Kaleidoeye

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作者：SCOTT KOENIG @ 2022-2-22
来源：Nautilus
翻译：Kaleidoeye / 奂目

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After years of being encouraged to choose a job I love so I’ll never work a day in my life, I figured I had found my ticket: science. Like many academics, I identify with my work. I pursued a Ph.D. largely because I’ve always thought of myself as curious and enthusiastic about nature, particularly the brain. Research at a university felt like a natural extension of those traits.

经历了多年被鼓励选择一份自己因热爱而不会感到有一天劳作的工作后，我想我找到了入场券：科学。像许多学者一样，我把自己与工作看齐。我过去一直在追求博士学位，因为我认为自己对自然—尤其是人脑—有好奇心与热情。在大学做研究像是这些特点的自然延伸。

Now, as I approach graduation at the City University of New York, I’m hedging against a competitive academic job market and applying for all kinds of jobs inside and outside academia. And as a bewildering testament to the overlap between my work and my identity, I can feel my self-concept change with the waxing and waning prospects of each application, my personal narratives regularly reweaving themselves to make this job—no, that one—seem like the logical culmination of my efforts so far.

现在，当我快要从纽约市立大学毕业时，为防范竞争激烈的学术市场带来的损失，我申请了各种学术内外的工作。面对工作与个性的冲突这个令人困惑的事实，我能感受到自我在每次申请工作时，随着充盈与黯淡的预期而不断地改变。我的个人叙述不断地重塑，这个工作——不，那一个——看来是我迄今为止逻辑上努力所带来的最好回报。

Work at a nonprofit? I’ve always been mission-driven, and I’m ready to leave behind the glacial pace and heady abstraction of academic research and actually make an impact, goes the inner monologue. OK, never mind, they rejected me. But now that university is emailing me back. Come to think of it, I’m passionate about education and impartial investigation, and no workplace has ever felt more like home than a college campus. The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson would call this a symptom of workism: “the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose; and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.”

在非营利组织工作？我总是被使命驱动，准备好不去考虑学术研究的缓慢进展与令人兴奋的抽象理念，真正地干出一份大事业，上演一出独角戏。好吧，没想到的是，他们拒绝了我。但是现在那所大学又召我回来。想想吧，我醉心于教育和公正的评估，没有哪个地方比校园更舒坦了。大西洋杂志的德里克·汤普森将这称为工作主义的症状：“相信工作不仅对于经济产出必要，而且是个人身份与生活目标的核心；相信任何为促进人类福祉的政策都必须鼓励工作。”

I’m not alone in viewing work as something like a religion. In a 2019 Pew Research report, Americans ranked “having a job or career they enjoy” as more essential to a fulfilling life than marriage, children, or a committed relationship of any kind¹. Another Pew report found that American teens ranked “having a job or career they enjoy” as even more important to them than “helping others who are in need.”²

不止我一人将工作看成一种类似宗教的东西。2019年美国皮尤调查指出，美国人将“有一份喜欢的工作或职业”对于充实生活的重要性排在了婚姻、孩子或任何亲密关系的前面。另一份皮尤报告发现，美国青年认为“有一份喜欢的工作或职业”对于他们来说，比“帮助需要的人”更重要。

The problem, though, is that our jobs don’t love us back. Americans put in more hours³ and take fewer days off⁴ than people in comparably large and rich countries, but only around half of us find our job satisfying, and just 20 percent⁵ find it engaging. For most of us, mistaking the desk for an altar leads not to self-actualization but to burnout and ennui. In Thompson’s words, “Our jobs were never meant to shoulder the burdens of a faith, and they are buckling under the weight.”

但问题是，我们的工作并不同样善待我们。对比同等规模和富裕程度的国家，美国人花更多的时间工作、更少的时间休息，但只有一半的人认为工作满意，只有两成的人认为工作有趣。我们中的大多数人错误地看待工作，导致的不是自我实现，而是过度疲劳与厌倦。根据汤普森的说法，“我们的工作不是为了承担信仰的重压，他们正在承担重压。”

I’m not alone in viewing work as something like a religion.

不止我一人将工作看成一种类似宗教的东西。

In his latest book, Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots, anthropologist James Suzman offers some context for why we’re so driven to work, and some suggestions for how we might make that drive less self-destructive. He starts, unexpectedly, with basic thermodynamics: The whole universe is slinking toward an inevitable heat death, as entropy increases and energy dissipates. What we call work is, in its most basic form, an intentional transfer of energy, a way of further spreading out heat. Per Suzman, complex life forms emerged “because they more efficiently dissipate heat energy than many inorganic forms.” The urge to transfer energy is built into living things at the molecular level. We are the universe refrigerating itself.

人类学家詹姆斯·苏兹曼在他最新的一本书——《工作的意义：从史前到未来的人类变革》——中，给出了我们受工作驱动的原因，并对如何减轻这种自毁式驱动提供了建议。他出人意料地以热力学开始：随着熵的增加和热量的消散，整个宇宙不可避免地跌向热寂。我们所谓的工作，其最基本形式是有目的的转换能量，是一种进一步消散热的方法。苏兹曼指出，复杂生命形式的出现，“是因为它们能比无机物更有效地消散热能。”转换能量的冲动在分子层面内置于生命体中，我们是自我冷藏的宇宙。

Suzman supports this point by highlighting seemingly pointless energy-burning in the animal kingdom. Peacocks with flashier (and more energy-expensive) tails aren’t actually better at attracting mates.⁶ Another bird, the southern masked weaver, spends countless hours building and then immediately dismantling intricate nests, one after the other, in a way that also doesn’t appear to give it any competitive advantage. Suzman argues that this profligacy, inexplicable via natural selection, is perfectly consistent with the view that organisms simply spend energy when it’s available because it’s available, in compliance with the laws of entropy. “After all,” he writes, “many of the things humans expend energy on—from building ever grander, more ostentatious skyscrapers to running ultra-marathons—are hard to reconcile with reproductive fitness or survival. Indeed, many of the things we do to expend energy risk reducing our lifespans rather than extending them.”

苏兹曼通过强调动物界无意义的能量消耗来支持这一点。有艳丽尾巴（和更多能量消耗）的孔雀并不真正擅长于吸引伴侣。另一种鸟类，南方蒙面织鸟，一个接一个地，以一种并不带来任何竞争优势的方式，花许多时间建造然后立刻拆毁复杂的巢。苏兹曼认为，这种不能通过自然选择解释的挥霍与生物体在可以消耗能量时就消耗的观点完全一致，因为它可获得，符合熵定律。“毕竟”，他写到，“许多人类花费能量的事项——从建造更宏大、奢华的摩天大楼到跑超级马拉松——很难与繁殖和生存调和。确实，我们为消耗能量而做的许多事情是在缩短而不是延长我们的寿命。”

But this doesn’t mean we’re doomed to lives of Sisyphean servitude to the laws of physics. Suzman offers compelling evidence that our fundamental restlessness as agents of entropy need not manifest as 80-hour work weeks and cutthroat corporate hierarchies. He draws on his experience living with the Ju/’hoansi “Bushmen” of Africa’s Kalahari Desert, some of the world’s last remaining hunter-gatherers. Their way of life remained largely unchanged from about 200,000 years ago, when modern Homo sapiens first spread out around southern Africa, until the 1960s, when governments and farmers began encroaching on their lands. Though few Ju’/hoansi still forage as their ancestors did, Suzman uses interviews with tribal elders and previous anthropological research to paint a picture of quotidian pre-agricultural life.

但这并不意味着我们就注定无休止地活在物理法则的奴役下。苏兹曼提供了引人入胜的证据，我们作为熵的代理人的基本无休止并未因每周80小时工作和残酷的公司等级制度而证实。他援引自己在非洲喀拉哈里沙漠同朱/汉西“布须曼人”生活的经验。这是世界上最后剩下的狩猎采集者之一，他们的生活方式与大约20万年前——当时现代智人首次在非洲南部扩散——基本保持不变，直到20世纪60年代，政府和农民开始侵占他们的土地。尽管朱/汉西“布须曼人”已很少像他们的祖先一样狩猎，但苏兹曼仍依靠同部落长老的访谈和以前的人类学研究描绘了农业前社会的日常生活图景。

Contrary to the Hobbesian view that it was “nasty, brutish, and short,” which dominated anthropology until the mid 20th century, Suzman describes a community of healthy, easy-going people content to work only as much as required to sate their immediate needs. The Ju’/hoansi spent about 15 to 17 hours per week finding food and about 20 hours on chores, leaving them with considerably more leisure time than the average American. Not coincidentally, they also had customs that discouraged the competition and status-seeking that motivates so much of our hustle and bustle in industrialized societies.

直到20世纪中叶，支配人类学的一直是“恶劣、残酷与短命”的西西佛斯视角。与此相反，苏兹曼描绘了一个团体，其中是健康、悠闲的人类，他们满足于只做为了直接需要的工作。朱/汉西“布须曼人”每周花15至17小时在寻找食物，20小时在家务上，这给了他们比美国人多的多的空闲时间。非巧合的是，他们的习俗压制竞争与寻求地位的行为，而这些行为在工业社受到熙熙攘攘地激励。

Tribe members with valuable resources like food or tools were required, with few exceptions, to give them away whenever someone asked. Spreading wealth depended not on the generosity of the haves but on the requests of the have-nots—a practice known as demand sharing⁷ (or, among the less sympathetic, “tolerated theft”⁸). The Ju’/hoansi also reinforced their egalitarianism by deliberately keeping egos in check: Whenever a hunter returned with a big kill, tribe members would “speak of his meat as worthless,” to “cool his heart and make him gentle.”

拥有丰富资源比如食物或工具的部族成员，除了少数例外，会被要求送出被人寻求的东西。扩散财富并不取决于富人的慷慨，而是穷人的要求——这种做法被称为需求共享（或者，在不太同情的人中，“被容忍的盗窃”）。朱/汉西“布须曼人”也通过故意的控制自我来加固平等主义：一个猎手无论什么时候带回一只大猎物，部族成员都会用贬低他猎物价值的方式来让他保持冷静与谦逊。

Suzman doesn’t spotlight the Jo’/hoansi to argue that we should all bolt for the nearest unclaimed wilderness and form anarchist communes—even if that does have some appeal. Rather, he writes his main goal is “to loosen the claw-like grasp that scarcity economics has held over our working lives and to diminish our corresponding and unsustainable preoccupation with economic growth.” If hunter-gatherers in a hostile desert can live comfortably working just 15 hours a week, Suzman argues, then surely people in the world’s richest societies can, too.

苏兹曼没有聚焦于朱/汉西“布须曼人”而认为我们应该寻找无人认领的荒地、组建无政府主义者的公社，即使这确实有点吸引力。相反，他写道，自己的主要目标是“放松匮乏经济对我们工作生活利爪般的掌控，相应地减少我们对经济增长不可持续的关注”。苏兹曼认为，如果狩猎采集者能够在恶劣的沙漠中舒适地每周工作15小时，那么在世界上最富裕社会的人也一样可以。

What’s stopping us? It’s complicated, but one answer is our resistance to changing our attitudes toward work—changes which, to be candid, I’ve had a lot of trouble making myself. Take my job search and the ensuing identity-whiplash. If workism has become the water I swim in—so much that the mere chance at a certain type of work is able to profoundly change my self-image—could work ever possibly be, for me, just something I do 15 hours a week to survive?

是什么在阻止我们？这很复杂，但一个答案是：我们对改变自己工作态度的抵抗，坦率地讲，我在其中有许多麻烦，如找寻工作和随之而来的身份打击。如果我真能在工作主义中畅游，那么仅一个特定类型的工作就能深刻改变我的自我图像。但是，对我来说，工作能够成为每周只做15小时就能生存的事吗？

We’re not doomed to lives of Sisyphean servitude.

我们并非注定要过西西弗斯式的奴役生活。

Adding to the confusion is the fact that so much contemporary work doesn’t have a tangible impact. The currency of academia is producing papers that, on average, maybe 10 people will ever read.⁹ Even people in more “applied” fields of knowledge work are liable to have a hard time articulating exactly what they contribute to society. As the late anthropologist David Graeber wrote, “Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks that they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.” How do we find a healthy relationship to our work when the work’s value is so unclear?

更加令人困惑的是许多当代的工作并没有一个有形的影响。学术界的货币是产出文章，平均下来，这些文章也许有10个人会读。甚至在应用型知识领域工作的人也很难有一个时间清楚准确地说出他们为社会做出了什么贡献。就像最近的人类学家大卫·格雷伯说的，“一大群人，特别是在欧洲与北美，用他们的整个工作生涯来做一些他们暗中相信并不真正需要做的事情。”当工作的价值如此模糊不清时，我们应如何找到一个健康的工作关系？

One option is to acknowledge that we’re overdoing it and dial down our cultural obsession with busyness (as much as our entropic natures allow). The economist John Maynard Keynes famously predicted in a 1930 essay that a 15-hour workweek would become the norm by the 21st century.¹⁰ “For the first time since his creation,” he wrote, “man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem: how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.” In one sense, he was right—we now have the technology and resources to make leisure our main enterprise. We just have to use them, if we want.

一个选择是去承认我们把工作做过了头，并降低我们对“繁忙”的文化顺从（只要我们熵的本性允许）。经济学家约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯在一篇1930年的文章中有名地预测：到21世纪每周工作15小时将变为常态。“这是人类创造以来的第一次，”他写道，“人类将面临他真实且永恒的问题：如何利用他的自由来避免迫切的经济需要，如何安于科学和复利为他赢得的闲暇，以明智、愉快与良好地活着。”从某种意义上说，他是对的，我们有科技和资源去将休闲作为我们的事业。只要愿意，我们只需要使用他们。

There are some signs that we’re moving in that direction. American workers currently have more leverage in the labor market than they’ve had in decades, and they’re using it to demand more reasonable hours, higher wages, and better working conditions.¹¹ Governments around the world have been experimenting with shorter work weeks and universal basic income programs. Artificial intelligence is getting better and better at doing all the dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs that make society tick, freeing humans up to do more of what we like.¹² And all of this is happening during a pandemic that has brought to light just how valuable it is to be able to spend time with friends and family.

有迹象表明我们在朝这个方向走。美国工作者如今在劳动市场上比几十年前有更多的优势，他们用这优势去要求更多合理的休息时间、更高的薪水和更好的工作环境。世界各国政府一直在尝试缩短工作周和实施普遍的基本收入计划。人工智能在无聊、肮脏与危险的工作方面表现地越来越好，这让社会运转良好，并解放人类以让他们做更多喜欢的事。所有这些都发生在大流行病期间，这场大流行病使人们认识到能够与朋友和家人共度时光的宝贵。

This doesn’t necessarily mean that our definition of living “wisely and agreeably and well” will change for the better: Suzman tells the story of workers at Kellogg’s who enjoyed a 30-hour work week during the 1930s and ’40s but by the 1950s voted three-to-one to return to the standard 40 hours.¹³ Why give up their free time? Some cited a desire to escape irritable spouses at home. But, Suzman writes, “most were clear: They wanted to work longer hours to take home more money, to purchase more or better versions of the endless procession of constantly upgraded consumer products coming on to the market during America’s affluent postwar years.”

这并不一定意味着我们关于“明智、愉快与良好”地活着的定义会变得越来越好。苏兹曼讲述了凯洛格工人的故事，他们在20世纪三十和四十年代享受着每周工作30小时，却在50年代以三比一的投票回到了每周工作40小时的标准制。为什么他们放弃了闲暇？有些人援引了逃避家中烦躁配偶的愿望。但苏兹曼写道，“大多数人都很清楚：他们想要工作的更久以带回家更多的钱，去购买更多更好的、不断升级的、一连串无止境的消费品，这些消费品在战后美国的富裕岁月涌入市场，”

Maybe a more relaxed attitude toward work really is taking root in America. Or maybe we will remain the energy-burning peacocks of the labor force.

可能一种更放松的工作态度正在美国扎根。又或许我们仍将是在劳动中燃烧能量的孔雀。

Scott Koenig is a doctoral student in neuroscience at CUNY, where he studies morality, emotion, and psychopathy. Follow him on Twitter @scotttkoenig.

Scott Koenig 是纽约市立大学神经科学专业的博士生，在那里他研究道德、情感和精神病。在 Twitter 上关注他@scotttkoenig

Art credit: Aleutie / Shutterstock

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