Yet our world of abundance, with seas of wine and alps of bread, has hardly
turned out to be the ebullient place dreamt of by our ancestors in the
famine-stricken years of the Middle Ages. The brightest minds spend their
working lives simplifying or accelerating functions of unreasonable
banality. Engineers write theses on the velocities of scanning machines and
consultants devote their careers to implementing minor economies in the
movements of shelfstackers and forklift operators. The alcohol-inspired
fights that break out in market towns on Saturday evenings are predictable
symptoms of fury at our incarceration. They are a reminder of the price we
pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order – and of
the rage that silently accumulates beneath a uniquely law-abiding and
compliant surface.
The Career Counsellors
I became interested in meeting a career counsellor, a professional dedicated
to finding ways of ensuring that work will be synonymous with fulfilment.
An internet search produced a company called Career Counselling International,
whose website promised help for those facing “troubling life decisions and
occupational choices”. This authoritative claim led me to expect large and
well-appointed headquarters, but the company turned out to be run from the
back of an unassuming and cramped Victorian home in a run-down residential
street in South London. It featured a small administrative office and a
consulting room with Paul Klee prints and views of a clotted carp pond and a
washing line. The only full-time employee, Robert Symons, a 55-year-old
psychotherapist, had started the business 12 years before, and ran it along
with his wife, June, who helped with the accounts and the marking of
aptitude tests.
We went to Middlesbrough to visit a windscreen repair company which was in the
process of laying off 25 middle managers. The bosses had asked Symons to
conduct a seminar entitled “Self-Confidence”, during which he would lead the
redundant workers through a number of exercises designed to help them to
imagine an adequate future for themselves. In the morning session, he
projected some slides on to a screen: I can do anything if I put my mind to
it. I can be strong and move mountains. I can set myself goals and achieve
them. Nothing I have done so far is an indication of the powers that are
within me. These were supplemented by a booklet Symons handed out,
containing extracts from the biographies of famous self-made men and women.
On the fly-leaf was a quote from Leon Battista Alberti: A man can do all
things if he will.
None of this was easy to watch, and several times I found myself looking
awkwardly out of the window at the cafeteria below. I was particularly
troubled to hear one participant repeating, under Symons’s direction: I
am the author of my own story. In the bathroom to which I repaired for
mental relief, I tried to analyse my discomfort, and yet in so doing, began
to be suspicious of my own stance. I realised that Symons’s talk unsettled
me because it reflected a disturbing but ultimately unavoidable truth about
achievement in the modern world. In older, more hierarchical societies, an
individual’s fate had largely been decided by the accidents of birth; the
difference between success and failure had not hung on a proficiency with
the declaration I can move mountains.
However, in the meritocratic, socially mobile modern world, one’s status might
now well be determined by one’s confidence, imagination and ability to
convince others of one’s due – a possibility of advancement which shone a
less flattering light on philosophies of stoicism and resignation. It seemed
that one might squander one’s life chances because of a high-handed disdain
for books with titles such as The Will to Succeed, believing that one
was above their shrill slogans of encouragement. One might be doomed not by
a lack of talent, but by a species of pessimistic pride.
After lunch, Symons took his managers back into the lecture room and offered
them a chance to share their hopes for the future, the idea being that a
public revelation of this kind would stand as a promise to themselves which
would be the harder to break when their confidence wavered. An employee in
her early forties, who had been with the company for 20 years, spoke of her
ambition to open a tea shop in the village where she had grown up. So strong
was her enthusiasm, and so detailed were her plans (the walls were to be
hung with pictures of the young Shirley Temple), that it was almost
impossible not to feel stirred. I can move mountains, she concluded by
saying, and returned to her seat, to the applause of all the participants.
I felt my eyes fill. I was reminded that whatever over-cerebral understanding
we may sometimes apply to our functioning, we nevertheless retain some
humblingly simple needs, among them a prodigious and steady hunger for
support and love. It was to the archaic part of our personalities that
Symons’s motivational exercises appealed, the side which requires neither
eloquence nor complex logic and which will forgive ungainly sentences so
long as they are imbued with the necessary, redemptive doses of hope.
The Biscuit Factory
It is perhaps because many of us know what it is to spend an afternoon baking
biscuits that there is something striking about encountering a company which
relies on the labour of 5,000 full-time employees to execute the task.
Manoeuvres which one might briefly have carried out on one’s own in the
kitchen (readying an oven, mixing dough, writing a label) had at United
Biscuits been isolated, codified and expanded to occupy entire working
lives. Although all employment at the company was ultimately predicated on
the sale of confectionery and salted snacks, a high percentage of the staff
were, professionally speaking, many times removed from contact with anything
one might eat. Some had attained extraordinary expertise in the collection
and analysis of sales data from supermarkets, while others daily
investigated how to ensure a minimum of friction between wafers during
transit.
