On Monday, April 28, the great blackout. On Tuesday, April 29, the inevitable aftermath of the serious incident. Thursday, May 1, a holiday. On Friday, May 2, many educational and non-educational institutions were on long weekends. The truth is that it's not very common for all this to happen so often. In any case, the circumstances invite us to think about how our perception of work and, consequently, that of leisure are changing. It's likely that if a Catalan in the 17th or 18th centuries had been asked "What are you?", the answer would have been associated with their status (military, ecclesiastical, noble, etc.) or with belonging to a particular guild, which until the end of theAncien Régime It was the main form of civil association between people. It's also reasonable to think that later, in the 19th century, the person being addressed would no longer have referred to the estate or guild, but would have placed themselves among the industrialists/owners, the artisans, or the workers. It's equally likely that, until just over a generation ago, the name of the company one worked for was added to the answer: "I work for Fecsa" (or La Caixa, or whatever). Today, when I speak to a former student and ask them what they do, whether they have a permanent, paid job or not, they often respond with a formula that implies a—let's say— desiderative identity"I want to do a second master's degree in London," "I'm trying to change departments within the company," "I'd like to learn French," etc. There is a conviction that work will no longer be an activity associated with one's personal identity, because one will have several throughout one's life. As Professor Carlos Obeso, with whom I collaborated on the European Values Survey a few years ago, emphasized, work is increasingly a simple remuneration mechanism, not a profound feature of our self, as it once was. The desiderative identity within the workplace points to the full acceptance of a changing world, which does not necessarily mean an unstable or even insecure one. The enormous labor mobility in the United States, for example, is associated, with all the necessary exceptions, with low unemployment rates compared to Europe.
Roughly speaking, there are three old mentalities that can be associated with our perception of work. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, work is, in the literal sense of the word, a punishment (Genesis 3, 19). There is a second, opposing tradition that we could call Faustian, according to which human activity is a form of emancipation from our animal condition that can, however, transgress natural limits. In the second part of Splendor In Goethe's work, for example, this is very clear. Finally, there is a mentality or tradition—which, for the sake of clarity, we could call Rousseaunian—that considers human effort to have been, in its beginnings, an emancipatory activity, but that it ended up becoming a curse with the arrival of private property. Last week, we were particularly concerned about the role that technology—the automated management of large electricity grids by AI, renewable energy, nuclear energy, etc.—can play in the future of work and the meaning it gives to our lives. We therefore subscribe to the tradition that we have called Faustian here. That is, we end up considering technology as a temptation which carries a significant danger. But it wasn't just any week, obviously: the debate ended up intersecting more or less inevitably with the May Day speeches referring to the reality of work. Also in the reality of leisure, naturally: on the 28th, we saw and experienced the almost forced inactivity of 55 million people. What did many people do during those thirteen or fourteen hours without power? I'm not referring to those who were unlucky enough not to be able to catch a train or get stuck in an elevator, but to the people who were at home without a cell phone, a TV, or anything. Some people absurdly raided supermarkets: many establishments ran out of certain basic products in a matter of hours, as I personally witnessed the next day. Just as happened during the pandemic, by the way, people stockpiled toilet paper until it ran out.
"We Mediterranean people," said Lluís Racionero many years ago, "are doubly guilty of the current European crisis [he was referring to the 1980s] and of the global stagnation, because we have abandoned the centuries-old heritage ofotium cum dignitate ["leisure in dignity", according to Cicero's formula]". I think he was right, and last week we witnessed it.
