Getting it wrong part 1: The age of leisure?

It seems that those of us who had our formative years in the 60s and early 70s were more likely to want to make the world a better place, and less likely to be motivated by money, than those that followed. One reason for this I suspect is that our personal economic futures felt secure. Modern industrial society was clearly capable of producing more than enough stuff to go around, the problem was working out how to get it fairly distributed. 

The general growth in productivity and, in particular, the advent of computers was widely forecast to result in an age of leisure. I was reminded of this by a recent article in the  Guardian in which I was surprised to learn that even in the 1930s the economist John Maynard Keynes was predicting that 

"leisure would increasingly oust work from the centre of our lives" and that "as societies got richer, the exemption from toil {would spread to more and more people. Leisure would increasingly become the meaningful core of life; and work, in the sense of working for a living, would increasingly become a residual."

Well a good number of us got that one wrong, but at least it turns out we were in good company.  We should have known that Capitalism really doesn't know when enough is enough and I suppose it was extremely naive of us to imagine that it might. 

Now, whilst I'm not too bad about getting on with things where I can see there's a point, I'm not really much of a worker. More of a daydreamer really. When asked what I do the best I can manage is "Oh you know , a bit of this and that" and, apart from 13 years teaching in Further Education, I've never managed to stick to a career. This isn't to say that "this and that" doesn't bring in anything at all, but its quite modest. Instead I usually find it easier to avoid spending money that to make it. I know that I'm lucky to have the choice and I'm lucky to have a partner whose regular, and worthwhile, work keeps us well above the bread line. 

But I also know that there are people on more money than us who feel hard up. By any historical standards they've got more than enough. They've got comfortable housing, they can afford to eat well, to keep warm, to travel, to go out a couple of times a week, pursue their hobbies and have a big telly, yet still they feel they haven't got enough.

For some of us there's a disconnection between the things we need, for shelter, food, clothing and social contact and those that can only really be classified as wants; a newer car, a smarter phone, a second skiing trip, a bigger caravan... 

It seems we underestimated the power of the advertising industry to keep us in a permanent state of dissatisfaction. We underestimated the ability of consumer capitalism to alienate us so much from each other that we end up relying on empty cultural signifiers, like designer handbags, to demonstrate our social status.

I'm often walk the dog and get to know the other dog walkers. To most of them I'm just Poppy's dad.  One day I met Fudge's mum. We both enjoy walking and got into conversation about why some people didn't. Her view was that when you walked you couldn't help but think about things and that the reason lots of people didn't walk was because they weren't comfortable with their own thoughts.

I know that for mathematicians, such as Andrew Wiles, one of the most important things they can have is somewhere to walk and think. A curious conclusion might be that if you want good mathematicians you need good quality public space. However, for those who aren't mathematicians or philosophers and whose mental space has been hi-jacked by the virus of consumerism, where making a decision is synonymous with deciding what to buy next, you can see why they might be wondering why they're  walking when they could be earning or spending.

In the early 1980's I lived and worked in the United States as a medical researcher, if you must know, making electrical measurements from mouse eggs, and I remember an advert for the Sunday edition of the New York Times. It showed a young couple having breakfast in bed along with the magazine section of the paper. The copy said "You work six days a week and on Sundays you decide what you're working for"