26 March 2025

I gave up on a work ethic at school and never looked back

I’ve been fighting the grind ever since I was first given homework.

Illustration by Boris Séméniako / Ikon Images

There has been some grim news lately, God knows, but on St Patrick’s Day the Daily Mail came up with a front-page headline that cheered me up to no end: “DEATH OF THE WORK ETHIC”. Finally, I thought. I have been fighting the work ethic ever since I was first given homework, which severely cut into my free time at home – time that could have been better spent, in my view, by staring at the walls and saying, “I’m bored.” Actually, I didn’t do that. As you can imagine, I was a voracious reader as a child, and there were plenty of books in the home. Strangely, few, if any, of these books were any help when it came to doing my homework. History was always the worst. We had a set of the 1929 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which was helpful up to a point, but I always felt that any plagiarism would be easy to spot. I remember we were once told to go away and write a biography of a former cabinet minister and in desperation I picked Selwyn Lloyd, former chancellor of the Exchequer, because he had the same first name as my grandfather. The only thing that could have been worse than writing my homework would have been to read it. As for trying to dig out, pre-internet, enough facts about life in 18th-century England: that experience scarred me. I still have an unreasonable prejudice against the 18th century.

Cut forward to my first holiday job, delivering newspapers. I liked the fresh summer mornings but I hated getting up for them, especially when it was raining, and the pay was an insult. My first actual job was at an importer of Indian furniture and knick-knacks in East Finchley, north London, and I got to wear one of those brown grocers’ overcoats you don’t see any more. My co-worker, several decades older than me, taught me the importance of the tea and fag break, to the point that what I really did during the day was have the occasional work break during a whole day of sipping tea and having a thoughtful cigarette. The second I was able to claim the dole, I was out of there.

Back to the Daily Mail and the present day. “ONE IN FOUR young people consider quitting workforce entirely,” the subhead went. One in four? Why so few? Do you really want to spend the rest of your life doing something you hate with a good chance you won’t be getting paid enough for it?

As it happens, I like what I do very much, even though I am fond of quoting Oliver Goldsmith’s line “no turn-spit dog gets up into his wheel with more reluctance than I sit down to write”. (Not all the 18th century was bad.) But every day I thank providence that I make just about enough not to have to go into an office or drive an Uber or deliver food. When I’m not writing this column I am reading books and writing about them. That might sound suspiciously like homework, and in a sense it is, but the crucial difference is that this time around I’m getting paid for it. I am extremely fortunate, and I know it.

I can imagine that the kind of people who think the country is going to the dogs because one in four young people think working sucks are the kind of people who would look at me and my burnt-out work ethic and send me off to the salt mines if they could. Those with a little more cunning and vision than the rest would say that writers are useless and roll on the day when they are all replaced by AI. Well, it would seem that among the many ways this government is trying to dismay us, its insistence that the UK become a “powerhouse” is something they are deeply committed to, and it strikes me that the kind of people who think AI is a dreadful thing tend not to be the kind of people who end up running the show. They are also the same kind of people who don’t quite understand there is something outrageous about an economic system that prioritises the shareholder over the worker. These are the people who bang on about “growth” and “hard-working families”. Have they never read the Bible, particularly chapter three of Genesis? It’s quite early on, and you can pretty much stop after that, as it tells you all you need to know. “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” Work, in other words, is a curse sent from a very pissed-off Supreme Being, and one who in those days was not known for taking a casual, laissez-faire attitude to what His creations got up to.

It is no accident that the words “work ethic” are often preceded by the word “Protestant”. My friend Ben, who has spent the past month in Spain, is often taken by surprise when another, seemingly weekly, religious festival comes along and all the shops shut. Today it was the feast of something weirdly specific – Our Redeemer Hitting His Thumb with a Hammer in His Stepfather’s Workshop, for all I know – but what happens is that everything shuts except for Chinese- or Muslim-owned restaurants – and all bars, of course. It’s not too bad at all. Balls to the work ethic.

[See also: “Adolescence” isn’t shocking]