The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy (2010) (24 page)

If an unknown researcher will be blindly obeyed, how much more overwhelming the desire to submit to an imposing boss in a grand office with power over livelihood?

Part of the answer is to remember that the boss may not be so imposing: according to Fromm, ‘The lust for power is rooted not in strength but in weakness. It is the expression of the inability of the individual self to stand alone and live. It is the desperate attempt to gain secondary strength where genuine strength is lacking.’
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This is another application of the rule that you don’t have to pretend to be what you are – power-seekers need the appearance of strength because they are not actually strong. The imposing figure behind the huge desk may well be as much of a fraud as the authoritarian researchers in the psychology experiments. And understanding this will make any boss less intimidating. Conversely, an unimposing figure behind a desk may be genuine. The best managers are often people who had no great desire to be managers. And who would want to manage the human creature, contrary at the best of times, and now impossibly so – feeling entitled to have everything but obliged to do nothing?

In the worst case, the boss is a bully and, therefore, more dangerous but also even weaker than the ordinary power-seeker. The classic bully mindset is kiss up and piss down – and the craven subservience of the kissing up should expose their extreme weakness. When it comes to pissing down, bullies attack only the most obviously vulnerable, so absence of fear is often sufficient protection. The most appropriate attitude is contempt, though this should be circumspect because bullies are vindictive. Hannah Arendt has argued that revolutions occur when contempt for bad governance becomes so widespread and corrosive that the system simply collapses – a theory demonstrated by the fall of communism.
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So it may be useful to spread and intensify contempt for the bully boss by slyly fomenting sedition in the photocopying room.

Considering the centuries of sweat expended on the earning of daily bread, it is surprising how little guidance has been offered on the conduct of this near-universal necessity. Of course, thinkers have been remarkably successful in evading the burden of paid employment and have refused even to soil their minds with the problem. But literary writers have also largely avoided the subject of work, even though most of them have work experience to draw upon and the workplace is a stage where disparate, incompatible people are forcibly confined together for long periods and suffer violent emotions such as power-hunger, greed, lust, hatred and rage. It may be that the experience of work, with its shocking expenditure of time and energy, is just too appalling to contemplate. Or that the deadening effects of habituation make it impossible to raise to the level of the imagination. But it is a curious and significant fact that there are hardly any novels set entirely in the workplace.

This is what makes
The Mezzanine
so valuable. It is full of perfectly observed details that provoke instant recognition and remind the reader that the workplace is not at all dreary, but instead rich and strange, full of human oddity and absurdity. Here is the narrator describing a secretary’s cubicle:

In the shadow of the shelf under the unused fluorescent light, she had pinned up shots of a stripe-shirted husband, some nephews and nieces, Barbra Streisand, and a multiply-Xeroxed sentiment in Gothic type that read, ‘If You Can’t Get Out Of It, Get Into It!’ I would love someone to trace the progress of these support-staff sayings through the offices of the city; Deanne had another one pushpinned to a wall of her cube, its capitals in crumbling ruins under the distortion of so many copies of copies; it said, ‘YOU MEAN YOU WANT ME TO RUSH THE RUSH JOB I’M RUSHING TO RUSH?’

Unfortunately,
The Mezzanine
covers only a lunch hour. Extended to a full day, it could have been the
Ulysses
of the workplace, and its privileged readers could have felt like Homeric heroes on the morning train. This book is determined to celebrate even work – and quotes with delight from Marcus Aurelius: ‘Manifestly, no condition of life could be so well adapted for the practice of philosophy as this in which chance finds you today!’ There is even a tip on how to enjoy private exuberance and zest at work:

One time, while I was locked behind a stall, I did unintentionally interrupt the conversation between a member of senior management and an important visitor with a loud curt fart like the rap of a bongo drum. The two paused momentarily; and then recovered without dropping a stitch – ’ Oh, she is a very, very capable young woman, I’m quite clear on that’. ‘She is a sponge, a sponge, she soaks up information everywhere she goes’.

‘She really is. And she’s tough, that’s the thing. She’s got armor’. ‘She’s a major asset to us’. Etc. Unfortunately, the grotesque intrusion of my fart struck me as funny, and I sat on the toilet containing my laughter with the back of my palate – this pressure of containment forced a further, smaller fart. Silently, I pounded my knee, squinting and maroon-colored from suppressed hysteria.

The Absurdity of Love

W
hat is more appealing than an intimate candlelit dinner for two? But first there is the choice between eating locally and going into town. Staying local restricts the range of restaurants but requires no travelling and permits an aperitif in the comfort of home. Town provides more eating options but involves a journey on public transport and an aperitif in a noisy, expensive city bar.

This evening, the couple decide not to travel. But the local restaurants are just
so last century
. How many decades since Italian, Chinese and Indian were happening cuisines? And these stick-in-the-mud local restaurateurs seem never to have heard the term ‘new wave’. What the area desperately needs is a good Vietnamese restaurant.

Then
he
wants to choose in advance and make a reservation, while
she
argues that this may mean the horror of
an empty restaurant
.

‘What’s wrong with an empty restaurant?’

The question is so
unbelievably obtuse
that she turns her eyes to Heaven for patience and strength, eventually finding the heroic forbearance to say calmly, ‘We’ll just stroll along and find somewhere.’

So they stroll and, frowning, peruse the familiar local menus. Knowing that
his
secret desire is for Chinese, she says coldly, ‘Everything will be doused in gloop.’ Knowing that
her
secret desire is for Indian, he issues a harsh laugh: ‘You put on four pounds just by reading the menu.’

There remains only the Italian, which neither of them really wants and which exposes them once again to the appalling maître d’ who is simultaneously obsequious and domineering. Once this man actually tried to seat them
in the basement
. And now he asks if they have a reservation when he knows perfectly well they do not. She requests the window table and the mattre d’ explains with an utterly insincere hand-wringing apology that this table is reserved. What is the man thinking of? Not only should a sophisticated and attractive couple be placed in the window, they ought to be
paid
to sit there and attract something other than a clientele who make the place look like
a retirement home canteen
.

Instead, they must squeeze round a tiny table between two other occupied tables, where anything above a whisper can be heard by all three sets of diners. So much for intimacy. And he had been hoping to make the romantic suggestion of watching a porn movie later, not, of course, anything crass but that woman-friendly, tasteful production he spent so much time searching for. She, on the other hand, had been hoping to discuss her diminished libido.

Already moving into the wall seat with a view of the room, she says, ‘Do you mind?’ He laughs bleakly: ‘I’m used to looking at walls.’

Now here are menu and wine list. He points out the considerable gap in price between the house red and the others. She reminds him that house red is invariably vinegar. He orders the expensive Chianti Riserva, which the waiter brings and pours, reminding them of another problem here. The waiters invariably rush forward to pour wine, robbing the diners of autonomy, forcing them to drink too fast and unjustly rewarding the greedy who drink fastest. To make a fuss or to accept this annoyance?

As for food, in the interests of good theatre, an essential part of the eating-out experience, she likes them to order different dishes and romantically share forkfuls. But they usually like the same dishes – it is a symbiotic union after all. So he has adopted the strategy of choosing and announcing his choice in a nanosecond. Now, understanding his ploy, she says with cold contempt, ‘So this is your new approach.’

‘Why can’t we both have the same thing if that’s what we want?’

Like so many of his questions, this is not worthy of an answer. Instead, she forgoes her first preferences, orders a starter and main different from his and slams the menu shut.

And only now, when the waiter has left, do they notice that their table
has no candle
. Every other table has its billowing flame. So this waiter insists on pouring wine, which is not only unnecessary but infuriating, and then neglects the one essential thing.
Bring a candle, asshole
.

But, even by candlelight, romance is not easy.

Indeed, so numerous and varied are the illusions, difficulties, demands, resentments, burdens and strains that beset contemporary relationships that the wonder is not that so many fail but that any survive at all. Yet never have so many sought relationships so urgently or entered into them with such high expectations. For, as the actual relationships have become more like short-term business transactions, the belief in eternal love as an essential prerequisite has grown stronger. In the romantic 1960
s
40 per cent of women were willing to accept marriage without love but, by the hard-headed, money-obsessed 1980
s
, only 15 per cent would countenance loveless financial security.
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There seems to be a weird and catastrophic inverse effect – the less tolerant the practice, the more demanding the theory. The lovers expect more but are willing to give less. Yet the inevitable disasters rarely chasten these romantics. Cyberspace teems with seekers of love entirely undaunted by constant past failure. In any other area of endeavour the bewildered and frustrated would give up, or at the very least ask searching questions. But the magic of potential, the key facilitator of the age, is strongest in sexual attraction. Love, or rather the expectation of love, is indeed blind.

The primary illusion is that establishing a relationship is easy. This is built into the very language: to ‘fall in love’, as though it is merely a matter of passive acceptance; to ‘be in love’, as though the passive acceptance leads to a definitive, final state. Erich Fromm addresses the problem at the start of his classic work
The Art of Loving
: ‘This attitude – that nothing is easier than to love – has continued to be the prevalent idea about love in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.’
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And, in order to fall in love and be in love, it is simply a matter of finding the right person, who will immediately remove difficulties, insecurity and loneliness by providing eternal, protective love.

This belief that it is only a matter of finding the right person is further encouraged by the refusal of personal responsibility, the tendency to look outward in demand rather than inward in obligation. It is up to the other to provide love so, when the relationship breaks down, it must be the fault of the other. This was not the right one after all and the solution is to resume the search with greater urgency. It is astonishing how those with a string of failed relationships rarely accept that they themselves must be at least part of the problem. Even more astonishingly, the succession of failures does not make another failure seem more likely. The series of disasters is, in fact, a
guarantee of success next time
. Because, after so many painful failures, success is
deserved
. The sense of entitlement is strengthened by grievance:
I really deserve this to work this time
. So instead of caution there is recklessness. The distraught singleton plunges back into the game like a gambler betting ever more heavily to recoup heavy losses.

And when singletons find partners they fling themselves into the relationship with desperate abandon, believing that love is the ecstatic surrender of self and fusion with the beloved, a kind of mystical unity. They shower each other with flattery, promises, gifts and sexual favours, introduce each other’s relatives, colleagues and friends, are rarely out of each other’s company and, when separated, bombard each other with romantic messages – a total abandonment and immersion that encourages a sadomasochistic relationship to develop without either party being aware of it. In fact, this dependency is often initially exhilarating, a release from the burdens and anxieties of freedom. So the domineering one thinks that the control will be permanent and the submissive one that all needs will always be met by the controller. And, when problems and tensions arise, each lover is baffled –
how can this be going wrong when I’ve given myself so completely?
But the surrender that was meant to ensure love has actually made it impossible. The result is bewilderment, anger and impatience – and the conclusion that this was not the right person after all.

Because the relationship, for all its intensity, will also have been unconsciously provisional – there is no longer any permanence even in marriage. And, though reversible decisions appear attractive, such choices satisfy much less than the irreversible and permanent. So there is a self-fulfilling prophecy – a relationship understood as potentially less than final will more than likely turn out to be less than final.

There is also the problem that, in contemporary cities, the couple relationship may be the only source of connection, structure, meaning and enchantment. In traditional societies there were religions to confer meaning and magic, rituals to structure the year, communities to offer strong connections and extended families to provide support. Now the poor groaning ‘relationship’ has to provide all of this, to take upon its weakened back the entire burden of living. No wonder it collapses under the strain.