Working Hard

It’s often remarked that people work too hard. At four in the morning, city traders can be seen jogging through Shoreditch, exercising before hitting their desks. At lunchtime, sandwich bars are packed with office workers grabbing a bite, even as they read a magazine telling them that a proper break will do wonders for their happiness. In the early evening, commuter trains are full of folk checking their email on handheld devices that were supposed to increase their leisure, not bring the office back home. We’re all workaholics now.

And yet, I suspect the problem is not so much that we work too hard. Rather, it’s that we work hard without being quite sure what we’re working for.

Consider the story of Cleanthes, the ancient Greek. He arrived in Athens, from a place way out of town, after something of a midlife crisis. He’d been a boxer, though now fed up with that, he wanted to wrestle with life and the best ideas. The trouble was he had only four drachma in his pocket, roughly four days wages for a skilled worker. Unlike many of his aristocratic philosopher peers – the likes of Aristotle and Epicurus – he would have to fund his studies. So he took up gardening by night, in order to philosophize by day. He became known as ‘the water-carrier.’

Other citizens were seriously impressed with his application. After a few months of this arduous regime, they awarded him an honorarium of ten minas, roughly three months wages for a skilled worker. It was the ancient equivalent of a student grant. In return, he wrote them a poem. In it, he extolled his fellows not to be swept along by blind desires, for if you live like that, you risk destroying your principles, your relationships, your passions. Don’t work hard and miss what you want, he advised.

Cleanthes wasn’t offering the trite self-help tip, simply to work less. He thought it is good to work hard and, after all, it is only human to want more and to devote your life to the pursuit of it. But he’d opted for a simple trade, the gardening, in order to preserve his energies for his main love, the philosophy. It’s rather like the novelist and poet, Adam Foulds, who took menial jobs that paid in order to fund his writing, which at first didn’t.

So the trick is this. Don’t not work hard. But do keep a check on whether you are working for what you really desire.

Mark Vernon