My aunt and uncle gave me The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work as a present after I graduated from school last June; because it was hardcover, somewhat long, didn’t have an extremely appealing title, and it was written by someone with a weird name (“Alain de Botton? I haven’t heard of any Alain de Botton”), I put off reading it for a long time. Well, I finally read it, and the author has a lot to say.

A quick “book review” paragraph: it’s entertaining. The author’s formidable education allows him to pepper his prose with sentences like “She had the strong, almost masculine beauty one might have associated with the wife of a middle-ranking colonial administrator in Uganda in the 1920s”. Anyway, I learned about logistics of warehouse distribution; the process from start-to-finish of how a fish goes from the Indian Ocean to a British supermarket; biscuit marketing; an eccentric career counselor; how a Japanese television company paid $750mm to launch, from French Guyana, a satellite into orbit; an obscure British painter obsessed with the study of particular moments in nature; a fiend for power pylons; an accounting firm; oddball entrepreneurs; and the business of aviation. I was exposed to great quotes by Hegel; I learned about the Encyclopédie (how cool!); the megalomaniac former president of the Maldives. Also, I had to write down at least 25 words to look up later that evening.

But I’d like this post to be about the message of the book. Since the advent of the industrial revolution, it has been more practical for man to specialize in a specific labor skill-set than to be a well-rounded individual; e.g. Why should a doctor know about shoe repair? This is increasingly true in our global, service-based economy… if you need something done, a quick internet search will link you to the appropriate merchant. If you have a service to offer, a quick AdWords campaign will connect you with people looking to buy!

People have become more like commodities than individuals. Of course, some people, like the barely-profitable landscape painter, get to specialize in their dream career. Otherwise, though, people become alienated, cogs in a machine much greater than themselves. And even the higher-ups don’t seem to be too happy. In that sense we have become like bees, working in service to a great, buzzing hive.

No matter what we create, it will eventually be wiped away by natural processes; de Botton argues that work offers an escape from this depressing thought. Why not consciously give the hive a purpose: the distributed happiness of mankind? I always thought that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World got a bad rap; SOMA would be great. It’s just not sustainable.

Link: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work on Amazon.com.

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