Pink's Proposal, Revisited

Yesterday I wrote a post about Daniel Pink and the concept of getting paid "enough". At the end I wonder what I would do if I was offered a job in which I was paid "enough", allowed autonomy in a ResultsOnlyWorkEnvironment, am encouraged to pursue mastery of my job, am allowed to design my work space, and have a voice in the higher purposes of the company. The imagination leaps to magazine lists highlighting Google and Starbucks and whoever as the best companies for employees. Also, the imagination leaps to the, shall we say, solidarity required between these companies and their employees. They rise and fall together. They must trust each other. They're family.

I wonder if this is the best we can do. I wonder if this is the moon for which to shoot. You see, I actually intended my earlier post to set up this one, in which I put forward the idea that everything Daniel Pink is spinning, everything these accoladed companies are trying to synthesize, is actually already available*.

Now, they're available in the sense that they can be had at a price. But that shouldn't bother us, since as Pink's psychology points out that we want more value out of our work than just money. Perhaps both paradigms of the future come at a price. But, I'll get to the point, which you may have seen coming...

Let's see, we're talking about a job in which only the results matter, so it's functional. Also, since I'm not wasting a lot of time doing non-functional work, I'll have more free time for self-mastery. I'll get to design my own work and work space, and I'll have a say (or the say) in the higher purpose I pursue in my work.  You know, there's a guy that was writing about this a long time ago, come to think of it (and he's just the one that happens to leap to mind).

Say "'ello" to Henry David Thoreau. Good old HDT got quite a jump on Daniel Pink, I must say. He was experimenting with Walden in the 1840s. If you've ever read Walden, you know that all of these values that Pink is trying to revive were those being championed by Thoreau way back when. Thoreau definitely lived in a Results Only Work Environment. So, check. His main purpose was self-mastery, which incorporated the mastery of his place (or the place of his squatting anyhow), and which was his (as a consummate transcendentalist) higher purpose. So, check, check, check. I'm not at all saying that you have to be an atheist(?) anarchist(?) in order to learn from Thoreau, since I'm not sure he was these things. But, you must learn to question the gods of society, and this is to have the imagination of anarchy. I'm not going to bore you with what America "used to be", but let's just say that the lesson of Thoreau's scandalous life was perhaps that an anarchic imagination is a virtue, not a vice. If anarchy was scandalous then, how much more today? If it was a virtue then, how much more today?

I suppose that the only issue is with the concept of "enough" income. It may indeed be impossible today, due to an IRS conspiracy, to re-Walden ourselves. I am not so sure that there hasn't been some giving as well as some taking since 1840. I am sure that the need for men to live deliberately has never been greater. You don't have to parrot Thoreau's experiment to value his insights; actually, it's probably best not to do so. No, the point is to live deliberately, or as Kierkegaard says, live such that you make all things a matter of conscience.

Here are some quotations chosen without too much care as I flipped through my copy of Walden. I hope if you are interested by Pink's ideas, you'll take the time to listen to his betters.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

The following could be considered HDT's statement of purpose for Walden:

Let us consider for a moment what most of the trouble and anxiety which I have referred to is about, and how much it is necessary that we be troubled, or, at least, careful. It would be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life and what methods have been taken to obtain them; or even to look over the old day-books of the merchants, to see what it was that men most commonly bought at the stores, what they stored, that is, what are the grossest groceries. For the improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man's existence; as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors.

(not sure how much longer that last sentence will hold true...)

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hinderances to the elevation of mankind.

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men...The philosopher is in advance of his age even in the outward form of his life. He is not fed, sheltered, clothed, warmed, like his contemporaries. How can a man be a philosopher and not maintain his vital heat by better methods than other men?

All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be.

The cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful. Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation: now, a taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is no house and no housekeeper.

The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful. "But," says one, "you do not mean that the students should go to work with their hands instead of their heads?" I do not mean that exactly, but I mean something which he might think a good deal like that; I mean that they should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics. If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where any thing is professed and practiced but the art of life;--to survey the world through a telescope or a microscope and never with his natural eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made, or mechanics, and not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm all around him, while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar. Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month,--the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this,--or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the mean while, and had received a Rogers' penknife from his father? Which would be most likely to cut his fingers?

In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial. It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do. 

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of evil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."

I'll stop here with a comment. Perhaps it is better to come to confess through experience, in accord with revelation, than to woodenly profess through the confessions...