What's the point of your job?

Existential Sundays are the best Sundays

Listen to Tom’s conversation with Charlie:

SORRY, THAT’S A BIT on the nose for a Sunday night. But I’ve been mulling it over a lot this week after hosting a fascinating conversation with Charlie Colenutt, a newbie author, at Backstory last Monday.

Disillusioned by his first job after university, Colenutt quit during the pandemic to embark on a seemingly esoteric project: travelling around Britain to interview 100 people about their jobs. He spent hours coaxing each subject with big, open prompts like “tell me the story of your working life”.

The resulting book, Is This Working?, is a brilliant and fun-to-read portrait of Britain through the places most of us spend most of our waking hours: offices, call centres, hospitals, and increasingly on Zoom in our kitchens. It’s essential reading for any boss, and for anyone pondering a career change.

The best thing about the book is the lack of a grand narrative. Non-fiction books are often marketed with one big argument/gross oversimplification, which the author hammers home relentlessly for 400 pages that might have been better as a page or two of bullet points.

Instead, Colenutt leaves the talking to his subjects. In a handful of pages each, they tell us what it is really like to be a dairy farmer, a sex worker or, sexier still, an accountant. (Colenutt’s skill is behind the scenes, relaxing his interviewees enough to open up and deftly editing transcripts that ran to two million words.)

Working the room

A couple of things struck me reading the book. First was how keenly those whose jobs involved some element of practical or physical work appreciated such tasks.

That really resonated with me: my old job (as a journalist) was 100% brain work. Every time my brain got overheated, I had little else to demonstrate my competence to myself or my bosses.

Running a bookshop is a refreshing balance of brain and brawn. Sure, I still get some kicks writing a punny newsletter headline. But I feel a much keener — and more immediate — sense of satisfaction from unpacking a box of new books and displaying them arrestingly.

Key to this is ‘finishability’ (I know when the job is done) and immediate customer feedback (I know when it is done well). I’m lucky to have a relatively even split of both types of task, and to have the freedom to toggle between them.

A recurring theme in Colenutt’s interviews is how much more workers value a task — or indeed their whole job — when they can understand its point. I was adding value as a journalist, of course (it’s not only the BBC whose credo is to inform, educate and entertain). But I hardly got to watch the readers as they furrowed their brows, tittered gently or dropped their marmalade.

At Backstory, I can never go a whole day without a complete stranger very sweetly telling me my shop has made Balham a better place to live. Eventually the layers of defensive deflection are chipped away and you have to accept that you are, in fact, making an impact.

The other thing that struck me was how, in a very quiet, somewhat begrudging and wholly British way, most people seemed mostly happy in their jobs most of the time — at least when their bosses allowed them to get on with it.

As Colenutt writes in his conclusion, the happiest of his interviewees are those who live a life of “well-adjusted ordinariness… no worlds to win, no universes to master”. “This is a hopeful idea. If a mundane and small working life is often a happy one, then meaningful work is within reach of most of us.”

Anyway, whether you’re a captain of industry of a disgruntled wage slave, I’d highly recommend this book. So much so that we’ll give you 10% off as an added incentive to give it a go. Just mention this email in the shop or use the code SUNDAYSCARIES to buy the book on our website.

And if you’d like to listen to my conversation with Charlie, here it is:

In the meantime, if you’d like more Backstory:

• Browse our upcoming events

• Request a book to pick up in the shop (we can usually get a book for the next day)

• If you’re further afield, order a book from our website with free UK delivery

Happy reading,

Tom