Sunday morning gave me a fantastic read, via multiple shares on my timeline – “Why do we work so hard?“, in which Ryan Avent traces the evolution of work (hours) from the time after the second world war, and wonders why a trend was reversed and we started working more hours. She considers her own as well as her father’s experiences, and explores whether it is the treadmill effect, the satisfaction of work, or a combination of both. She sums up one of her answers thus –
It is a cognitive and emotional relief to immerse oneself in something all-consuming while other difficulties float by. The complexities of intellectual puzzles are nothing to those of emotional ones. Work is a wonderful refuge.
Something about it gave me a sense of deja vu. I realised that this has also been my hypothesis about parenting! Back to that in a bit. Meanwhile, she ends the article with
..precisely why what I’m doing appeals to me. They are asking about a job. I am thinking about identity, community, purpose – the things that provide meaning and motivation. I am talking about my life.
It reminded me of a short conversation with S recently, where we agreed about how (many) people follow up their introductory “Hi, I am XYZ” with their designation and/or place of work, irrespective of the meeting context.
To me, both parenting and work both seem to seek the same validation – a purpose to life. While parenting seeks it from evolution, work seeks it from society, or in nuanced cases – a self image. There’s no judgment on either here, by the way. After all, creating more organisms is what evolution has built into us from the beginning of life, and everything from orgasms to parental instincts have been optimised towards this end! And ‘work’ and people’s interest in it is what has led to many advances in civilisation. In any case, it is about an individual’s state of comfort.
What does bother me though is that between these two, (most times in combination) there seems to be a monoculture being created. In Serious Men, Manu Joseph wrote,”All a man really wants is to be greater than his friends“. Both the work and parenting narratives are tailor-made for this. Started by evolution and honed by society. [‘greater’ need not be conspicuous like wealth or health, it can even be a ‘self image’] There seems to be a collective acknowledgement by society that these are the only purposes worth striving for. A monoculture that involves money and converts life into the business of living. You might argue that parenting isn’t really only that, and I’d say that all of that pleasure and love is anyway programmed into us. Also, I only have an outsider’s point of view, but from what I see around with kids, their education, their demands, it is increasingly about the child and the parent getting prepped for the business of living. Arguably again, individuals do have the freedom of choice, but it is not really outside of society.
I came across a fantastic concept recently at Digital Tonto – apparently 98% of our DNA is “junk” that doesn’t code for anything. But, as per Richard Dawkins, it is junk when viewed from our point of view – the confusion arises because we assume that DNA exists for our sakes rather than the other way around. We, he argues, are mere vehicles to propagate genes.
The monoculture I mentioned before is a vehicle evolution/society created, but now it has begun to exist for its own sake. What potentially gets restricted/lost is the single biggest asset that evolution has given our species – imagination. We have harnessed it to project futures – work or kids, but I think there is a 98% remaining to explore, create and fathom beyond those narrow scopes. If we don’t, maybe evolution will find another species that will. Evolution’s validation is itself. Perhaps that is a purpose we should strive for. It is scary, and I definitely can’t see it as a refuge, but I plan to keep at it.
