Events have taken an alarming turn. I have a job. A job job. A real one, where you go into an office and do things involving stationery. This is at once a great blessing—it’s a nice job: I’m editing the books pages of a weekly magazine—and a source of mild alarm. After six years earning my living, primarily, in an egg-stained dressing-gown, I can’t know for sure how I shall cope with being reintroduced to ordinary society. One hears a lot about the successes of captive-breeding programmes that reintroduce endangered species to the wild; rather less about the opposite process.
That’s as it might be. There’s less of the opposite process about. We live in an age of home-working and flexi-working; of zero-hours contracts and portfolio existences. More and more of us are strangers to the office—or, at least, have the sort of relationship with the office that is the equivalent of the stiff politeness with which you re-encounter a long-ago one-night stand.
Certainly, as everyone I know who has been on both sides of the divide affirms, there’s nothing to focus the mind like being self-employed. The notion that freelancers spend their days watching Judge Judy or Storage Wars, while their office-bound contemporaries work diligently at their cubicles like little honeybees bustling in their hexagonal pods, is the exact opposite of the truth. When left in the house on my own, even if I didn’t have that much work to do, the very idea of turning on the telly, or taking a long bath with a glass of claret, or going back to bed, filled me with a dreadful terror. If I did that, where would it end?
When somebody else is paying for your time—alas for what this says about our moral characters—you are infinitely more likely to spend it arsing around on Facebook, making sheep’s eyes at other members of staff, drinking at lunchtime or, if you’re fortunate enough to be provisioned with a cupboard, taking a restorative kip in the early afternoon.
This is what, in The Practice of Everyday Life, the theorist Michel de Certeau called “la perruque,” though he cast it as an act of principled resistance against Power, as reified through the dehumanising and commodifying effect of waged labour. Five will get you ten that de Certeau came up with this ingenious theory while skiving off from his proper job.
Yet most people still seem to regard wage-slavery, in particular of the white-collar sort, as a far less desirable condition than the freelance life. Nikil Saval’s breezy and often amusing new social history of white-collar work, Cubed, pretty much takes this as its premise: it regards Herman Melville’s clerk Bartleby—who politely rejects his whole role in life with the words “I would prefer not to”—as the first martyr of the clerkocracy. His, it suggests, is a brave proleptic stand against what was to come. Office life, in this account of it, is Taylorised and sterilised: with white-collar workers and the environments in which they do their work ever more uniform and interchangeable, assessed by sinister managerial metrics and as fungible as hexagonal nuts in a giant machine. It sees office life as a sort of hell.
That is to ignore, though, the familiar pleasures of routine: the exchange of such blissfully meaningless expressions as “Morning!” and “Coffee?”; the nicely calibrated emotional distance that the etiquette of office life places between you and your co-workers; the nicely calibrated physical distance that the commute places between you and your children. It ignores the fact that there is something to be said for a constant low level of anxiety—a drip-drip-drip of small demands on your attention—as a homeopathic remedy for the beard-tearing existential panic that can swoop on any of us when we’re entirely in charge of our own destinies.
Nope. The more I consider my new, counter-trend position—especially in light of the psychologically suboptimal datum that eight in 10 of the conversations I’ve had over the last few years have been conducted over the internet with strangers—the more optimistic I find myself. I shall mothball my dressing-gown and say, contra Bartleby: “I prefer to.”
