‘Work on, work on, but you'll always work aloneʼ | Essay | Architectural Review 2/6/20, 9(09 PM

‘Work on, work on, but you'll always work alone’

1 February, 2016 By Jack Self

The monastic nature of contemporary work is no coincidence

If you own a smartphone there is a four in five chance that you check your email and social media
accounts within 10 minutes of going to bed at night and waking up in the morning. As a global
society, the hours of rest we get each night have fallen from more than nine in the 1950s to little
more than seven this decade – the lowest known figure in human history. But we are not just
sleeping less; we are barely sleeping and always working.

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‘Work on, work on, but you'll always work aloneʼ | Essay | Architectural Review 2/6/20, 9(09 PM

Before the widespread availability of universal telephony, the working day was clearly defined
because work could only occur at specific locations. There was no ambiguity; you were either at the
office, factory, atelier, studio … or you weren’t. Today, ‘business hours’ and ‘personal time’ have
bled into each other. There is a desperate fear of being left behind, of exiting the loop, of becoming
irrelevant, and so we take our work with us. And technology has made that portability easier. ‘I had
better just check’, you think, in case you have some unread alert, have not seen some breaking
news or have missed an urgent call.
This instinct to check – or, more properly, to ‘check in’ – is, for most people, still limited to wasted
moments in our personal time: a dinner date goes to the washroom, check; your bus is delayed by
a few minutes, check; ad break while slumped on the sofa, check. That time is not surplus; it is all
you have left. At worst, it starts eating into your ‘quality time’ – you ignore your kids to stare at your
screen, cut friends off mid-sentence to post a picture, wake up during the night to bathe in the blue
glow. Checking in is the process that ensures you don’t become out of sync with a horrific machine
governing flows of information.
Our struggle to ‘get a head start’ on our work – as if there was a finite amount – is a response to the
stress of being constantly connected. Always working is a self-defeating cycle: we sacrifice a little
today to help ourselves tomorrow, only to do the same tomorrow. This investment is emotional –
the presence of work in our personal lives convinces us that our work is indeed intensely personal
and highly personalised. The complexity of intertwining employment with our own pasts makes us
feel vaguely entrepreneurial; it certainly forces us to believe no one else is capable of doing our job.
The office is everywhere, and work is all around us. At the same time, more and more our actual
places of work resemble the home.

Egg chair
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‘Work on, work on, but you'll always work aloneʼ | Essay | Architectural Review 2/6/20, 9(09 PM

Our fear of redundancy coupled with our legitimate sense of personal investment makes it
impossible to unplug. The term mostly used to describe this form of always-on lifestyle is ‘creative’,
probably because the only social figure to work with this intensity and personal dedication is the
artist. Of course, the artist always works at the fringe of convention. As ‘creatives’, however, we
mysteriously constitute ‘classes’.
The artist is really only a kind of secular monk or nun, who has replaced God with Art. What sets
monastic life apart from that of the artist or creative is a certain relationship between solitude and
collectivity. Monks laboured alone, but when they did come together it was primarily to celebrate
Mass. In other words, the strength of their society was directly related to the possibility of being
alone, what they called a ‘community of individuals’.
When considering the current trend in office design away from impersonal cubicles towards the
vibe of a hipster café, it is tempting to view these new forms of workspace – hot-desking
arrangements, co-working, studio shares, networking ‘hubs’ – as epitomising just such communities
of individuals. The freedom of the open plan has gone far beyond Bürolandschaft (which was only
an undifferentiated corporate floorplate) and become concerned with promoting self-investment in
work. As a typology, the café is an environment where people choose to come, and thus are free to
go. You cannot generally reserve seats and you are not obliged to communicate with neighbours.
There is no suggestion that people in a café form a community. In fact, it is the antithesis of
monastic work: we are together, but alone; monks were together, though apart. The absence of
strong interpersonal bonds in contemporary workplaces, and their aversion to the creation of
community, produces an easily expendable and replaceable workforce – no matter what we may
like to think about the unique nature of the way we work…
Notwithstanding this difference, our constant state of work is nonetheless the logical endpoint of the
monastic experiment that began in England half a millennium ago. At that time, monks or nuns
made up nearly two per cent of the population, and a third of all land belonged to the Catholic
church. The abbeys that housed these servants of God were centres for crafts, education and
culture; monks produced masterful woodwork, practised medicine and metallurgy, developed
sustainable farming methods, wrote historical texts, invented record keeping, finance and modern
taxation, all while building architectural and engineering wonders. Their immense wealth and
prestige posed a serious threat to the king, Henry VIII, who eventually decided to break them up.

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‘Work on, work on, but you'll always work aloneʼ | Essay | Architectural Review 2/6/20, 9(09 PM

office house
There is still a myth that the Reformation was about divorce. In fact, it was about power. Between
1536 and 1541, Henry went about destroying more than 900 monasteries, annexing their assets
and creating a new church with himself as its head. (The abundance of these ruined spires in the
landscape became the main inspiration for the English Picturesque movement centuries later.)
After the dissolution of their homes, the monks and nuns became integrated with the general
population, applying their particular way of life to every activity in society. Their academic and
artisanal knowledge would translate into universities, guilds and eventually corporations. But
perhaps the greatest impact was a radical reconfiguration of our relationship to time.
The Romans divided a day equally into 12 ‘hours’ of light and 12 of dark. Consequently, the
duration of an hour varied considerably according to the season. For example, in a city like Lindum
(present-day Lincoln), a lunch hour could last 84 minutes in summer, but just 37 minutes in mid-
winter. This level of uncertainty was a serious problem for medieval monks. They believed that
every action served God (a kind of perpetual liturgy) and, as such, the rhythm of the day and its
orderly division into periods of prayer, sleep and work, was extremely important. They spent most
of their time alone, only coming together at certain times in the day for specific activities, intended
to reinforce the monastery as the aforementioned community of individuals. Without accurate
timekeeping, it was impossible for each monk in his room to know when it was time to meet –
hence, monks pioneered the use of mechanical clocks. These early timepieces had no dials, simply
bells that rang out in the cloisters.

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‘Work on, work on, but you'll always work aloneʼ | Essay | Architectural Review 2/6/20, 9(09 PM

Once time had been standardised in this way, new types of measurement began to emerge; with
fixed periods, monks knew if they were getting more or less work done than on the previous day.
This gave rise to the concept of productivity, as it was better to make more for God than less. The
puritan work ethic, and the entire concept that work is fundamentally good, comes from this
discovery. Very soon, the monks began to realise that methodical and structured collaboration
resulted in higher-quality products when compared with unregulated, solitary work. They had
developed the division of labour.
By the late medieval era, as Henry contemplated his rampage, monasteries had become veritable
factories. Moreover, they spread their ideas about work and time by constructing clock towers all
over the land, creating public time and systematically restructuring agrarian society.

Cafe jpg
After the Reformation, the monks and nuns formed associations dedicated to commerce and trade.
From Clarks shoes and Cadbury, to Barclays and Lloyds, many of the oldest British companies
were formed by puritan orders that emerged from the ruined monasteries. They used the division
of labour and ethic of productivity to create as much abundance for God as possible; in other
words, they pursued profit. Within a century this propelled Britain from a European backwater into
the most technologically advanced country on earth. It put an end to feudalism, created capitalism,
spawned an empire and colonised a continent. The very same principles would later lead to the
scientific method and the Industrial Revolution.
If we consider the statistics on how we live today, we seem to be returning to a monastic form of
life: little or no sex, no children, one-room apartments in a closed complex, or little cells in a shared
house. The architecture of the monastery is today reflected in every dwelling.

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‘Work on, work on, but you'll always work aloneʼ | Essay | Architectural Review 2/6/20, 9(09 PM

This new form of monasticism is particularly affecting young people, who are forced by shortages
into over-occupying housing. They increasingly share homes built for families, converting all
common spaces (living rooms, sometimes even bathrooms) into one-room cells. At such a large
scale, this pressure to share spaces with strangers is driving individuals to spend more time alone
in their rooms. For the first time ever, in 2014 the bed overtook the sofa as the most used piece of
British household furniture – this is because we are watching less TV at the time when it is
broadcast, and are spending more time at home watching our screens in bed rather than
socialising.
The rise of Tinder, Grindr and other ‘hook-up’ apps disguises the global trend (led by Japan) toward
less physical intimacy. One major cause appears to be lack of privacy at home. The other major
cause is financial stress. With all our debt, we can’t afford to get married, have children or buy a
house, even though surveys suggest these are the highest priorities for almost everyone under 40.
However, more powerful than any of these factors is the return – after several centuries of lying
dormant – of the monastic concept of perpetual work. The collapse of work and leisure means our
sense of self and identity is defined almost exclusively by what we do, and what others (LinkedIn,
Twitter, etc) say about what we do. We may have replaced God with Mammon, but this ‘always-on’,
‘stand-by’, ‘just-in-time’ lifestyle is monastic in every sense: we are our jobs, just like the monks.
This phenomenon is a potent sign, reinforcing the reality that Western society is transitioning to a
neofeudal capitalist regime of extreme privilege and wealth inequality.

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