Writing in 1930 about the “age of leisure and of abundance” he believed would be unleashed by the automation of most human labour in — the guess looks like a good one — a hundred years’ time, the economist John Maynard Keynes confessed to feelings of “dread”.
Keynes’s essay Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren is famous for its prediction of a 15-hour working week but it also contains a prophetic note of gloom. Within the space of a few decades, he pointed out, men and women would be forced to abandon all the “habits and instincts” bred into them by a culture immemorially dedicated to the value of hard work and to submit to the unpleasant novelty of doing nothing at all. The result, he suggested, would be a “general nervous breakdown”.
“General nervous breakdown” may adequately describe the emotional state of some of the present cohort of graduates leaving university into a worryingly tough labour market. Entry-level jobs, The Times reports, have fallen by a third since the launch of ChatGPT.
If that fall really can be attributed to artificial intelligence then we may be standing at the dawn of the age without work that Keynes heralded in his essay. Arguably, the spiritual challenges we face may be greater even than those he predicted. If work was a matter of “habit and instinct” in the 1930s, it is much more than that now. For many educated and ambitious modern employees, especially those in elite white-collar jobs such as law and consultancy that are most exposed to AI, work defines life to a degree even Keynes would have struggled to anticipate. Those who speak of “workism” as the true faith of the educated West are only partly exaggerating.
White-collar work has never been so all-consuming. In Keynes’s day many bankers habitually worked from 10am to 3pm, five days a week. The leisure time to play golf or collect porcelain was an important marker of social status. But the ethic of 21st-century meritocracy rewards hard work and even monomania. Highly- paid knowledge workers put in more hours than any other socioeconomic group (an unprecedented situation, as the poorest have historically spent most time working). A few years ago, junior employees at Goldman Sachs were moved to complain that 100-hour work weeks were driving some of their number to weight loss and depression. The Yale law professor Daniel Markovits points out that where in the 1960s a lawyer might expect to work “approximately 1,300 fee-earning hours per year”, major modern firms demand 2,400 billable hours. There are tales of young bankers so devoted to their jobs, they sleep on single mattresses flung in corners of vast empty apartments. Automation is going to leave a gaping hole in many lives.
That hole will be more than a matter of blank calendar space to fill. Many workers, especially from younger generations, have grown up with the idea that economic productivity is virtually the goal of existence. A million podcasts dedicated to “optimisation” encourage young people to organise their whole lives around the principle of professional success. At universities, vocational courses thrive and humanities departments in search of students must emphasise dubious “transferable skills” rather than making a case for the inherent virtues of, say, English or history. A revealing survey published a few years ago found that 95 per cent of teenagers said “having a job or career they enjoy” would be “extremely or very important” in adult life, far above “helping other people” (81 per cent) or getting married (47 per cent).
Employers have adapted themselves to the expectations that work is about more than salaried employment. “Fun” offices provide ping-pong tables and playground slides, and progressive chief executives offer their workers not just salaries but moral leadership in the form of diversity initiatives, mental health awareness days and anti-racism courses. An acquaintance who worked briefly in a trendy tech start-up was told that she had not acquired colleagues but hundreds of new “friends” (she wisely quit).
To the most enthusiastic adherents of the totalising system of entertainment, ethical guidance and remuneration that constitutes high-status modern work, to lose a job would be to lose almost a whole life. And crucially, at the same time that work has colonised our lives, other sources of meaning have decayed. Britain was hardly a utopia when Keynes wrote his essay in 1930 but it arguably offered more diverse forms of fulfilment: fertility was high, church membership was high, marriage rates were high and citizens were connected to each other by deep community networks such as labour unions, working men’s clubs, reading groups and endless sporting and charitable clubs. The modern world that faces up to the prospect of worklessness is much more prosperous but also more isolated and childless. Many of those who are displaced by machines will find they have little to fall back on and that alternative sources of meaning will be harder to come by.
The ability to cultivate a meaningful life outside work may be a defining skill of this new age. An underrated lesson from Keynes’s Britain is the importance of taking leisure seriously. Britons in 1930 were still the heirs of the ambitious Victorian cult of self-improvement. Workers’ education institutes taught weary miners to read Edward Gibbon in the evenings. The middle classes botanised, versified, played instruments and painted. Though a notorious workaholic, Keynes counted gardening, ballet and art collecting among his own interests. Trivial things in themselves, but a generation that spends seven hours a day on screens may not find itself half as well-fitted to prosper in a world of eternal leisure.