Keep calm and do your job

Dear reader,

Tradition would have me wish you all a happy new year. But such a wish seems futile, given the omens of the end of last year. For our peace of mind, let’s try to forget the three earthquakes which caused 1,300 deaths in Afghanistan, 3,000 in Morocco, and 50,000 in Turkey; nor should we mention the 4,000 lives lost in Sudan or the 22,000 in Israel and Palestine, or the 500,000 people believed to have been killed or wounded in Ukraine and Russia, or the rise in terrorist attacks and antisemitism, especially among the young…

Where the climate crisis inspired activist vocations, the rise in new geopolitical threats  has fuelled feelings of powerlessness and despondency. But we still need to take stock of these gloomy events, in order to raise essential questions, such as: how can we live with them? How can we not succumb to a feeling of absurdity when we suddenly shift from a terrifying news article to an “urgent” email from our boss about an end-of-year drink? And when our job seems so far removed from the world’s problems, can it still give our lives meaning?

In his novel Unforgettable Suite (in French, 2023), set in Japan during the Fifteen Years War (1931-1945), Akira Mizubayashi provides a beginning of an answer. Just as a love affair is blossoming between a cello player and his luthier, the musician loses his life at war. The luthier then drowns her sorrow in work, by attempting to make a perfect replica of the cello player’s favourite violin. As atomic bombs fall on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the country turns into a living hell, she delves into her craft with utmost meticulousness, so she can then contemplate her work and derive satisfaction from its beauty. Her creation becomes the snaplink tying her to a cruel world which she no longer cares about. “Peace on earth for men of goodwill” is a recurrent saying in the novel. The making of the instrument is probably the least political response to Japanese imperialism; and yet, this is where the luthier resists, this is where she finds her peace.

This attitude calls to mind that of Doctor Rieux in Albert Camus’ 1947 novel The Plague. Whilst treating patients on a bright sunny day, he’s struck by the strange cohabitation between life-going-on – the beautiful spring weather – and the terrible threat his town is facing. “The brief, intermittent sibilance of a machine-saw came from a near-by workshop. [...] There lay certitude; there, in the daily round. All the rest hung on mere threads and trivial contingencies; you couldn’t waste your time on it. The thing was to do your job as it should be done.”

It’s not about having a “good job”, but doing one’s job well, whatever it may be: this is the answer to absurdity. For Camus, absurdity resides in our quest for meaning at the very heart of meaninglessness. On the one hand, we feel the inextinguishable will to make our actions match the needs of the world; on the other, we’re aware of our powerlessness.

‘True generosity toward the future consists in giving everything to the present’

—Albert Camus

Human dignity resides in the seriousness with which we undertake each task – from the designing of a PowerPoint to the emptying of a dishwasher –, even if the task isn’t serious in itself. In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Camus writes: “To work and create ‘for nothing,’ to sculpture in clay, to know that one’s creation has no future, to see one’s work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries – this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on the one hand and magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator.”

So in 2024, I wish for us to all become more short-sighted, that is to say, absorbed with doing our job “well”, step by step, without searching for a distant goal or superior meaning. Like this luthier plunged into her work of replicating an instrument in the middle of a war, or the factory worker Camus’ hero hears during a pandemic. Let’s spend 2024 under the aegis of the absurd, by understanding that there is no hierarchy in action. Let’s scrap these lenses of utility through which we try to assess the dignity of jobs. And instead, let’s watch over the neighbours to our left and our right, without losing ourselves in the horizon. “True generosity toward the future consists in giving everything to the present,” Camus further writes in The Rebel (1951). This may seem a bit rich, but in a way, the overcoming of absurdity might first involve getting caught up in the here and now!

Athénaïs Gagey

Picture © Chris Ralston / Unsplash