I must admit that dividing tasks has undeniably freed and enriched most humans. If we tried to provide all of our necessities for ourselves, we’d be restricted to subsistence farming–a precarious lifestyle marked by suffering that doesn’t strike me as particularly fulfilling to the spirit (no shade against those who choose that path–that’s just how I see it from afar).
However, if maximizing revenue isn’t our only goal and we value a complete experience of human existence, division of labor comes with noxious psychological and spiritual effects. Mainly, it limits people to fragments of themselves. When people engage exclusively in one way of thinking (or in even more tragic industrial cases, one way of moving), they tend to identify only with that narrow experience and “outsource” everything else to others.
I see this in starkest terms at advertising agencies, where departments are literally named after thinking modes (“creative,” “strategy”) that humans engage in naturally, but which the industry labels as the exclusive lane of a select few. It’s shocking how quickly people, after being grouped into other departments, turn off their creative and strategic thinking. Most will defer even the most basic thoughts of this nature to the “specialists,” from fear of being caught exercising these disciplines without the permission of an official title.
And when they do provide a minimal opinion on the matters, they tend to begin by apologizing and caveating with the self-concept of “I’m not creative”—as if they’ve never in their life doodled a sketch, or written a heartfelt birthday card, or curated a bitching party. Not only do I find this sad, I also think it hinders the quality of our work.
I think the fundamental issue here is that complexity takes a lot of energy to mentally process, and most people don’t want to spend time figuring out how to fit multifaceted people into their projects. They’d rather line up one person to one skill and switch them in and out like machinery, even if it means hiring more people.
Clearly, the best balance is somewhere in the middle, an arrangement where we collaborate with each other via specialized roles to make our collective lives freer, but where we have enough flexibility to not reduce ourselves to one (or even two or three) ways of interacting with the world. Maybe this means we eventually figure out “polywork” cultures that allow individuals to have a wider variety of roles.
Or maybe it simply means drastically reducing our time “at work” (ie, our time reduced to small fragments of ourselves) to the bare minimum. Maybe leisure, when you think about it, is that time where you get to be a whole human, its function (if true leisure should even have a “function”) to keep your not-in-market-demand selves from withering away.