Alain de Botton recently said that he’d been congratulated on his prescience for writing a book about the nature of work in these times of economic woe. But he wasn’t prescient, he said — just interested in the subject. He has been pondering it for several years now, in his specific, de Botton-esque style, which is calm and leisurely, and sometimes faux-naif; a killer combination when it works. Here it works; he has pretty much got to the bottom of the subject.
In his time, Alain has got to the bottom — or close to the bottom — of several subjects. Love, travel, Marcel Proust, and happiness, to name a few. As a writer, he can be attracted to the paradoxical and the counter-intuitive. His work has a mildly French feel; in his novel Essays in Love he wrote, ‘One of love’s greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us happy.’ Approaching his subjects by stealth, he stands above them, and a little to the side. His aim is to lead you gently, to a point where you will say to yourself: ‘I see! So that’s how the world works!’
In Aristotle’s time, de Botton tells us, people thought that one could only be happy if one did not work. ‘For the Greek philosopher, financial need placed one on a par with slaves and animals.’ But then things changed — as we became progressively industrialised, so work became more exalted. Catholics had thought holiness could only come from prayer and contemplation; Protestants, with their work ethic, thought that work itself had intrinsic value. These days, our economy depends on a high level of specialisation. People spend their lives doing weird things. How, de Botton wonders, do they cope?
Early in the book, he shows us where our tuna comes from.
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