A Humanistic Sickness

“About 70 percent of people,” says Dan Cable, “are not engaged in what they do all day long, and about eighteen percent of people are repulsed.”

18% is a lot of people.

Cable is the Professor of Organizational Behaviour at the London Business School. As such, he unsurprisingly frames this repulsion as bad for worker motivation and productivity, but he also describes it as “a humanistic sickness.”

He traces the root of the disengagement/repulsion problem to the beginning of the twentieth century:

Each of the people in [a shoe shop] would watch the customer walk in, and then they’d make a shoe for that customer [but a few years after the Industrial Revolution] we got this different idea, as a species, where we should not sell two pairs of shoes each day, but two million.

As we know (read my books!), this led to Taylorism: the separation of “head and hand” and the division of work into smaller (and increasingly meaningless) sub-tasks. One person stitches the sole of those shoes, another stitches the heel, another threads the laces, and so on. We became a Big Machine, workers became alienated from their work or to lose sight of bigger pictures, and our daily activities lost meaning to the point where 70% are not engaged and 18% (the most likely Escapologists among us) are “repulsed” by it. Well done, Capitalism.

As Cable explains in the video, this way of working isn’t good for the way our biological brains evolved. Humans need novelty, we need change, we need problems to solve. We also, I’d add, need to be able to take a sense of pride in our crafts and to enjoy the moment of finishing a meaningful task.

The relevant part of the brain, Cable says, is called the ventral striatum and it’s forever “urging us to explore the boundaries of what we know, urging us to be curious.”

This ventral striatum, especially here in the 21st century, will remain unsatisfied if we don’t escape into what, a few months ago, we called “the right kind of work.”

It may or may not involve making shoes.

How will you make that escape? Alternatively, how did you make that escape? Let me know. New Escapologist, in its return to print, will have space devoted to such stories. Tell them to us. Tell them to your community: the rest of the 18%.