hard labour

The most satisfying jobs in the world do not involve creating things (which is inherently dissatisfying if you have any sense of pride, as the thing you create is never as good as you’d like it to be.) The most satisfying jobs in the world involve destruction. When I worked at the hospital building site, I’d done all the sweeping there was to do. My reward was to be given a sledgehammer and shown a wall that needed knocking down. It went far too quickly. Sledgehammers are remarkable objects. On a job that Steve got me once, painting and decorating an old church, I got the plum job of smashing out roof timbers in the company of a stoned Geordie. We’d balance on two timbers and took out the one in the middle with a rhythmic swing of the hammer. The classic ‘man sawing the branch he’s sitting on’. It beat painting and decorating all ends up. It might be that the combination of physical labour and the fruit of that labour being so rapidly evident is what makes destructive work so satisfying. There’s also something honest about it, as opposed to the perennial hint of smugness that goes with creation (‘Look what I/ we have made’) Perhaps there’s something more profound in the satisfaction to be had from destruction: the quest for a simpler life, which may have existed before they started putting buildings up, designing pretty wheels, getting silicon to reform itself as chips.