Opting out of infinite growth
An alternative to the career ladder.
Brian Hat waves at me through the front window, then ducks around the side of the house to the front door. He’s three months and two weeks into an experiment he’s running on himself, trying to reconfigure his relationship to his time and priorities. “I’ve got no excuse to not be enjoying the majority of my life. I wasn’t happy. And I take full responsibility for my own happiness, so what can I do that would make me happy?”
This is what he’s here to talk about. Brian takes off his jacket and looks around for where to hang it, accepts a cookie and a mug of herbal tea. He sits down across the dining table from me, mistakes a napkin I hand him for an item of babies’ clothing – I have known this man for five years, and I have no children – and we settle down to business. Tell me about your experiment, I say. How did it come about?
“Essentially it came about from my granddad, who worked in a biscuit factory all of his life, and retired and deeply regretted working in a biscuit factory his whole life. And then my dad retired and said exactly the same thing.” A consensus, Brian tells me, is that “a lot of people who are retired wish they had less money and more time. So I’m just trying to get a head start on that.”
Brian’s year-long experiment – six months at work, six months off work – is an attempt to apply this knowledge to the problem that working has been making him miserable for years. “The first thing everyone always says is if you don’t like your job, you should get a new job. And I did that a few times. And that didn’t help.” He went to his GP, who offered to strike him off for three months. The law firm he worked for – “and this is a sign of the sort of industry it is” – had a full-time counsellor. “I didn’t realise quite how impartial she was going to be,” Brian says, “because she said, ‘You should probably just find a different job, then.’”
The tipping point was when, after a record-breaking year, “the priorities of the department shifted from doing a good job to trying to make as much money as possible to meet an arbitrary goal. So that bothered me, coupled with a lot of stuff I’ve been reading about the infinite growth of capitalism. What is so bad about the flat line? If you’ve made record-breaking profits, what if we just took the foot off the gas slightly and gave everyone a bit more of a life?”
The resistance to the nine-to-five isn’t new. When work for money became the only option for many people in the Middle Ages, thousands chose vagabondage instead. This despite the punishments against it: branding; flogging; for second offences, the death penalty. It took centuries of state interventions aimed at ‘social order’ and an entirely new way of thinking about the body (as a thing to be controlled with the mind’s superior Reason) to get to the point where most people go to work most of the time without too much insurrection.
What does feel new is this experimental framing. “The real test,” says Brian, “will be what is that other half? I know what working is like, and that’s fine. But the other six months, can I find enough things to do with my spare time to not make this depressing,” to avoid the existential dread and the cultural hangover that productivity equals worth?
Brian hasn’t come at this question unprepared. “I want to try and fill my days with things that are at least theorised to help you achieve that underlying sense of happiness and calm that some people talk about.” Broadly speaking, he says, it’s the mind, body and soul. “I’ve got this big list. I’d like to see my dad a bit more than I do at the moment. I realised I saw him twice last year, which just isn’t good enough. I want to be better at climbing. I really want to work on the allotment. I want to do some charity work, because it’s probably the secret to happiness, helping other people. I think a lot of it focuses around how to be happy.”
Brian is lucky, he knows. He’s got skills in a field the market needs (forensic computing: “essentially, the collection, preservation, presentation, publication maybe, of digital evidence for the courts”), meaning that he can shift to a higher-pay-lower-security freelance position without impacting his finances too much. He’s just moved in with his girlfriend, who he presumes will not see him go homeless. Recently, at least, he’s led “quite a sensible life.” He has savings. He’s not advocating that this is the solution for everyone; he doesn’t even know if it’s the solution for him. How will he know it’s working?
“Yeah, that’s a good question.” Outside of the quantifiers of performance review scores and salary increases, how do you know whether you’ve done a good job or not? Are goals even good for you? Brian, and the arrival fallacy, say no – but they’re hard to escape, especially when the dominant cultural narrative is that all time, including time off, needs to be spent doing something to be worthwhile. “The ideal would be to just have an underlying sense of wellbeing and happiness at all times. Is that possible to do? I don’t know.” He pauses. “I’m going for 51%. Not to put a quantifiable metric on it.”
How’s it going so far? “I don’t know if I should be measuring it yet,” Brian says. “Because, well, the first thing I did, I had three months of work. And the work for three months was really hard, really unpleasant. And then I went off on holiday as soon as it finished. And that was obviously great. I came back and I was ill for a week. That was less great. But it was still better.” He laughs. “It was still way better.”