The delusion of having a meaningful job Can you really be 'passionate' about digital marketing?

I do not mean to belittle those who demand that their job be more than just a job. It is a reasonable request, given the circumstances of contemporary economic and cultural life. But put aside the fact that “meaningful” jobs allow those employers to get away with paying less. The more fundamental question is how we arrived at such an impoverished search for meaning. Now that we are in another wave of hype about technology and its potential to cause widespread job displacement (AI-powered “brand management” is already here), age-old arguments for the vita contemplativa — an obvious substitute for delusional workaholism — take on a new urgency.

Enlightenment, Kant proclaimed early in the Industrial Revolution, is the “courage to use your own understanding”, not only to think for yourself, but to do so publicly with neither fear nor favour. For too long, the bulk of humanity had outsourced this quintessential human capacity, deferring to clergy on matters of religion, to physicians on matters of health, to princes on matters of state, and so on. But even a pastor must mind his church’s teachings in his ministrations, and members of any profession must conform to certain expectations. A priest qua priest “is not free and cannot be such because he is acting under instructions from someone else”, Kant writes. But who, then, is free? Even the most senior priest is ultimately subject to “someone else”. The same goes for any professional, any employee, and any boss.

No; for Kant, only someone fulfilling the role of a scholar (even if merely temporarily) is completely free to “use his own rational capacities and to speak his own mind”. The vast majority of us must fill prefabricated roles that then become our identities, dictating what we ought to say, do, and think (a predicament that of course afflicts scholars, too, nowadays).

The result is a society of dissemblers, the denizens of LinkedIn who doth insist too much that they are “passionate” about digital marketing, sales portfolio management, or “leveraging data to help clients achieve their goals”. These are the lies we live by, and one is reminded of the Athenian Apollonius: “To speak falsely is the mark of a slave.” Enlightenment is available only to select members of those societies that satisfy certain basic conditions of freedom. But satisfying such conditions requires no shortage of unfreedom. The beating heart of it all, Kant believed, is mankind’s “heartless competitive vanity” and “insatiable desire to possess and to rule.” Without such appetites, humanity might have remained no different from its beasts of burden. It would have fallen short of its true and natural purpose, which is to develop its capacities, ad infinitum.

Kant’s understanding of progress as capability-building has obviously prevailed, culminating in the present age of endless hype about world-changing technologies, Mars missions and digital platforms to connect all of humanity. Yet one can still question his conclusions about human nature and the purpose of society. Though developing our capabilities does allow us to develop ever more capabilities, surely it also could allow more of us, someday, to get off the train. The fact that we dare not, Han believes, is a product of our economic system: a “hell of unbridled competition”, performance, and achievement, where the only constants are “hyperactivity and hyper-communication… Capitalism is nurtured by the illusion that more capital creates more life, increases the capacity to live.”

This God-is-dead explanation rings true, but it is incomplete. The problem cannot be only “capitalism”. Socialist regimes, too, fetishise action and champion their respective Stakhanovites. No, the historical transformation of waged labour from an indignity into a higher calling required more than just coercion. Beyond the rise of a particular economic system, we are also suffering the loss of an older sensibility. Those with the privilege to “do good” by “changing the world” simply assume that that is indeed what they are doing. Such conceits used to go by the name of presumption. In the cult of purposiveness, the old wisdom that recommends against hubris is not only ignored but inverted. Nowadays, Mark Zuckerberg, of all people, boasts that: “We are all blessed to have the ability to make the world better, and we have the responsibility to do it. Let’s go work even harder.”

Coming from industry leaders, such proclamations will always fit Montaigne’s description of a “fine statement under which ambition and avarice take cover”. But they have also come to reflect genuinely held, quasi-religious convictions. Like traditional religious faith, faith in one’s own purpose serves a consolatory function (especially for the secularly minded), warding off all those usual irksome existential questions about the meaning of finite lives in an apparently arbitrary cosmos. The cult of purposiveness crowds out those concerns by requiring an always-on, all-consuming asceticism, especially among its lower-ranking members.

Yet as Nietzsche — another contemplatavista who disembarked the train early on — understood, an ascetic is a paradox. By taking what looks like the difficult path, he makes “life easier for himself” through a “complete subordination to the will of another or to a comprehensive law and ritual”. By fully embracing purposiveness, and a career through which to realise it, you need not worry about what to do with yourself, or even about taking responsibility for your actions. Even supposing your (or your company’s) plans to change the world backfire and produce malign unintended consequences, at least you tried. Rarely does it occur to anyone to ask whether the world would have been better had more doers with grand designs simply abstained. In the Nineties, charities started paying ransoms to free enslaved people in Sudan; in response, the enslavers rounded up even more victims for a bigger payoff. Such examples are legion. At least they tried.

If one truly wants to make the world a better place, perhaps one ought to give more attention to how things could go wrong than to how they might go right. The problem, as contemplavistas have long known, is that our intentions are rarely as pure as we think. The ostensibly selfless act always offers its own hit of personal pleasure. Pity, as Nietzsche saw, confers a sense of superiority, just as public philanthropy brings recognition, even glory — one of the most dangerous inducements of all. Righteous indignation can veer all too easily into self-indulgence. It is an open secret that some professions and activist groups owe their existence to the perpetuation of the problem they purport to solve. But the dilemma doesn’t stop there. The economists Ruben Andersson and David Keen have documented similar dynamics in the US “wars” on illegal immigration, drugs, and terror. Each has generated its own private industry of contractors and other stakeholders (an overused term that actually fits in this case) who would be out of the job if their “purpose” was ever actually achieved.

That the purpose-driven individual’s motives include not-so-noble elements seems indisputable. That is just who we are. The sheer potency of glory and prestige is what led classical Epicureans to counsel not only retirement from public life but anonymity (though this precept proved too much for either Lucretius or Epicurus or Montaigne, for that matter). They saw the pleasures offered by a hectic, active existence as too fleeting and contingent to be worth the trouble. With wealth, public achievement, or approbation comes the fear of losing what you have won, and fear of any kind is antithetical to the tranquillity that happiness requires. Better to do away with all sources of anxiety — insofar as you can — and embrace the life of the mind (or of therapeutic tinkering, hobbies, exploration, and the like) and the pleasure of good friends. The fruits of the vita activa are perishable, Epicureans observe, whereas those of the vita contemplativa grow only sweeter with time.

Could any ethical tradition be more out of favour today? As ancient philosophies go, Stoicism is the reigning champion, not least among trade publishers and influencers. While sharing some of Epicureanism’s common-sense insights about what really matters, it is easily cherry-picked, and boasts the advantage of being practical for modern career-oriented and entrepreneurial strivers. For those selling Stoicism (a lucrative gig, to be sure), the original school’s rejection of status and other such pleasures tends to be overshadowed by its principles for maximising performance in a workaholic culture. Hence, in its offerings of “ancient wisdom for everyday life,” The Daily Stoic gives us “7 Essential Stoic Productivity Tips (from Top Performers)”. Marketed predominantly to younger male careerists, there is no better pablum to keep noses to the grindstone.

It is not surprising that Han is better known in continental Europe than in the Anglo-Saxon world — especially the United States. There has always been a strain of European radical thought that sees through the cult of purposiveness in affluent, “post-scarcity” societies. In Vita Contemplativa, he echoes (largely without attribution) post-war European Situationism, whose exponents argued that the neuroses of affluent societies lay in their ideological underpinnings, implying that no amount of policy tweaking would get to the root of the problem. Instead, more people first would have to abandon the presumption of purposiveness in roles where it holds no purchase. That may seem unlikely — not everyone wants to sit in an armchair next to the fireplace — but contemplation need not be as narrow as it sounds. Freedom from tormenting demands — not least those we place on ourselves — is what matters.

The irony is that these “inactivities”, too, would be productive in their own way, creating the conditions for the art, fellowship, and social cohesion that make human lives human. We should not wish for everyone to give up on purposiveness, of course. Large efforts are underway to commercialise solar energy and battery storage, even as others are making progress against hitherto incurable diseases. But millions of others are just fooling themselves. Another piece of “ancient wisdom for everyday life” warns that you can always have too much of a good thing. Purpose may now be one of them.

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Stuart Whatley is Senior Editor at Project Syndicate

StuartWhatley