should expect to discover life’s purpose
in work. “With dollar-compensation no
longer the overwhelmingly most im-
portant factor in job motivation,” the
chairman of the New York Stock Ex-
change wrote, “management must de-
velop a better understanding of the more
elusive, less tangible factors that add up
to ‘job satisfaction.’” After a while, ev-
eryone was supposed to love work. “Do
what you love and you’ll never work a
day in your life” popped up all over the
place in the nineteen-eighties and nine-
ties, along with the unpaid internship,
the busting of unions, and campaigns to
cut taxes on capital gains. It soon be-
came, in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street,
a catechism. “The only way to do great
work is to love what you do,” Steve Jobs
told a graduating class at Stanford in
- “If you love what you’re doing, it’s
not ‘work,’” David M. Rubenstein, a
C.E.O. of the Carlyle Group, said on
CNBC in 2014. “Everywhere you look
you hear people talking about meaning,”
a disillusioned Google engineer told
McCallum. “They aren’t philosophers.
They aren’t psychologists. They sell ban-
ner ads.” It’s not pointless. But it’s not
poetry. Still, does it have to be?
I
n the eighteen-twenties and thirties,
the French mathematician Gaspard-
Gustave de Coriolis, studying the effect
produced when, for instance, one bil-
liard ball hits another, used the word
“travail.” Experimenters soon began
applying the English equivalent, “work,”
to describe, say, what a steam engine
does when it converts steam pressure
into the motion that runs a machine.
By the end of the industrializing nine-
teenth century, work had generally come
to mean the time and effort people
spend on the labor required to feed
their needs. More and more, it meant
the effort men spend, doing work in
exchange for money, to provide for the
needs of their families. That emerging
definition is part of the story of how
the unpaid and often invisible work
that women do, at home, came to be
called something other than work. An-
other kind of analytical cleavage took
root, too, between work and what came
to be called craft.
In “Work: A Deep History, from the
Stone Age to the Age of Robots” (Pen-
guin Press), the South African anthro-
pologist James Suzman, a specialist on
the Khoisan peoples, disputes the eco-
nomic definition of “work.” One cul-
ture’s work is another’s leisure; one peo-
ple’s needs are, to another people, mere
wants. Suzman proposes, instead, to
define “work” as “purposefully expend-
ing energy or effort on a task to achieve
a goal or end,” a definition so commit-
ted to its universality as to risk becom-
ing meaningless. He insists that the key
word here is “purposeful”: to act pur-
posefully is to understand cause and
effect. Among the traits that distinguish
Homo sapiens from other primates, Suz-
man argues, is this capacity, which—
because of humans’ harnessing of, for
instance, fire—makes possible a differ-
ent relationship to provisioning. This
argument is both old and fashionable:
gorillas often spend more than fifty
hours a week gathering and eating food;
human hunter-gatherers, acting pur-
posefully, typically spend only between
fifteen and seventeen hours a week on
feeding themselves, leaving them plenty
of time for all sorts of other things.
“Hazda men seem much more concerned
with games of chance than with chances
of game,” the anthropologist Marshall
Sahlins quipped about African hunter-
gatherers, whom he called “the original
affluent society.”
If human beings are able to spend
less time working than other primates,
why do so many people now work as
hard as gorillas? Suzman’s answer is at
once anthropological and historical, and
it has to do with agriculture. “For 95
per cent of our species’ history,” Suz-
man writes, “work did not occupy any-
thing like the hallowed place in people’s
lives that it does now.” According to
Suzman, “up until the Industrial Revolu-
tion, any gains in productivity farming
peoples generated as a result of work-
ing harder, adopting new technologies,
techniques, or crops, or acquiring new
land were always soon gobbled up by
populations that quickly grew to num-
bers that could not be sustained.” The
harder farmers worked, the harder they
had to work.
For much of human history, a great
many people who tilled the land were
serfs and slaves. The harder they worked,
notwithstanding catastrophic events
like plagues and droughts, the more
they produced, and the better the land-
owner and his family ate. The idea that
it’s virtuous to spend more of your time
working was embodied by the figure of
the yeoman farmer, a smallholder who
owned his own land and understood
hard work, in Benjamin Franklin’s for-
mulation, as “the way to wealth.” Then
came the rise of the factory. The Indus-
trial Revolution alienated people from
the products of their labor, as Karl Marx
observed. It also, Glenn Adamson ar-
gues in “Craft: An American History”
“It draws an awful lot of attention to my midsection, is all.” (Bloomsbury), alienated people from
