The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

We spend the majority of our waking lives at work. We define ourselves by our work. We find meaning — or fail to find it — in our work. And yet, de Botton argues, we rarely think seriously about what work is for, what it gives us, and what it costs us. This book is his attempt to think seriously about it.

Accompanying workers in ten very different fields — tuna fishermen in the Maldives, career counsellors in London, rocket scientists in French Guiana, biscuit factory managers in Reading — de Botton finds in the most mundane occupations unexpected depths of meaning, and in the most glamorous ones unexpected sources of melancholy. The prose is as precise and as elegant as anything he has written. The photographs by Richard Baker, commissioned specifically for the book, give the whole project an almost documentary quality.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work asks us to look at what we do every day — really look at it — and to think about whether the way we spend our working lives adds up to a life well spent. Beautiful and genuinely thought-provoking. Published by Penguin.