Work?

Work, as in doing a job, more specifically as in doing a job you wouldn’t choose to do if you could do something else. I am wont to puzzle my brain over this subject as someone who, like most people I know, has done a variety of jobs through life since leaving school. Some were truly awful, soul eating drudgery, some were just dull and of no real interest and some did present challenges that taxed my brains and personality. However, none of them were things I would have chosen to do if I wasn’t compelled to do them in order to maintain even a moderate standard of physical well being; safe shelter, food, water and warmth in winter.

So, to move beyond my own experience, where did the oft quoted work ethic come from anyway? Well I for one don’t know and, as ‘workers’ in one form or another have existed since the very earliest of recorded histories, I can’t see how anyone can know the answer without using far too much presumption and assumption to be able to claim any certainty at all.
I do know that the era of human society that one might call transactional (as in something beyond basic bartering, “Swap you these turnips for those parsnips?”) is likely quite new in the time span of our evolution as a species (barring interesting but totally speculative theories of forgotten civilisations from ten or more thousand years ago). A good friend suggested to me that even before our transactional era, say as the proverbial ‘hunter gatherers’, everyone would be expected to ‘work’. Initially that sounds straightforward enough but when I try and imagine the details (wherein the devil lives) I can’t see even that supposed ‘simpler existence’ being… that simple.
There would be a great many individuals either not able to do, or with no aptitude for, the main work of ‘hunting and gathering’. Those that were too young, those that were ill or injured (inevitably some in the long term), those that were too old, those that were pregnant, those looking after babies and small children, those that were a positive liability in the hunting and gathering groups. I’m sure that is a far from exhaustive list. So what of them? Almost certainly far outnumbering the actual hunter gatherers. What of the artists, entertainers, carers, thinkers and all of those that might be hopeless at most practical ‘work’ but great to have around making life enjoyable and better for others? Unless one assumes that humanity in prehistory merely lived a life of harsh and joyless drudgery then surely all those ‘types’ need including in any theories of a supposed way of life. After all, we have the beautiful cave wall art to account for do we not? Those date from unimaginably long ago (20, 30, 40, even 50 thousand years ago) and took great skill with obviously a long time invested, both learning the skills and creating the images.

Perhaps we need to consider the basic hierarchical structures of this transactional epoch. After all the concept of the worker is symbiotically connected to the concept of the boss, but it’s not the ‘chicken and egg’ scenario to my mind. The boss must have come first, before the worker surely. Someone had to establish authority, in order to ‘tell others what to do’. That authority then has to be maintained, policed, enforced, call it what you will. My best guess is that our pyramid like hierarchical systems originated with organised religions and the self proclaimed leadership of those religions. That seems an almost certain font of authority with a boss atop of the heap, sorry, pyramid.
Of course we have no way of knowing how the groups of prehistoric humans really organised themselves, or behaved, or thought about life, we can only make suppositions, but the most basic philosophical wondering is perhaps of the, “Where did we come from and what’s it all about?” variety, closely followed by, “What will become of us?” variety. Was there ever a time before some character put on a silly hat and said, “I know the answers! The gods have spoken!” If successful with that playbook, pretty soon the person wearing the hat is ‘the boss’ and getting others to do as they are told… or else… there’s always the stick lurking behind the carrot.