My friend recently told me about a young Chinese woman who was staying with them and kept tittering to herself. Asked what she was finding so funny, the answers were telling. In one case, it was because she had seen so many people lounging in parks that she had assumed the working day had been cancelled from on high – and was amused to find out it was a normal weekday. Then there was the way that all the shops and cafés were shut by 9 p.m. Again, the private merriment. ‘Nobody works here!’ she exclaimed gleefully.
In a sense, she’s right. Of course some people work – those in manual and service-sector jobs, for instance. Lawyers, for whom business booms when all else falls to pieces, are working; some like dogs, most are simply enjoying the nine-to-fivers of yore, often from home.
But what with all the talk of ‘stress’ (one in five have taken time off for it in the past year); the AI surge, soaring costs, inflation and Rachel Reeves’s curious chancellorship, plus trends that began in Covid, when the population got a taste of free money, a great many people are no longer working that hard. Or at all.
To the harried denizens of powerhouses like China and America, this represents real quality of life. Britain is increasingly a hell for the exiting super-rich but heaven – or at least a haven – for slackers. I was struck by a recent essay in the New Yorker by Lena Dunham, the creator and star of the hipster soap Girls. Entitled ‘Why I broke up with New York’, Dunham explains why she chose London.
‘London shocked me with its reassuring differences from New York,’ she writes. ‘The city, which is large enough to contain all five New York boroughs twice, had a spaciousness I could not get over, streets so wide that the buildings seemed to be stepping aside for me to pass. My reputation back home was as a work-obsessed hermit… Here, I moved with ease, whether walking on Hampstead Heath or sliding into a black cab, greeted by a gruff “Oy! Where you ’eaded?”’
The ‘spaciousness’, the frequenting of the Heath, the moving ‘with ease’ in stark opposition to life as a ‘work-obsessed hermit’. Welcome to the slackers’ paradise, Lena.
Reddit is full of Americans asking for advice on moving to the UK for a better life, and those sharing their experience of doing so. The vast majority recommend such a move. ‘I moved to London almost two years ago from New York and it was the best decision I’ve ever made,’ runs one typical post on a thread called ‘Americans who moved to London: how has your experience been?’.
‘I don’t make as much money as I could have, but I have a very easy life’
There are many replies like this one from Sunny_Sailor: ‘The quality of life is infinitely better.’ Or this, from one PchyKeen: ‘work/life balance tends to be better. I’m less stressed, work less, and take a lot more vacations. Employee protections actually exist.’
Or, from lndpuglady: ‘I don’t make as much money as I could have, but I have a very easy life and have always managed to live well here without much. I work from home or cycle 20 minutes to work and have had so many random health issues that I haven’t paid a cent for that would have bankrupted me back in the US.’ Freeloading healthcare, ‘easy life’, ‘a lot more vacations’ – this is the Britain the super-rich are leaving because, in part, they can simply pay for a better version of all that and get it elsewhere.
Culturally and economically, it is getting harder to become rich and stay rich here, and easier and easier to claim you are too stressed, or neurodiverse, or victimised or traumatised to work. But what’s one man’s economic ruin is another’s ability to live without bankruptcy, and to fly cheaply to Naples or Palma. Life here is pretty good for those without much ambition. Perhaps we will soon see more Americans coming to these shores. Forget the brain drain, we may soon be seeing the consequences of a strain drain.
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