People Satisfied With Their Work Live Longer (Healthier & Happier Lives)

The feeling that what you're doing is important, is worth doing, you know, contributes to those with whom you have social bonds.

You could call me a socialist, or maybe even an anarchist. Not anarchist in the violent revolutionary sense in which most people understand it, but in the original sense of the term. In short, Anarchists believe that the objective of society is to widen the choice and freedom of individuals in that society, not restrict them. For a comprehensive account of Anarchism as a social and political philosophy, see here. Regardless, I am most certainly on the left. That is to say, I am for people above organisations, and that often includes organisations that are built up around good ideas such as these.

Too often, organisations and their bureaucracy relegate the needs of people to its own needs. Organisational aims although perhaps originally well meaning, fall fould to the power struggles of individuals tasked with executing them. The abstract demands of the organisation commands higher concern than the human need. Its purpose becomes corrupt and the people who were originally meant to benefit from the formation of the organisation, begin to suffer because of it. We see this time and time again in the local and national government, charity, and, most especially, in the world of work.

Although in the world of work, it’s fair to say that the purpose of the organisation is unapologetically selfish. Apart from social enterprises, more often than not the organisation’s purpose is to serve the interests of the people who own it rather than broader society. Regardless of well-scripted, lofty, and perhaps naive social statements, corporations exist to line the pockets of their shareholders, not to be of social benefit. If it does happen to provide a social benefit, that is not by primary design. And if the time comes that profits begin to suffer as a consequence of that chance social benefit, that social benefit will be sacrificed. And critically, whether we’d like to admit it or not, everyone who gives their time and effort to that organisation does so at the pleasure of the organisation. You’re just a number after all.

Work becomes abstract and meaningless and people’s well-being suffers. First, we become psychologically and emotionally sick, then we become physiologially sick. Lives are shortened, and as we later reflect on our working lives, we wonder why we spent our evenings and weekends in the service of this job, of this organisation which really didn’t give two shits about us anyway. They cared about getting the job done, that’s all. And as we remember the effort, worry, stress, and anxiety we and thousands of others generated in this service, we lament the loss of connection to one another. Sure, we made friends at work, but this was in spite of the conditions rather than because of them. We crave social connection, in fact, it’s a fundamental need, according to Maslow, McClelland and others. Witout it, we die. Organisations take advantage of this creating narratives for naive twenty and thirty-somethings to align with.

In 1976, Peter Jay from the BBC interviewed Noam Chomsky. They spoke about many things including meaningful work. Chomsky said that the knowledge that you are doing something useful for your community is important for job satisfaction. The feeling that what we are doing is important and worth doing and makes a contribution to those with whom we have social bonds is a very significant factor in our personal satisfaction. That aside, there is the inherent satisfaction and gratification that we receive from doing things that we enjoy. In the modern workplace, this intrinsic value seems to have been reduced to nothing, with utility taking precedence. In other words, if what we are doing cannot be transformed into financial profit, it’s hardly worth the effort. I think our society has come to believe this absolutely, and alongside this belief is the sense of absence and of meaninglessness.

My research thus far has shown me that about 40% of people dislike or flat out hates their work. Another 40% like their work but… There are extrinsics that adversely impact their happiness with work. And the remaining seem to love their work unreservedly. The research continues.

Have Your Say

I’m gathering testimony for a book I’m working on the topic of work, and I need your input. What does work mean to you, does it make you happy, do you think it makes a positive impact on the world, and what would you do if you didn’t need to work for money? Let me know.

Noam Chomsky in conversation with Peter Jay, 1976.

Full Interview Transcript

PETER JAY (BBC): You wrote, in one of your essays, that “in a decent society, everyone would have the opportunity to find interesting work, and each person would be permitted the fullest possible scope for his talents.” And then, you went on to ask: “What more would be required in particular, extrinsic reward in the form of wealth and power? Only if we assume that applying one’s talents in interesting and socially useful work is not rewarding in itself.” I think that that line of reasoning is certainly one of the things that appeals to a lot of people. But it still needs to be explained, I think, why the kind of work which people would find interesting and appealing and fulfilling to do would coincide at all closely with the kind which actually needs to be done, if we’re to sustain anything like the standard of living which people demand and are used to.

CHOMSKY: Well, there’s a certain amount of work that just has to be done if we’re to maintain that standard of living. It’s an open question of how onerous that work has to be. Let’s recall that science and technology and intellect have not been devoted to examining that question or to overcoming the onerous and self-destructive character of the necessary work of society. The reason is that it has always been assumed that there is a substantial body of wage slaves who will do it simply because otherwise they’ll starve. However, if human intelligence is turned to the question of how to make the necessary work of the society itself meaningful, we don’t know what the answer will be. My guess is that a fair amount of it can be made entirely tolerable. It’s a mistake to think that even back-breaking physical labor is necessarily onerous. Many people, myself included, do it for relaxation. Well, recently, for example, I got it into my head to plant thirty-four trees in a meadow behind the house on the State Conservation Commission, which means I had to dig thirty-four holes in the sand. You know, for me, and what I do with my time mostly, that’s pretty hard work, but I have to admit I enjoyed it. I wouldn’t have enjoyed it if I’d had work norms if I’d had an overseer, and if I’d been ordered to do it at a certain moment, and so on. On the other hand, if it’s a task taken on just out of interest, fine, that can be done. And that’s without any technology, without any thought given to how to design the work, and so on.

PETER JAY (BBC): I put it to you that there may be a danger that this view of things is a rather romantic delusion, entertained only by a small elite of people who happen, like professors, perhaps journalists, and so on, to be in the very privileged situation of being paid to do what anyway they like to do.

CHOMSKY: That’s why I began with a big “If”. I said we first have to ask to what extent the necessary work of the society — namely that work which is required to maintain the standard of living that we want — needs to be onerous or undesirable. I think that the answer is: much less than it is it today. But let’s assume there is some extent to which it remains onerous. Well, in that case, the answer’s quite simple: that work has to be equally shared among people capable of doing it.

PETER JAY (BBC): And everyone spends a certain number of months a year working on an automobile production line and a certain number of months collecting the garbage and…

CHOMSKY: If it turns out that these are really tasks in which people will find no self-fulfilment in. Incidentally, i don’t quite believe that. As I watch people work, craftsmen, let’s say, automobile mechanics for example, I think one often finds a good deal of pride in work. I think that that kind of pride in work well done, in complicated work well done, because it takes thought and intelligence to do it, especially when one is also involved in management of the enterprise, determination of how the work will be organized, what it is for, what the purposes of the work are, what’ll happen to it, and so on — I think all of this can be satisfying and rewarding activity which in fact requires skills, the kind of skills people will enjoy exercising. However, I’m thinking hypothetically now. Suppose it turns out there is some residue of work which really no one wants to do, whatever that may be — okay, then I say that the residue of work must be equally shared, and beyond that, people will be free to exercise their talents as they see fit.

PETER JAY (BBC): I put it you, Professor, that if that residue were very large, as some people would say it was, if it accounted for the work involved in producing ninety per cent of what we all want to consume — then the organization of sharing this, on the basis that everybody did a little bit of all the nasty jobs, would become wildly inefficient. Because, after all, you have to be trained and equipped to do even the nasty jobs, and the efficiency of the whole economy would suffer, and therefore the standard of living which it sustained would be reduced.

CHOMSKY: Well, for one thing, this is really quite hypothetical, because I don’t believe that the figures are anything like that. As I say, it seems to me that if human intelligence were devoted to asking how technology can be designed to fit the needs of the human producer, instead of conversely — that is, now we ask how the human being with his special properties can be fitted into a technological system designed for other ends, namely, production for profit — my feeling is that if that were done, we would find that the really unwanted work is far smaller than you suggest. But whatever it is, notice that we have two alternatives. One alternative is to have it equally shared, the other is to design social institutions so that some group of people will be simply compelled to do the work, on pain of starvation. Those are the two alternatives.

PETER JAY (BBC): Not compelled to do it, but they might agree to do it voluntarily because they were paid an amount which they felt made it worthwhile.

CHOMSKY: Well, but you see, I’m assuming everyone essentially gets equal remuneration. Don’t forget that we’re not talking about a society now where the people who do the onerous work are paid substantially more than the people who do the work that they do on choice — quite the opposite. The way our society works, the way any class society works, the people who do the unwanted work are the ones who are paid the least. That work is done and we sort of put it out of our minds, because it’s assumed that there will be a massive class of people who control only one factor of production, namely their labor, and have to sell it, and they’ll have to do that work because they have nothing else to do, and they’ll be paid very little for it. I accept the correction. Let’s imagine three kinds of society: one, the current one, in which the undesired work is given to wage slaves. Let’s imagine a second system in which the undesired work, after the best efforts to make it meaningful, is shared. And let’s imagine a third system where the undesired work receives high extra pay, so that individuals voluntarily choose to do it. Well, it seems to me that either of the two latter systems is consistent with — vaguely speaking — anarchist principles. I would argue myself for the second rather than the third, but either of the two is quite remote from any present social organization or any tendency in contemporary social organization.

PETER JAY (BBC): Let me put that to you in another way. It seems to me that there is a fundamental choice, however one disguises it, between whether you organize work for the satisfaction it gives to the people who do it or whether you organize it on the basis of the value of what is produced for the people who are going to use or consume what is produced. And that a society that is organized on the basis of giving everybody the maximum opportunity to fulfill their hobbies, which is essentially the work-for-work’s-sake view, finds its logical culmination in a monastery, where the kind of work which is done, namely prayer, is work for the self-enrichment of the worker and where nothing is produced which is of any use to anybody and you live either at a low standard of living, or you actually starve.

CHOMSKY: Well, there are some factual assumptions here, and I disagree with you about the factual assumptions. My feeling is that part of what makes work meaningful is that it does have use, that its products do have use. The work of the craftsman is in part meaningful to that craftsman because of the intelligence and skill that he puts into it, but also in part because the work is useful, and I might say the same is true of scientists. I mean, the fact that the kind of work you do may lead to something else — that’s what it means in science, you know — may contribute to something else that’s very important quite apart from the elegance and beauty of what you may achieve. And I think that covers every field of human endeavor. Furthermore, I think if we look at a good part of human history, we’ll find that people, to a substantial extent, did get some degree of satisfaction — often a lot of satisfaction — from the productive and creative work that they were doing. And I think that the chances for that are enormously enhanced by industrialization. Why? Precisely because much of the most meaningless drudgery can be taken over by machines, which means that the scope for really creative human work is substantially enlarged.

Now, you speak of work freely undertaken as a hobby. But I don’t believe that. I think work freely undertaken can be useful, meaningful work done well. Also, you pose a dilemma that many people pose, between the desire for satisfaction in work and a the desire to create things of value to the community. But it’s not so obvious that there is any dilemma, any contradiction. So, it’s by no means clear — in fact, I think it’s false — that contributing to the enhancement of pleasure and satisfaction in work is inversely proportional to contributing to the value of the output.

PETER JAY (BBC): Not inversely proportional, but it might be unrelated. I mean, take some very simple thing, like selling ice-creams on the beach on a public holiday. It’s a service to society: undoubtedly people want ice-creams, they feel hot. On the other hand, it’s hard to see in what sense there is either a craftsman’s joy or a great sense of social virtue or nobility in performing that task. Why would anyone perform that task if they were not rewarded for it?

CHOMSKY: I must say, I’ve seen some very cheery-looking ice cream vendors…

PETER JAY (BBC): Sure, they’re making a lot of money.

CHOMSKY: … who happen to like the idea that they’re giving children ice-creams, which seems to me a perfectly reasonable way to spend one’s time, as compared with thousands of other occupations that I can imagine.

Recall that a person has an occupation, and it seems to me that most of the occupations that exist — especially the ones that involve what are called services, that is, relations to human beings — have an intrinsic satisfaction and rewards associated with them, namely in the dealings with the human beings that are involved. That’s true of teaching, and it’s true of ice cream vending. I agree that ice cream vending doesn’t require the commitment or intelligence that teaching does, and maybe for that reason it will be a less desired occupation. But if so, it will have to be shared.

However, what I’m saying is that our characteristic assumption that pleasure in work, and pride in work, is either unrelated to or negatively related to the value of the output is related to a particular stage of social history, namely capitalism, in which human beings are tools of production. It is by no means necessarily true. For example, if you look at the many interviews with workers on assembly lines, for example, that have been done by industrial psychologists, you find that one of the things they complain about over and over again is the fact that their work simply can’t be done well; the fact that the assembly line goes through so fast that they can’t do their work properly. I just happened to look recently at a study of longevity in some journal on gerontology which tried to trace the factors that you could use to predict longevity — you know, cigarette smoking and drinking, genetic factors — everything was looked at. It turned out, in fact, that the highest predictor, the most successful predictor, was job satisfaction.

PETER JAY (BBC): People who have nice jobs live longer?

CHOMSKY: People who are satisfied with their jobs. And I think that makes a good deal of sense, you know, because that’s where you spend your life, that’s where your creative activities are. Now what leads to job satisfaction? Well, I think many things lead to it, and the knowledge that you are doing something useful for the community is an important part of it. Many people who are satisfied with their work are people who feel that what they’re doing is important to do. They can be teachers, they can be doctors, they can be scientists, they can be craftsmen, they can be farmers. I mean, I think the feeling that what one is doing is important, is worth doing, and contributes to those with whom one has social bonds is a very significant factor in one’s personal satisfaction.

And over and above that, there is the pride and the self-fulfilment that comes from a job well done — from simply taking your skills and putting them to use. Now, I don’t see why that should in any way harm, in fact I should think it would enhance the value of what’s produced.

But let’s imagine still that, at some level, it does harm. Well, okay, at that point, the society, the community, has to decide how to make compromises. Each individual is both a producer and a consumer, after all, and that means that each individual has to join in these socially determined compromises — if in fact there are compromises. And again, I feel the nature of the compromise is much exaggerated because of the distorting prism of the really coercive and personally destructive system in which we live.