I saw Alain de Botton (@alaindebotton) speak last week at Seattle’s Central Library. I actually saw him speak when he was here a couple years ago, because I’m a huge fan of his book Status Anxiety. His newest book is called The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work and couldn’t have been released at a more appropriate time for me.

The talk started off with the interesting observation that both marriage and work have recently (as in, since 1750 or so) been conquered by the notion that they should, in their ideal state, be relationships of love. We should love who we are married to just as we should love our work. Mistresses and hobbies have (in theory) suffered in reputation. Or, perhaps they’ve just become even more suspicious.

Though, my experience is that hobbies have in some ways supplanted work as the primary “do it with love” occupation. In some circles, we talk almost entirely of hobbies when meeting new people rather than work. Perhaps these are more cynical circles, or perhaps it was just more popular in teens and 20s when none of us had found our career of choice yet. Talking about love at the same time as talking about working at Circle K or Pizza Hut was sort of out of the question.

Over the last 5 years or so, I’ve been enamored by the idea of amateurs. The self-taught, the scrappy, the people who do something they love simply for the love of it. Perhaps that is a sign that love has not only conquered the idea of work, but pretty much replaced it.

So what does it mean?

Are we better at a task when we love the task? Does it imply that a certain loving attention is paid to every detail? Or does it mean that we’re emotionally tied to our product, and become codependent on it? Is loving a job really necessary?

I think so, but am not 100% positive. Is love an unlimited resource? Can we all just produce as much love as minutes of the day, filling each one to the brim and sipping its rich content? Or, do we have a certain number of love pokerchips which we can choose to allot to our cat, our wife, our job, or our bottle of whiskey. I tend to believe that like strength, the more we love, the more capable we are of loving.

However, an important point that Alain de Botton made about meritocracy in another context may ring true here too. If we strive to reward merit, it implies that the unrewarded lack merit. If we only value those jobs we love, it implies that those jobs we don’t love lack value.

Some work, then, must remain in the “unlovable but full of value” category lest we live in a world of dirty toilets and unshoveled driveways. For those jobs, and many others that are equally unlovable but perhaps not as visually stunning, perhaps respectful work is a better term than loved work.

This entry was posted by Buster on Sunday, June 14th, 2009 at 5:14 pm. It is filed under Responses and has these tags: alain de botton. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.