Not Against Work

I was thrilled. At the ripe young age of ten, I made it onto the stage of Three Little Bakers Dinner Theatre. It was only a local professional theatre—not even equity—but in Delaware and at my age, it might as well have been Broadway. I was only the understudy for the normal kid, a boy who later came to be one of my closest friends, but for those four guaranteed performances, I was in heaven. The role was a big one in their annual Christmas show (much of which was stolen directly from the Radio City Music Hall’s “Christmas Spectacular”), and as someone who loved singing, dancing, and generally showing off to large crowds, the huge theatre was absolutely perfect. The fact that it was paid, and therefore a job, did not faze me one bit. I would have gladly worked there even if I was not compensated.

Working for no pay seems slightly counter-intuitive. In current usage, the term “work” describes a thing that we do in order to survive, not generally something of interest. It takes up all of our time, and each day we cannot wait to get back home and spend time doing other things; watching TV, spending time with family, and generally relaxing, to name a few. We work to get money, so theoretically we will only do the work that is necessary to get the pay we want. In his essay, “Against Work,” Christopher Clausen points out that this may not always be true. “Today those of us with full-time employment typically put in several hundred more hours per year than western Europeans,” Clausen writes, “Our disposable income is correspondingly higher, though when asked whether we would prefer more leisure to greater wealth, most of us opt for leisure” (Clausen, 672). We claim that we desire to have more free time, which makes sense with how we currently view work, as an inconvenient obligation. But, as Clausen makes clear, we define ourselves by our job and how long we spend there (672). When two strangers are introduced, almost inevitably the question will arise, “What do you do for a living?” In college, it may be even worse, as students are certain to ask each other, “What is your major?” We have not even entered the workforce yet, but already our lives are devoted to determining our future careers, and developing the skills necessary to do the jobs we want to do.

But, already I have begun to use the phrase “want to do” when talking about a job. Clausen never makes this distinction between jobs that we want to do and jobs we do not want to do, a classification that W.H. Auden makes clear in his short comments on “Work and Labor.” He defines “work” as a job that one is paid for but also takes interest in; “labor” is something entirely different, where one takes a job just for the money and ability to support their family, even though they have no interest in it (Auden, 654). Thus, there is nothing inherent in a job that makes it “work” or “labor;” any job can be either, depending on the attitude of the person doing the job. Clausen’s definition of “work” is much more unclear. There is no obvious subdivision of enjoyed work and hated work to Clausen; rather, he lumps it all into one big category called “work.”

Personally, I have never had to do what Auden calls “labor” for any significant amount of time—only as a quick favor to someone or as volunteer work. All of the working that I have done in my life has been in the theatre, a field which I thoroughly enjoy. I have been a performer, a stage manager, a spotlight operator, a music operator, and many other positions, all of which appeal to me. Although I am in college for a career path other than the theatrical arts, I know that if I found myself working in a theatre for the rest of my life, I would not be disappointed. Performing and working in technical theatre has provided some of the most enjoyable experiences of my lifetime. I believe with my entire being that my life would be significantly happier if I were to work in the theatre than, say, as a sanitation worker. A sanitation worker may, however, have the complete reciprocal feelings toward the two occupations. There are sanitation workers in this world who genuinely enjoy what they do, and it is certainly possible that some of those workers would hate to be on stage. Maybe they hate getting up in front of crowds, but love the feeling of doing something integral to the health and well-being of others.

A classification must be made, but the terms “work” and “labor” are too connected into our everyday language, having become almost interchangeable. Different people use the terms differently, so a new way to define these types of jobs must be created. To avoid the preconceived ideas about words in English, I must turn to German, where multiple ideas are easily and commonly presented in the same word, forming a compound with an entirely new meaning. A job that someone enjoys and makes them happy, called “work” in Auden’s dichotomy, is “Arbeitsliebe,” (pronounced Ahr-bites-lee-buh) literally meaning “work love.” On the flipside would be “Arbeitshass,” (pronounced Ahr-bites-hahss) or “work hate.” My own Arbeitsliebe would be working in a theatre in the above example, and my Arbeitshass would be sanitation work. Of course, these are not the only jobs to which these terms apply. I am studying Music Technology because I want to work in that field. Thus, any job I could get as a Music Technologist would be an Arbeitsliebe. In addition to sanitation work, I would hate to do many other jobs, like mining, factory work, food service, and the list goes on and on. The set of jobs I would hate to do are my Arbeitshasse, and the set of jobs I would love to do are my Arbeitslieben.

It seems significant, though, that even in Auden’s dichotomy, even the favorably-defined “work,” now “Arbeitsliebe,” has its downside. He says, “[A worker] is therefore more likely to take too little leisure than too much; workers die of coronaries and forget their wives’ birthdays,” (Auden, 654) which is the entire subject of Ellen Goodman’s essay, “The Company Man.” Goodman shows a man who works so hard that he eventually dies as a result of the way he treated his body, making it take a backseat to his job (Goodman, 629). Goodman never makes it clear what the subject’s attitude to his job is, so it cannot be easily classified in Auden’s system, but it seems as though the subject must have had some enjoyment in his work to have spent so much time there even when he was not required to.

Or maybe there’s something else going on in the essay. Even using the terms Arbeitsliebe and Arbeitshass leave a bit to be desired. It is possible for a person to spend a great deal of time, even when not required to, working in a job that they hate. A sanitation worker, particularly one working as a custodian, works long hours doing something that most people would never enjoy doing—cleaning up after others. Money becomes a big factor here, as a person who has a limited skill set may only be able to get a job with low pay, and as result must work longer hours to afford the things they want in life. Thus, a worker who hates his job could find himself working terribly long hours, and getting the same result in life as Goodman’s Company Man. Though perhaps less likely, the converse is also possible. A person may love their job but the job itself may call for short hours, or maybe they have restrictions due to labor unions, in which case a person could spend little time in their Arbeitsliebe.

Perhaps Clausen’s ambiguity about which type of work he is against is therefore intentional. Arbeitshass is simply bad because a person spends their time doing something they do not want to do, literally wasting their life away. Arbeitsliebe is just as dangerous, because a person is much more likely to focus their entire attention on the work and neglect the other things deemed important in life: family, health, and friends. Thus, a person can be happy with their work, but unhappy in all other aspects of life. Perhaps this explains the study findings that Clausen cites, where David Watson claims that people are just as happy in low-paying, low-status jobs as people in high-paying, high-status jobs, regardless of their interest in the field (675).

As such, Clausen’s recommendations against work, or at least toward reducing work, make sense, whether it is Arbeitshass, Arbeitsliebe, or anything in-between. It is the very subject of Ellen Gilchrist’s essay, whose title alone gives it all away, “The Middle Way: Learning to Balance Family and Work” (Gilchrist, 656). It seems that Clausen and Gilchrist argue the same thing: that as a society, we need to learn to balance work and other things in life. “The Middle Way” is something usually only referred to in Buddhist philosophy. The Middle Way to a Buddhist is a concept of non-extremism, trying to find a middle ground between self-indulgence and self-mortification. Clausen and Goodman would likely call the devotion to work a type of self-mortification, and Gilchrist wants us to find that balance between heavy devotion to work and the self-indulgence of spending life out of work. She wants us to find a point where we work enough to get the money we need to survive and live the life that we want to live, but where we do not work so much that we ignore other aspects of life. Her argument is perhaps the most realistic of the three in the sense that she acknowledges that working is something most people must do in order to survive, as most of us are not being lucky enough to be born into great wealth, but warns that spending all of our time working is bad.

I never had a problem with working long hours. In theatre (and most other music professions) long and usually sporadic hours are the norm. An actor may spend three hours working one day, and twelve the next rehearsing for an upcoming show, which after opening may require up to eight 3- or 4-hour time commitments spread throughout the week. To most other professionals, this sounds like a breeze, but working in the theatre is an incredibly exhausting profession. An actor in a musical is required to memorize a few hours’ worth of material, including spoken dialogue and music, as well as memorize where they are to go on stage at any given point, any and all dance steps, and where they should be backstage when they are not performing. The performance itself involves a high amount of energy, as the actor must dance, sing, and speak lines in a way that has been decided upon to convey the proper emotion, much of which is left up to the actor’s personal analysis. They must also juggle any changes of costume and/or microphones, any use of objects (props), and in some cases, the movement of set pieces throughout the show. What’s more, this all must be done in the same way every time. An audience member recommends a show because of the specific acting styles of the performers, and to keep more audience members coming back, nothing must change. No other profession requires such a high level of perfection and consistency. Music performance is exhausting on all imaginable levels.

But here is where I part from Clausen. To Clausen, such an exhausting job is not worth doing because it goes against the idea that “the purpose of life is to enjoy it,” but that is precisely what ends up happening in theatre (672). Clausen perhaps never got to reap the rewards of his seemingly-pointless job in the Heart Institute, because he never got to interact with the recipients of his work, but in theatre, that interaction is constant (674). An actor can see the audience from the stage. That in itself is something that generally does not occur to people, but it is something the actor knows and uses. Some people claim that a good actor can deliver the same performance regardless of the audience, but in my experience an audience’s reaction fuels the actor to continue and to perform with gusto and energy. The benefits to the actor are instantaneous. After a good song or scene, there is applause and the actor feels appreciated. If there is a good joke in the script, the audience laughs, and although it was not a joke of his invention, the actor still feels like a comedic genius. Depending on the general practices of the theatre itself, the actor may get the opportunity to meet with audience members following a performance, which is always a rewarding experience. Everyone loves to be told they’ve done a good job at something, and an actor gets to hear it hundreds of times in only a few hours’ time. It gets more exciting when the patrons elaborate.

A woman once came to me after a performance of The Sound of Music, in which I played Rolf, the mail-boy-turned-Nazi who loved the eldest of the von Trapp children, Liesl, and in the end of the play lets the family go despite his duty and opportunity to turn them in to his superiors. After shaking my hand, as audience members normally do, she pulled me into a hug and whispered, “I knew you wouldn’t do it.” To this woman, I had become something much more than an actor playing a role; I had become Rolf, the young boy who got mixed up with the wrong crowd but still managed to know where his heart lay. To this woman, I represented true love conquering the most terrible of circumstances, and the idea that sometimes things can go right in life when everything else goes horribly wrong. Moments like that make the effort of acting more than worth it. I could easily devote my life to earning those moments.

Clausen clearly never had that experience. To him, a professor, work is a chore that, although “some of what [he does] for a living is fun,” is not in any way outweighed by the rewards (673). That is what Arbeitsliebe is all about; the benefits—whether psychological, financial, social, or intellectual—afforded by a job overpowering the difficulties attached to it to create something that a person can easily spend their existence doing. Clausen believes that, “humans are the only animal that doesn’t think the purpose of life is to enjoy it,” but in reality, we merely enjoy it in a different way.

Works Cited

Auden, W.H. “Work and Labor.” Occasions for Writing. Ed. Pat C. Hoy II and Robert DiYanni. Boston: Wadsworth, 2008. 654.

Clausen, Christopher. “Against Work.” Occasions for Writing. Ed. Pat C. Hoy II and Robert DiYanni. Boston: Wadsworth, 2008. 672-676.

Gilchrist, Ellen. “The Middle Way: Learning to Balance Family and Work.” Occasions for Writing. Ed. Pat C. Hoy II and Robert DiYanni. Boston: Wadsworth, 2008. 656-659.

Goodman, Ellen. “The Company Man.” Occasions for Writing. Ed. Pat C. Hoy II and Robert DiYanni. Boston: Wadsworth, 2008. 629-630.