We have already been experimenting with a life in which work can also run at a fluctuating pace, that is, where people can arrive at work at different times, work effectively for longer, and leave earlier. There are already companies that encourage employees to do their work with purpose and that foster their capacity for personal expression. And this has worked to some extent, though it is still under construction. Perhaps it is the hope of a path toward lives that are full of work and yet healthier. Being proud of the work you do, being driven to keep improving and being recognized for it, doing tasks in your own time and with quality, is more than having a good day at work; it is gathering energy for personal relationships, for leisure, for health, for life. “Even now, people are ashamed of idleness, and when they devote themselves to a long period of reflection and contemplation, they already have a guilty conscience. We think with a watch in hand, and we eat lunch with a watch in hand, looking at the business section and the stock market report in the newspaper; we love like people who might miss out on something. It is better to do something than to do nothing.” The Gay Science dates from 1882, and Nietszche was already foreseeing a future more than a hundred years away. Dissociating work from life stops being healthy when we believe that one is better than the other, that one exists only as an obligation for the sake of the other. We work so we can reap the fruits of our work. But what if harvest time comes too late? Will we have lived?
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