By Richard Godwin
I DON’T want a lot for Christmas. Not even snow. But there’s one thing that would come in handy, over and above a directional coffee-maker or a copper pineapple or a Skate-and-Sing Elsa doll.
What I would really is for someone to rip a fissure in the fabric of space-time and grant me a little pause for breath.
Some Christmas party hangover recovery time. Some getting-down-to the-level-of-my-toddler time. Some intramarital Netflix and chill time. Some time to read unread books, play unplayed music and love those insufficiently loved because there aren’t the hours to do these things properly in the London 9-5 (or 6-23, as I’ve come to call it). As Kanye West put it in one of his increasingly perceptive addresses: “Beauty has been stolen from the people and sold back as luxury.” And he considers this a double calumny, since his own riches have taught him one simple truth: “The only true luxury is time.”
Given the pan-Western angst occasioned by the time shortfall, it’s weird that our earthbound politicians are so reluctant to address or even acknowledge the problem. As the tentative resolutions from the Paris Climate Change summit show, world leaders are coming round to the idea that we can’t premise the next hundred years on ever-increasing consumption and demand. However, they’re having a hard time selling “less” to populations they’ve always weaned on “more”.
The problem is that they’re trying to deal with 21st-century problems – climate change, but also global inequality, surplus populations, mass migrations, mass unemployment, technological obsolescence and so on – with 20th-century frames of reference.
The problem of automation troubles trade unionists, who remember the postwar dream of full employment and romanticise work. Climate change bothers capitalists, who can’t extricate themselves from carbon-fuelled economic growth. In the most regressive corners, the imaginative deficit is so immense that 19th-century frames of reference have filled the breach: witness Iain Duncan Smith coercing the jobless into “Workfare” schemes, as if “improving” individual souls could atone for wider economic failure.
It’s particularly perplexing that all this hand-wringing should come in a period of such profound – and transformative – technological change. Indeed, technological change causes a lot of hand-wringing in itself, since recent leaps in productivity and communications have only left us feeling more insecure and exploited.
But surely the logical thing would be to approach the problem from the other side? If a country has an unemployment rate of 20 per cent, maybe it’s not because there are 20 per cent too many people but because we’re expecting everyone to do 20 per cent too much work? And to produce and consume 20 per cent too much stuff, creating desires where there were none?
The more enlightened tech companies are realising that it doesn’t really help anyone to coerce employees to being present at all times. But it is something that employees themselves should feel empowered to demand; after all, no one handed us the conventional weekend on a plate.
I’d say a compulsory work-email blackout from now until Epiphany would be a start. And then we can move on to the not-just-for-Christmas aims: threeday weekends as standard; legal recourse to fine bosses who breach our contracts; a fully leisured August; and productivity gains felt through ever-shorter working hours. As we enter the annual festival of anguished materialism, I say it’s time to demand the immaterial.
