Diary

Tuesday, 7th April 2009

Alain de Botton opens his diary

As a type, authors are famous for the amount of time they waste. We change light bulbs, stare out of the window and congratulate ourselves if we have managed to turn out 800 words in a day. But having recently spent some time working in a big corporation, an ultra-modern temple of glass and steel that exudes an impression of über-efficiency, I’m reassured that squandering time is endemic in all areas of human activity. I was amazed by the amount of idle chat, internet surfing and banter ahead of every meeting. People may dutifully show up for work between 9 and 6.30, but the time during which they really do anything profitable is a fraction of this. I’ve come to think of the average company (or person) as a bucket riddled with holes out of which water is constantly leaking. It’s a miracle if there’s anything left in the bucket at all by the end of the tax year. What we call ‘a profit’ is at heart a small percentage of what there might have been if the human race was not endemically and gloriously wasteful.

In the current economic situation, a lot of people seem to be rediscovering Karl Marx. His analysis of capitalist crises remains spot-on, but rather like Prince Charles’s views on architecture, Marx is better at analysing problems than arriving at plausible solutions to them. Many have pointed out that throughout the thousands of words he wrote attacking capitalism, Marx only ever produced one tantalising, beautiful and daft line on what working life would be like under communism. In the concluding volume of Das Kapital, Marx remarked that the average man in a communist society would be able to go fishing in the morning, work in a factory in the afternoon and read Plato in the evening — an implausibly high-minded combination of activities that tells us rather more about Marx than it does about the average man. Still, Marx was implicitly catching on to what has now become a mantra of modern theorists of work: that we all need variety. I know a lot of professional readers of Plato — myself included — who might benefit from time by the riverbank and the assembly line.

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David Short

April 10th, 2009 2:48am Report this comment

I cannot see how this piece is a Diary.

But come on, tell us which company you 'worked' in.

Everybody (apart from authors, farmers, coal miners etc) knows that nobody does any work at 'work'.

That's why The Office was so true to life.

The office is a place to go and while away the time, where you get paid, between your fishing and Plato reading.

Or it was until now.

As many people have found out, and many more will soon find out.

That might even apply in the future to people lucky enough to have found employers who don't require them to be at the office, or do any 'profitable' work.

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