«An unquenchable passion for work might be a panic-stricken way of concealing the fear of a lack of passion for life itself. If you are what you do, what are you when you stop doing it and you still are? There are people who don’t find this a problem, who have not entirely or even at all identified existence with what they do and how they make a living, but they are evidently a great problem to those – the majority –who do».
Così recita un articolo della scrittrice inglese Jenny Diski significativamente intitolato “Learning how to live”. La massima secondo cui “si diventa ciò che si fa” sembra implicare che quando si termina di “fare” – cioè di lavorare – si smetta anche di essere. Il far niente incute paura perché ci fa sentire colpevoli. Per questo si stigmatizza chi, come i bambini, si occupa con piacere di attività non necessariamente produttive. Oppure si guarda dall’alto in basso chiunque svolga un lavoro “culturale”, dunque non un “vero lavoro”. Salvo poi finire per invidiare, a proposito di parole fra virgolette, chiunque abbia un’occupazione “creativa”:
«Creative work sits uneasily in the fantasy life between dread leisure and the slog of the virtuous, hardworking life. It’s seen as a method of doing something while doing nothing, one that stops you flying away in terror».
In cerca di un più sano rapporto con il lavoro e il post-lavoro può essere salutare, con rimando al testo Stone Age Economics
«Once people had done the few days’ hard work of felling a tree and carving out a canoe, there were large amounts of free time to lie about daydreaming, exploring, telling stories: doing “culture” or just skiving. You’d fish in the canoe you’d made, and by preserving and sharing the catch with others, who also shared theirs with you, you could then take a few days off before you needed to get any more. Decent members of those communities did what they needed to do and then when they didn’t need to do it, they stopped».
[ illustrazione: Emiliano Ponzi ]
Volpi e ricci 