Blue sky thinking: is it time to stop work taking over our lives?
Three encounters loom large in the anthropologist James Suzman’s memory of his brief but informative stint in the corporate world. The first was early on, when he told a colleague that he didn’t need to spend the half-million pounds allocated for a task because he could do it for free. His colleague was horrified. “If you don’t spend your budget,” he said, “they won’t think we’re doing anything!”
Soon afterwards, Suzman was chatting with a board director about what they’d do if they won the lottery. Suzman thought of the director’s massive townhouse and annual bonus. He was surprised when the man told him that, even with a colossal windfall, he’d continue working.
Later, the same director observed to Suzman and the rest of the senior management team that they spent more time with each other than they did with their families. He delivered the line matter-of-factly, as though it were just the way work was. But Suzman knew that it didn’t have to be.
Before he took his job, Suzman had spent some 15 years based among the Ju/’hoansi “Bushmen” of eastern Namibia, who were notable for having sustained a foraging society well into the 20th century. And while he lived among them, he witnessed first-hand how the hunter-gatherer life was far from the constant struggle for survival many of us imagine it to have been. In 1966, a landmark anthropology paper had found that the Ju/’hoansi were generally well nourished and lived long, content lives. They used the bulk of their time to rest, or have fun. Astonishingly, they spent just 15 hours a week finding food, and they stored little for the future, trusting in the surrounding desert to provide when required. Any individual surpluses were redistributed among the group. With social sanctions for selfishness and selfimportance, their economy functioned in such a way as to eradicate inequality and material desires. Anthropologists concluded that the Ju/’hoansi worked almost exclusively to meet their immediate needs, beyond which their wants were few.
By contrast, in the corporate world
– the world we know, where we might work 80-hour weeks largely untethered from any question of what is required and what is lusted after – our desires seem limitless, driven by an ever-escalating demand for growth and productivity.
To Suzman, the implications of this contrast were seismic. First, it suggested that the assumptions underpinning our modern economy – that we are competitive by nature, that our desires will always exceed our means – were wrong. And second, it meant that for the vast majority of our history, while we roamed the Earth as hunter-gatherers, we enjoyed more leisure time than we do today. In an age of increasing inequality, ill health, dissatisfaction and even desperation around work – and, with the coronavirus pandemic, more uncertainty than ever – it presents a hopeful thought: maybe it doesn’t have to be like this.
“Half the value of understanding hunter-gatherer society is to recognise that lots of these things that we think we are hostage to are actually not a part of our nature,” says Suzman, emphatically. “We can trace our work ethic, we can understand why we became obsessed with scarcity, we can understand why it’s different now… Maybe there are other ways of doing things.”
Our understanding of work as a means to an end has been so derailed it often feels as though we never stop working. We work for free and monetise our hobbies. We work on our bodies, our relationships, our selves. For many of us, maybe more than might like to admit it, work may be our primary identity.
It has been the driving force of my life for nearly 20 years, the unquestioned catalyst for me to move to another country or stay up all night. Given the option of a lighter load, my preference has been for slightly too much – occasionally misjudging the line.
“You’re a worker, I’m a worker,” says Suzman freely, when we meet at a café in Cambridge, where he lives. “I identify myself very much with my work. I’m actually rudderless when I’m not working; doing things like a pure leisure holiday, I find unbearable.” At its most fundamental level, says Suzman, work is the process of capturing and expending energy – so it seems fitting that he should have so much of it. He is breezy about his knowledge and persuasive in his arguments, and his mind draws links across human history just about as fast as he can express them.
Suzman looks back on his seven years in a corporate role as “fieldwork in big business”. But he still seems to feel conflicted about the experience, not least when he tells me who he worked for: the diamond-mining giant De Beers.
He joined in 2007 as its global director of public affairs, wooed by its talk of wanting to go green and give back. Under his leadership, the company was repeatedly recognised by the industry for its sustainabilityreporting practices and environmental and social performance. As an anthropologist, Suzman learned the company culture and quickly scaled its ranks, “But the longer I was there, the more I internalised it,” he says. “I began to dislike myself terribly, sitting there thinking: ‘How’s my bonus going to look this