Work Ethics
20 Ideas for 2020 and Beyond.
I’m back, after a far longer break than intended. I hadn’t realised how many weeks had passed since my last newsletter until I logged in just now and saw the date. Time has taken on a new, intangible quality since March, and it feels dangerously easy to lose track. Days are intense and slow, but months slip by in a blink. The weeks have lost their rhythm. September will arrive tomorrow. The year itself feels neverending.
I know I’m not the only one experiencing the passage of time in this way, so hopefully you’ll forgive the prolonged absence. And - in my defense! - I’ve been working on something.
Work Ethics is a short book I’ve written about the way I want to work, and think about work, moving forward. Five principles - Freedom, Care, Service, Simplicity, Creativity - just 54 pages, and 20 Ideas for 2020 and Beyond. It’s independently published in London on 100% recycled paper and I’ve produced an initial print run of 100 copies. Profits from the first edition will be donated equally to The Black Curriculum and the Sunrise Movement. You can learn more - and buy a copy - here.
It feels important to offer some context for this little book. Crucially, I want to explain that it’s not a ‘quarantine project’, per se. Although 95% of the text was written during lockdown, I’ve been thinking about most of these ideas for a year or more now. In the interests of full transparency - something I’m trying to practice wherever possible these days - I’d actually compiled some of them into a tentative book proposal at the start of this year. Progress on that imploded around the time the pandemic hit, along with everything else.
For a month or two, I was unsure of how to proceed. (I was also on the other side of the world, figuring out how and when to get back to familiar ground – but that’s a story for another newsletter.) Writing requires mental clarity and precision if it’s to be done well, and for weeks I felt incapable of either. My entire gameplan for the year had been upended - again, I know I’m far from alone in this - and my usual tricks and techniques for recovering from professional setback felt not only futile, but newly irrelevant.
Once I’d made it back to London and caught up on a lot of lost sleep, I realised that I was already sitting on a framework for the future. Although nearly all of the ideas in Work Ethics predate the pandemic, the overarching concept felt topical to the point of irony: the way that we worked wasn’t working, and it’s never going to work again. If our efforts have, thus far, been shaped by an unerring faith in the inherent value of the work ethic, then the political, social, and environmental challenges of our time urgently call for an ethics of work to take its place.
While many of the principles in the book focus on practical solutions to universal challenges, I am highly conscious that any philosophical contemplation of work itself can only ever be taken from a position of privilege. I wavered for weeks on whether to share this work in this moment; ultimately deciding to proceed with the intention that this short book might offer some insight or comfort to anyone trying to put one foot in front of the other (and hopefully raise some money for important causes in the process). In a moment when so many of us are struggling to find motivation and meaning in our careers, my hope is that Work Ethics will offer a fresh perspective.
Given that all our attention spans are even more shot than usual, I also hope that the book’s brevity will serve as a bonus. As always, my own thinking has been shaped by a spectrum of ideas borrowed from various books, articles, and essays, so I’ve included a ‘Further Reading’ list at the back of the book for those wanting to go deeper. Now more than ever, I’m deferring to the wisdom of great thinkers as I attempt to navigate this dark, confusing time and move towards more enlightened days ahead. I have faith that they’re coming.
Hanging in there with you in the meantime,
Phoebe