'After Work'
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'After Work'
Dissecting Erik Gandini's new documentary on the pathologies of the modern working world.
What would you do with your time if you didn’t have to work? Does the thought of a stress-free life wash over you like the balmy wind on the Amalfi coast to which you’d run away immediately, or does it create an existential pit in your stomach? After all, what is your identity if not a reflection of what you do, how you spend your days? Or perhaps you aren’t too concerned about your job, code-switching between weekday/weekend body and mind? Uncomfortable and fascinating, the question of work and how the modern world relates to it is at the core of Swedish/Italian director Erik Gandini’s new release, After Work, which premiered at the CPH:dox festival in March. From South Korea to Italy, Gandini set out in a genuine bid to find a healthier and perhaps even plausible alternative to the Calvinst work ethic, the productivity-focussed ideology at the core of many economically developed countries today. In other words: the more you work, the better you are[1].
The film’s journey begins in a familiar place: the USA. Gandini shows us a corporate high-flyer with the aura of a LinkedIn influencer, a motivational speaker talking office workers down from the ledge of imminent burnout, a delivery driver who condenses her career to a point by stating, somewhat blankly, “the day I pee in a bottle is the day I quit Amazon”. There is discussion, tension. There is a slumbering awareness of the danger of stress, but an unwillingness to leave it behind. Indeed, Americans voluntarily give up 500 million hours of their holiday allowance each year.
We move on to the grey cubicles of a Seoul office block, where a now-grown daughter visits her elderly father at work in a windowless room, lamenting the years he missed. A government-sponsored advert plays on a billboard, encouraging workers to go home and see their families instead of staying late. Rows of computers turn black suddenly at 7PM on a Friday as part of the newly implemented PC-off policy, an attempt to tackle the chronic overworking of South Koreans. I can barely cope if I don’t have time for a slow breakfast before work, let alone renouncing friends, family and health over decades, in favour of maintaining a self-image of productivity and reliability. Why can nobody seem to strike a balance between work and leisure? What, I ask myself, is wrong with people?
If it were not for Gandini’s almost alien way of observing those silly humans on the other side of the lens, the offbeat and unflinching humour employed to soften the blow of human ineptness, I may have been a more unsettled viewer. The grounding presence of a philosophy professor throughout the film, a self-professed workaholic who spends her days analysing the protestant work ethic, is decidedly meta yet reassuring. Ah, yes: academic detachment from reality. A woman after my own mind!
Her words soften the blow of the introduction to the Kuwaiti approach, the antithesis to South Korea’s work compulsion. A constitutional right to work coupled with immense wealth and a disproportionately small population means many Kuwaitis hold symbolic jobs, being paid by the government to keep up the pretence of having an occupation. A man sits in a cubicle and watches films to pass the time; a woman reminisces about the day six months ago when she was tasked with sending a letter, the only time she actually had to do any work. In the director’s words: “very emotionally, existentially, depressing”. What Gandini fails to address as such is what makes this absurd surplus of labour and money possible in the first place: the underpaid and overworked migrant labourers making up 70% of its population, who remain at risk of abuse, arbitrary deportation and disproportionate occupational fatality.
We move on to Italy, where NEETs (young people “Not in Employment, Education or Training”) now make up a good chunk of the younger, working-age population, and see hedonism as the priority. I could fuck with this for a little while, but for good? I am not convinced. Maybe it’s my conditioning, but I require both the luxury of time to have fun and the balancing pull of challenging work and perhaps a sprinkling of stress keeping my cortisol and dopamine levels dancing in order to be content.
Gandini’s last stop - and in his view the most promising [2]- is a wealthy Italian heiress who fills her days with gardening, grooming her horses and reading. I don’t doubt she has the most fulfilling daily routine out of all of the film’s subjects, however I do not find the conclusion very heartening. If the answer to work-life balance is inheriting a palazzo in the Tuscan hills, it is not particularly relevant to most of the film’s viewers, although it does bring things to a point. Money helps.
Like the Kuwaitis, the Italian heiress is what Veblen would have called a member of the “leisure class”, a group with a social status that exempts them from the necessity of work. In contrast to the former, she seems to find little value in the prospect of employment, with a sense of self that is more tied into her environment, hobbies, and relationships. This is where the techno-utopian idea was meant to take us: more free time, more time to devote to personal, intellectual and aesthetic pursuits. As many of us know, however, our cultural reality has made the time saved by technology a space to be filled with, you guessed it: more work.
So what is the answer? My current perspective is this: finding a career which is a true expression of your interests, one which fulfils you in a multifaceted way, is the only good excuse for workaholism. Having a job which you are just okay with is a good alternative, if it gives you the space and time to devote equal focus to the things you do care about. Making a job you have little personal connection to “the primary and all-demanding object of devotion or attachment” or tying your identity or sense of self-worth to it because you cannot bear to face the empty space, is a recipe for unhappiness. If that’s you, I suggest finding a hobby. I might change my mind on this tomorrow, but that’s it for now.
More information on After Work is available at https://cphdox.dk/film/after-work/.
[1] For a less reductionist explanation of the Calvinist work ethic, see https://www.britannica.com/topic/Protestant-ethic
[2] https://variety.com/2023/film/global/erik-gandini-after-work-1235561211/