Centuries of serving the work ethic have changed our very identities, says Simon May

How could the cult of work have come to foster procrastination? Wouldn’t this be a contradiction in terms? Surely the value we place on work is crucial to overcoming any impulse to procrastinate over it? Surely it’s key to giving purpose and dignity to our lives; vital to expressing who we take ourselves to be, including our talent, our drive, and our ingenuity; a way of leaving our mark upon the world; and, to that extent, fundamental to establishing our worth and distinctiveness both in our own eyes and those of our peers?

On the one hand, the cult of work is certainly all of these things. It has also unleashed extraordinary inventiveness, underwritten vast increases in freedom and opportunity, and enabled prodigious self-discovery and self-creation. It has been central to the explosion of sciences and the arts, productivity and technology in the past two hundred years. And it continues to be so.

On the other hand, the cult of work as it has widely developed in Western industrialized countries has turned many of us into robotic productivity machines, slaves to the deity of relentless output. Our identities have become dependent on an unceasing stream of achievements and our self-esteem, along with others’ esteem for us, poised perilously atop our CVs.

The result can be to deeply alienate us from our work– not only when we’re indentured to an impersonal bureaucratic organization run by remote bosses or stakeholders, but even when we’re pursuing work that we freely choose, in control of its aims and schedules, and able to reap its fruits. For the way the cult of work has developed has turned our lives into a kind of industrial process – replete with targets, deadlines, and deliverables – to be managed with the maximum efficiency of a production line. In doing so, work easily goes from being a source of dignity to the very opposite, a source of self-alienation that demoralizes and paralyses us.

It’s perhaps no coincidence that the English word ‘procrastination’, derived from the Latin for ‘putting off until tomorrow’, first appears in the sixteenth century when the earliest shoots of the cult of work emerge. Since then it’s been freighted with ever more moral opprobrium, and has come to exact a peculiar sort of emotional torture in a culture, like many in the West, that prizes work as a supreme good and so as a fundamental determinant of who we’ve become and how well we’re living our lives. For those cultures, perhaps to a greater extent than ever before, we are our work.

Numerous opinion surveys bear this out. In a report of January 2019, the Pew Research Center found that over 90 per cent of teens, asked about their priorities for adult life, ranked ‘having a job or career they enjoy’ as ‘extremely or very important’ – and higher than any other priority, including ‘helping other people who are in need’ (81 per cent), having a lot of money (51 per cent), getting married (47 per cent), having children (39 per cent), or – perhaps surprisingly – becoming famous (11 per cent). As another Pew Report, of January 2023, suggests, this seems to reflect the priorities imparted to them by their parents, of whom around 90 per cent rated financial independence and enjoyable careers or jobs as ‘extremely or very important’ for their children’s future, while only about 20 per cent attached similar importance to their children becoming parents and getting married.

Nor, crucially, does the ethos of work stop at vocations, careers, and jobs. This is only its most obvious manifestation. Much more surreptitiously, it has come to colonize almost everything we value, including relationships, religion, raising children, and keeping our homes, all of which have come to be seen or spoken of as work. I’m not making the familiar point that online connectivity and remote work have bull dozed the walls between public and private, work and ‘life’, so that we’re always available to our careers or jobs. I mean that the ethos of work itself has come to penetrate everything we do, including what we’ve successfully carved out as private and intimate. We talk of ‘working at love’, ‘working at our marriage’, ‘working on myself’ – or, even, more colloquially, to a server in a restaurant enquiring if they can clear our plate, ‘I’m still working on it’. Leisure, too, has become a kind of work – a time to be used productively and often to recharge ourselves to return, all the more energetically, to our jobs. Our life itself is understood as a ‘work in progress’.

In other words, the point is not just that work in the sense of a job or a career has become a kind of religious cult. A cult that, as a determinant of social status (perhaps especially for highly educated elites), widely trumps even the value attached to success in love, parenting, and family. It’s also that the cult of work no longer stops at career and its fruits, such as the satisfactions of achievement, status, and money. Rather its ethos permeates nearly every other dimension of life. Life has, in many ways, become a totalitarianism of work.

This is an extract from Jump!: A New Philosophy for Conquering Procrastination (John Murray) by Simon May. Buy a copy from Bookshop.org here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

Simon May is our guest on “A Drink with the Idler” this Thursday 29 May, at 6-7pm, when he will be sharing his expertise on ways to avoid procrastination. Free to subscribers – otherwise £7.50.

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