Ordinary Workers and Artists

I turn forty here in less than two months. I've lived enough to know some people who wanted to be artists but were told along the way, likely by a parent, that only the pursuit of a "real job" made practical sense. Having heeded the advice and having become “successful” in their practical pursuits, I've also watched these people entering their late 30s and into their 40s asking the "what if" question about their lives. Dorothy L. Sayers reflects on the incredible tension many feel looking for the search for meaning, yet instead finding themselves working in the “most monotonous and soul-killing kind of toil.” Sayers does this by reflecting on the difference between the “artist” and the “ordinary worker”:

The great primary contrast between the artist and the ordinary worker is this: the worker works to make money, so that he may enjoy those things in life which are not his work and which his work can purchase for him; but the artist makes money by his work in order that he may go on working. The artist does not say: “I must work in order to live”; but “I must contrive to make money so that I may live to work.” For the artist there is no distinction between work and living. His work is his life, and the whole of his life- not merely the material world about him, or the colors and sounds and events that he perceives, but also all his own personality and emotions, the whole of his Life- is the actual material of his work.

… There is a price paid for the artist’s freedom, as for all freedom. He, of all workers in the world, has the least economic security. The money value of his work is at the mercy of every wind of public opinion; …. Moreoever, he is taxed with a singular injustice; while the world pays tribute to his unworldliness by expecting him to place a great deal of his time, energy, and stock-in-trade at the disposal of the community without payment. The artist puts up with these disabilities because his way of life is not primarily rooted in economics. True, he often demands high prices for his work- but he wants the money not in order that he may stop working and go away and do something different, but in order that he may indulge in the luxury of doing some part of his work for nothing. “Thank heaven,” the artist will say, “I’ve made enough with that book, or play, or picture of mine, to take a couple of years off to do my own work”- which he probably means some book or play or picture which will cost him an immense amount of labor and pains and which he has very little chance of selling.… The actor, like other artists, passionately enjoys doing work for nothing or next to nothing if only he can afford to do it. And he never talks of himself as “employed”; if he is employed, he tells you that he is “working.”

… far too many people in this country seem to go about only half alive. All their existence is an effort to escape from what they are doing. And the inevitable result of this is a boredom, a lack of purpose, a passivity which eats life away at the heart and a disillusionment which prompts men to ask what life is all about, and complain, with only too much truth, that they can “make nothing of it.”

… the power that enables men to work with enthusiasm is a real conviction of the worth of their work. They will endure much if, like the artist, they passionately desire to see the job completed and to know that it is very good. But what are we to say about a civilization which employs so many of its workers in doing work which has no worth at all, work which no living man with a soul in him could desire to see, work which has nothing whatever to justify it, except the manufacture of employment and the creation of profits? That is the real vicious circle in which we are all enclosed. That is the real indictment we have to bring against a commercial age.  Callings, pp. 408-12