Working to live
I’ve been lucky enough to be able to take some extended time off to visit France. There’s something wonderfully relaxed about the pace of life here. Partly it’s because it’s summer, and every one in France (excluding some unfortunate poor sans papiers) is either on vacation or will be soon. The average worker here gets around 4 weeks vacation, more than double the average US worker. Partly the relaxed pace is because the French work a rather short work week, leaving plenty of time for social interactions with friends and political arguments over coffee. Most French work a nominal 35 hour week, although in practice many work longer for several weeks in a row and then take a long weekend. This contrasts with the nominal US 40 hour week, which in fact seems far longer for all the salaried professionals I knows. Surprisingly (here’s a statistic to drive Thomas Friedman crazy), the French are around 5% more productive per hour of work than the US-they just work a lot less, some 40% less over their lifetimes.
This all sounds idyllic, and in a very real way it is (I would dare say, at the risk of offending my countrymen, that the average Frenchman enjoys his life more than the average American), but I must confess that from perspective it seems a bit slothful. A friend joked that my reaction is just residual guilt from my “Protestant work ethic,” as Max Weber famously put it. Maybe so. In America, a man is defined by his success in his career. This leads to tremendous overwork, and isn’t a very pleasant way to live life, but it’s democratic, in a sense: anyone can, in theory, fight their way up. Americans protest that we want to “work to live,” and not “live to work” as we so often do, but the truth is that deep in my heart I cannot shake the notion that my work is an integral part of my life.
This all sounds idyllic, and in a very real way it is (I would dare say, at the risk of offending my countrymen, that the average Frenchman enjoys his life more than the average American), but I must confess that from perspective it seems a bit slothful. A friend joked that my reaction is just residual guilt from my “Protestant work ethic,” as Max Weber famously put it. Maybe so. In America, a man is defined by his success in his career. This leads to tremendous overwork, and isn’t a very pleasant way to live life, but it’s democratic, in a sense: anyone can, in theory, fight their way up. Americans protest that we want to “work to live,” and not “live to work” as we so often do, but the truth is that deep in my heart I cannot shake the notion that my work is an integral part of my life.
