You’d still work if you didn’t have to

But it would feel more like play.

Jul 15, 2024

In Aesop’s fable, the grasshopper spends all summer playing games while the ant gathers food. When the winter arrives, the ants are prepared, the grasshopper dies.

The moral of the story is that work is more virtuous than play, but the philosopher Bernard Suits thought the grasshopper got it right. In his 1978 book The Grasshopper, Suits says the point of our lives is to play, not to work.

Set up just like one of Plato’s dialogues, the grasshopper lays dying as his disciples gather around him, begging him to work so he can save his own life. As in Socrates' final scene, the grasshopper sticks to his morals, imparting with his final breath that the only and highest good is to play.

…and that in the utopian world of his dreams everyone in the world would be playing, even if they think they are working.

This last message is cryptic to the ants. “Working is doing things you have to do and playing is doing things for the fun of it,” they say. How could someone who’s working be unknowingly playing?

Imagine, like many utopian philosophers do, that all of our survival and financial needs are thoroughly met and we don’t need to work if we don’t want to. What would we do?

Many have assumed the answer is enjoy more leisure. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes worried we would become bored with so much free time. “There is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread,” he said. “For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy.”

One hundred years later, Nick Bostrom says we’ll have to learn how to enjoy. “The answer, I think, is that we’d need to develop a culture that is better suited for a life of leisure,” he says. In his book Deep Utopia he gives us a list called “what to do when there’s nothing to do,” reminding us that we could always go to the gym, take a walk, or write in our diaries.

But a world without work does not imply a world without the need to work for something. We would only idle for so long, traveling the world and loafing in the sun before we become bored and listless. Eventually, we would need some challenge to occupy us. Or as the grasshopper puts it: We would need to find some game to play.

This is something the anti-work movement has neglected. If you are anti-work, what are you for? What activities do you wish to engage in instead? And if you had the ultimate freedom to do those things, might some of them look like work today?

Might someone decide to build his own house, the grasshopper wonders, even in a world where houses are cheap and easily 3D printed?

“Just as a golfer could get balls into holes much more efficiently by dropping them in with his hand, so John could obtain a house simply by pressing a telepathic button,” the grasshopper says. “But it is clear that John is no more interested in simply having a house than the golfer is in having ball-filled holes. It is the bringing about of these results which is important to John and to the golfer rather than the results themselves.”

Even if we take up mountain climbing, we would accept some limitations or “rules to the game” so that we might feel a sense of accomplishment upon achieving some challenge. A mountain climber wouldn’t, for instance, take an elevator to the top of Everest if he could. The challenge is the point. It is what gives us purpose.

It’s what makes the game fun to play.

It’s also what makes it look a little bit like work.

The grasshopper’s disciple concludes: “What you seem to be saying is that a Utopian could engage in all of the achieving activities that normally occupy people in the non-Utopian world, but that the quality, so to speak, of such endeavours would be quite different.”

Precisely. The grasshopper calls this the “lusory attitude.”

In his mind, the end of work is actually just going back to work, but this time with a better attitude about it. With the spirit of playing a game you have chosen to play.

With a lusory attitude.

We saw some of that attitude during the pandemic, when leisure time increased and we saw a corresponding increase in personal hobbies. As I documented in my essay “Will we return to craftwork?” Collette Bice started making candles during the pandemic only to start selling them and make it her job. Why would she make candles by hand when she could purchase all of the candles she wanted inexpensively on Amazon?

But her personal hobby proved a challenge: To see if she could make them by hand, to see if she could make something slowly but beautifully, even to see if she could turn candlemaking into a business. This is much more difficult than purchasing candles, and more rewarding. It gives her purpose.

Bostrom agrees that something has more purpose when it’s more difficult. “Suppose that one day some men in suits place a briefcase in front of you on your desk. They open it, and inside there is a device with two buttons. One button is labeled ‘devastate the world,’ the other is labeled ‘bring about utopia.’ The choice is yours. In this scenario, your life clearly has enormous impact; yet it might be largely devoid of purpose—something which may require a more ongoing engagement and exertion.”

But if we can find a game we want to play—some challenge that requires our ongoing engagement and exertion—we find purpose.

“We will then be able to talk about a Utopia which embodies that ideal,” the grasshopper says, “that is, a state of affairs where people are engaged only in those activities which they value intrinsically.”

And the things we intrinsically value might prove valuable to society too. In a world where all of the houses can be 3D printed for a dollar, might you prefer to buy a unique handcrafted one? In a world where you can purchase anything on Amazon, might you still prefer a handcrafted candle from an artisan?

If so, you might even be willing to work more in order to buy them. And more people might go to work to make them. Everyone would be working on something they value so that they can have a life that they value. They would be playing a game without even realizing it.

The grasshopper’s dream realized.

Of course, the utopian world the grasshopper speaks of does not exist. We do not have full freedom to do whatever we want without financial consideration, and we do not have our every need met so that we can pursue them, but we do have much more of that freedom than we used to.

“In developed countries, we have already come a long way toward realizing this type of abundance—say, more than halfway toward a post-scarcity utopia,” Bostrom says. “Shall we say that wealthy countries are something like between a third and half of the way toward a leisure society? We have long childhoods and retirements, as well as weekends and holidays. If and when we get to Keynes’ 15-hour work week, then maybe we would be eighty percent of the way there.”

What are we doing with that extra leisure? We are finding our “dream jobs.”

We ask “what do you want to be when you grow up?” because we believe the thing we want to do could also be our work. We ask: “what would you do for free?” and use the question to inform what we should do for money. In America, we ask people about their jobs because there is an inherent belief that they are at least somewhat aligned with something we want to do. At least, much more so than when we were all farmers or industrial workers.

“The American dream” is being able to do the thing you are most passionate about, and have that be your job. As countries develop economically, they have more work that they enjoy too—many are already better able to achieve the American dream than America. As we continue to develop AI and super intelligence, that will only continue. More of the grunt work will be taken by the robots and that will allow us to choose from an even wider buffet of professional options.

We will be able to choose work that is more in line with our interests. We will be able to choose the games we want to play.

The thought exercise of imagining what we would do if we didn’t have to do anything, is a good one. Not because we might one day have that, though I expect we will get close, but because we already have sufficient agency to achieve it.

It’s not that we don’t want to work, it’s that we want to play.

And this is why I think we should replace the “anti-work” movement with a “pro-play” movement.

As the grasshopper says, “We thus call games ‘pastimes,’ and regard them as trifling fillers of the interstices in our lives. But they are much more important than that. They are clues to the future. And their serious cultivation now is perhaps our only salvation.”

I tend to agree: It is games that give us meaning in life. “Life for most people will not be worth living if they cannot believe that they are doing something useful, whether it is providing for their families or formulating a theory of relativity.’”

As the grasshopper says: “It is games which give us something to do when there is nothing to do.”