What do we really gain from working?

With the debates in recent years on retirement, questions have also arisen in psychiatrists' offices. This patient, having largely reached the age and conditions required to claim retirement, then wondered about the reasons why he was unable to assert his rights. “What does work bring you?” I asked him.

Very quickly and without thinking too much, he listed: relationships with others; financial autonomy; a narcissistic satisfaction in doing a good job; recognition; the feeling of being useful; continue to learn; to transmit ; take on challenges… Then he smiled as he realized that with such expectations, he was not about to stop working.

An operation shaped by agriculture

Contrary to what one imagines, the basic answer of salary and living conditions is never the first to come up in the polls. Very regularly, only 40% of employees say they work to earn a living. If everything was just a question of retribution, what can we say about these bullshit jobs, useless and sterile jobs, which lead straight to bore-out, this syndrome of exhaustion and depression caused by the loss of meaning? And why don't we see the development of artificial intelligence and robots ready to replace us as an opportunity? Perhaps because it is not yet accessible to us to imagine a world and a life without work.

However, in our creative mythologies, work is a curse linked to our human condition. According to the Bible, God condemned man to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow for having transgressed the prohibition of the Garden of Eden. For Judeo-Christian centuries, there was no questioning of the laborious and painful side of work, this suffering being based on reparation for original sin.

In terms of history, it intervened in our daily lives with agriculture, nine thousand years BC. If, previously, it was possible to hunt when hungry, agriculture brought the necessity of daily work. Even today, one hundred and ten centuries later, our relationship to time, to idleness, our submission to the vagaries of nature, our attachment to effort and reward, to property and wealth, to status social and growth, everything that shapes our relationship to work comes from agriculture, its demands, its uncertainties, its ingratitude.

For our ancestors of Greek Antiquity, work was to be avoided, as it prevented them from devoting themselves to philosophy and the questioning of ethical questions. It is true that the writings of Aristotle and Plato have reached us, not those of the cohorts of slaves, artisans or traders, whose work allowed the former not to work. In the Age of Enlightenment, philosophers (such as Diderot) began to equate work and self-realization. Then, Protestant thought, triumphant in the United States, home of capitalism, associates work and wealth with a blessing from Heaven: if God has condemned us to work, he will reward us in hard cash. “The true end of work is no longer man but money”, summarizes the philosopher Alain de Botton, in Splendors and miseries at work (see below). With capitalism which buys our labor force, the economic imperative, fueled by profit, prevails over the human imperative, fueled by the need for security, fulfillment, respect and recognition.

An existence to justify in society

It is here that two men come together, whose thoughts one would be tempted to oppose: Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. For them, man is above all a worker. For the author of Capital it is by working, by developing his physical and intellectual strengths, that man extracts himself from animality and gains his humanity. “The kingdom of freedom begins where one stops working out of necessity,” writes the communist thinker. Alienation occurs when, dependent on his salary, a man loses himself by selling himself to a boss and to forces of production external to himself, which prevent him from nourishing his passion, his reason and his creativity. In Discontent in civilization (Payot, “Petite Bibliothèque”, 2010), the founder of psychoanalysis writes: “No other technique for leading one's life binds the individual as solidly to reality as the emphasis placed on work, which surely inserts at least into a piece of reality, the human community1. » For Freud, work represents “the possibility of displacing a high proportion of libidinal components, narcissistic, aggressive and even erotic components, on professional work and on the human relationships which are attached to it”. It thus allows everyone to “affirm and justify their existence in society”. We work to join the community of men and transcend our nature. It is in this vision that we can speak of sublimation through work.

For Christophe Dejours, psychoanalyst specializing in suffering at work, “the compensation that mobilizes the majority of workers is not material compensation.” Not that it is unimportant, of course, but it is not a driving force. The expected retribution is above all a symbolic retribution: its main form is recognition, he writes in The best in us (Payot, 2021). “Recognition in the sense of gratitude for the service rendered; recognition in the sense of judgment on the quality of the work accomplished. Recognized by his peers, a worker gains access to belonging: belonging to a team, to a collective, to a professional community. Belonging is what work allows us to ward off loneliness.” Work is therefore what integrates us into the human community and allows us to act in the service of others. This is what all the “frontline workers” have humbly proven to us who, during the Covid crisis, offered us the possibility of living – or even surviving, in the case of caregivers. We gain our value there, that which is rewarded by salary, of course, but above all approval, recognition and gratitude. We legitimize our usefulness in the great chain of men and nature. Beyond the dissatisfaction, the arduousness and sometimes the suffering, beyond our resignations, our dismissals, our moments of crisis, this is what moves us: the search through work for our place in society. Company. But then, to return to the debates on pension reform, if work has this role, what about the moment when it stops? As for the patient who had listed all the gains he found in continuing to practice his profession, there is only one question left to ask: in which spaces, in which activities to receive all these benefits? In order to leave the world of work without being excluded from the world of men.