There's more to life than work

It wasn't always like this. For thousands of years, work was viewed as an unavoidable drudge, something to be done with as rapidly as possible and escaped in the imagination through alcohol or religious intoxication. Aristotle was only the first of many philosophers to state that no-one could be both free and obliged to earn a living. Holding down a job, any job, was akin to slavery and denied one any chance of greatness. Christianity added to this analysis the yet grimmer conclusion that the misery of work was an unavoidable consequence of the sins of Adam and Eve. The idea that work could be fun, as opposed to simply useful and necessary, had to wait until the Renaissance to get any traction. It was then, in contemporary biographies of geniuses like Raphael or Leonardo da Vinci, that one gets the first glimmers of the idea that doing extraordinary work might be better than lying around as an idle aristocrat, indeed, that work might be the highest of blessings.

A more optimistic assessment of work as a whole had to wait until the 18th century, the age of the great bourgeois philosophers, men like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot, who for the first time argued that one's working life could be at the centre of any ambition for happiness. It was during this century that our modern ideas about work were formed - incidentally, at the very same time as our modern ideas about love and marriage took shape.

In fact, there were remarkable similarities between the two realms of love and work. In the pre-modern age, it had widely been assumed that no-one could try to be in love and married: marriage was something one did for purely commercial reasons, to hand down the family farm or ensure a dynastic continuity. Things were going well if you maintained a tepid friendship with your spouse. Meanwhile, love was something you did with your mistress, on the side, with pleasure untied to the responsibilities of child-rearing.

Yet the new philosophers of love now argued that one might actually aim to marry the person one was in love with rather than just have an affair. To this unusual idea was added the even more peculiar notion that one might work both for money and to realise one's dreams, an idea that replaced the previous assumption that the day job took care of the rent and anything more ambitious had to happen in one's spare time, once the money had been hauled in.

We are the heirs of these two very ambitious beliefs: that you can be in love and married, and in a job and having a good time. It has become as impossible for us to think that you could be out of work and happy as it had once seemed impossible for Aristotle to think that you could be employed and human.

These ambitious ideas about work have led to all kinds of achievements, but they have also had their casualties. After all, if one sincerely believes that work should be everything in one's life, then what is one to do when dissatisfaction sets in in front of the computer in mid-afternoon? Any unhappiness in the workplace is now interpreted far more seriously than it would have been 300 years ago. If things go wrong at work, we are now not only unhappy, but unhappy that our promise of happiness has been betrayed.

And what of those who are made redundant - a prospect facing growing numbers of Britons, as the recession bites deeper and the unemployment tally passes two million for the first time since 1997? The likelihood is that, as well as facing penury, individuals whose value is gauged in terms of career status are bound to feel worthless. With this in mind, the government has announced plans to provide an army of therapists and counsellors, to help deal with the rise in anxiety and depression that is expected to accompany the unemployment boom.

As for those of us still in work, in the gap between our ambition and reality there today flourishes a host of theorists who try to find answers to our pains: management consultants, therapists and, most notoriously, career counsellors. These career counsellors are emblematic of our current confusions about work. They are often the first port of call for people in trouble with their jobs. They promise to deliver on modernity's great promise: the right to an enjoyable occupation. They speak that most authoritative of modern languages, science; hence their battery of tests, psychological profiles and opaque reports which they generate. But despite the fancy armature with which they surround themselves, career counsellors are frequently unable to find any useful advice for us beyond an unlikely recommendation that we are ideally suited to joining the fire service or working on a North Sea trawler. Career counselling stands in relation to the problems of work rather as 14th-century surgery stood in relation to the problems of osteopathy; in both cases, the job seems to have been created more out of a wish that someone should know how to do it than any evidence that they are in fact able to do so.

Furthermore, modern jobs are more likely than ever to leave us wondering about their "meaning". What is it for a job to be meaningful? Even though we are often taught that we are all out to enrich ourselves, the most sincere pleasure available through work is perhaps that which arises from a knowledge that one has helped someone else, that one is making a difference, that as a result of one's labour one is changing the world for the better. But a peculiarity of the modern world is that many jobs are both lucrative and yet rather low on meaning: they generate healthy amounts of money but leave us wondering what their point is. The reason for this is that the industrial revolution radically transformed how and where money can be made.

Machines and technology have enabled us to generate huge amounts of cash, but really only in areas which are generally low on the ladder of meaning. The big profits are made trading commodities, mass manufacturing soap suds or setting up call centres processing insurance forms - whereas occupations like nursing, poetry writing or landscape gardening remain at pre-industrial levels of profitability. So we have an odd situation where the best educated, most successful members of our society are frequently doing jobs which earn a lot of money but leave them wondering what real difference they are making, while those transforming others' lives are barely scraping by. It's unsurprising that in this context, the story of the career crisis - where a banker leaves the city for an inner city school or organic farm - has a hallowed place in the minds of newspaper feature editors.

The belief that work should make us happy has created other problems in big organisations. In particular, it has spawned that other intriguing feature of our age: the human resources (HR) department. In the pre-industrial world, the best way to get somebody to work hard was to hit them. Most work was about manual labour and heavy lifting, and to whip your employees was the most effective way to ensure a good day's graft. But things changed forever when jobs appeared where you actually had to be mentally involved, and enjoying yourself, in order to do them properly. Building a watchtower isn't going to help if you're manning an art gallery.

In most modern jobs, unavoidably, people actually have to believe in what they are doing in order to do it properly. Therefore, employers have had to become experts at seducing those who work for them into believing that what they are doing is worthwhile. There is no end of talk, much stemming from HR departments, about how large companies respect their employees, treat them as friends and look after them as parents might. Only brutal economic realities put such sentimental language to the test. Nevertheless, the need to speak in this rose-tinted way to employees is not a sign of soppiness, it is merely hard-headed pragmatism and as hard-nosed as anything that a Roman quartermaster in charge of a gang of slaves might come up with.

When we think of being happy at work, many of us continue to imagine that becoming an entrepreneur offers the best chance of fulfilment. And during this era of mass redundancies, many people assume that setting up their own business is the ideal solution. Indeed, leaving the big organisation to set up a small business is a great hope of our times. You can see why: we may think of ourselves as living late on in the history of consumer society, but the most sophisticated contemporary economy stands to be perceived by subsequent generations as no less primitive than we judge Europe to have been in the Dark Ages.

It is a mere 80 years since deodorant was introduced, the remote-control garage door has been in existence for barely 35 and only in the last five years have surgeons discovered how to safely remove tumours from our adrenal glands and insert aortic keyhole valves into our hearts. There are a host of businesses waiting to be started: we are still waiting for scanners to locate our lost keys and for medicines which will guarantee us eternal life. Untold numbers of new businesses lie latent in our present inefficiencies and wishes. The fulfilment of a significant, and perhaps the most important, share of our needs remains untethered to the mechanisms of commerce.

Yet in reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of self-made success in a capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not relentlessly play up the possibilities open to all those with a business idea and so, in turn, did not cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one.

The statistical probabilities of successfully rerouting commercial reality were once laid bare for me by a wry venture capitalist. Of the 2000 business plans he received a year, he said, he immediately threw out 1950, scrutinised 50 more closely and ended up investing in 10. Within five years, out of those 10 enterprises, four would be bankrupt, another four would be stuck in what was termed a "graveyard cycle" of low profits and a mere two would be generating the significant returns which keep his industry afloat. Here was a vision of success guaranteed to disappoint 99.9% of its subscribers.

Then again, there is a heroic beauty in the exuberant destruction of both capital and hope entailed by entrepreneurs' activities. Money patiently accumulated through decades of unremarkable work can, in a rush of optimism inspired by a flattering business plan, be handed over to a momentarily convincing chief executive who will hasten to set the pyre alight in a brief, brilliant and largely inconsequential blaze.

We bring to our work, be it a job in a big corporation or in our own business start-up, a historically extraordinary degree of hope and optimism. At the same time, we are surrounded by unprecedented risks and dangers. The number of bankruptcies in Scotland rose by 154% last year, and by the end of next year, the British Chamber of Commerce predicts that more than three million people will be unemployed.

At a time like this, we would be wise to remind ourselves that work can be satisfying and rewarding even when it doesn't always, unrelentingly, have to be everything in our lives. Those facing unemployment might at least find solace in the fact that a life without work need not be devoid of meaning.

Alain de Botton's new book, The Pleasures And Sorrows of Work is published by Penguin on April 2, priced £18.99

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