Shiraz Janjua

The Alain de Botton book I’m reading, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, isn’t quite what I was hoping for, at least two-thirds of the way in. I was hoping for more insight into the lives and minds of people as they work and make their way through society. Mostly, though, we get an overview of the various sectors of industry with a kind of manufactured wonder for them. Still, he’ll occasionally drop in some gems like this one; he follows an accountant to her office after her morning transit commute.

The employees proceed upstairs without looking around them. To feel at home in the office is not to notice the strange silver sculpture in the lobby and to forget how alien the place felt on the first day. The start of work means the end to freedom, but also to doubt, intensity and wayward desires. The accountant’s ten thousand possibilities have been reduced to an agreeable handful. She has a business card which she hands over in meetings and which tells other people — and, more meaningfully perhaps, reminds her — that she is a Business Unit Senior Manager, rather than a vaporous transient consciousness in an incidental universe. How satisfying it is to be held in check by the assumptions of colleagues, instead of being forced to contemplate, in the loneliness of early hours, all that one might have been and now will never be. She has a meeting scheduled with a team from an insurance brokerage in half an hour, leaving her time to buy a muffin and coffee from the cafeteria. The start of the day in the office has burnt off nostalgia as the sun evaporates a coat of dew. Life is no longer mysterious, sad, hanunting, touching, confusing or melancholy; it is a practical stage for clear-eyed action.