考研MBA管理类联考英语二完形填空真题及答案
美国物价-毕业实习心得体会
考研MBA管理类联考英语二完形填空真题及答
案
Would a Work-Free World Be So Bad?
Fears
of civilization-wide idleness are based too much
on
the downsides of being unemployed in a
society premised on
the concept of employment.
A 1567 painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder
depicts a
mythical land of plenty, where
people grow idle in the absence
of work.
Wikimedia * Ilana E. Strauss* Jun 28, 2016 People
have
speculated for centuries about a future
without work, and today
is no different, with
academics, writers, and activists once again
warning that technology is replacing human
workers. Some
imagine that the coming work-
free world will be defined by
inequality: A
few wealthy people will own all the capital, and
the
masses will struggle in an impoverished
wasteland.
A
different, less paranoid, and not mutually
exclusive
prediction holds that the future
will be a wasteland of a different
sort, one
characterized by purposelessness: Without jobs to
give
their lives meaning, people will simply
become lazy and
depressed. Indeed, today’s
unemployed don’t seem to be
having a great
time. One Gallup poll found that 20 percent of
Americans who have been unemployed for at
least a year report
having depression, double
the rate for working Americans. Also,
some
research suggests that the explanation for rising
rates of
mortality, mental-health problems,
and addiction among
poorly-educated, middle-
aged people is a shortage of well-paid
jobs.
Another study shows that people are often happier
at work
than in their free time. Perhaps this
is why many worry about the
agonizing dullness
of a jobless future.
But it doesn’t
necessarily follow from findings like these that
a world without work would be filled with
malaise. Such visions
are based on the
downsides of being unemployed in a society
built on the concept of employment. In the
absence of work, a
society designed with other
ends in mind could yield strikingly
different circumstances for
the future of labor and leisure. Today,
the
virtue of work may be a bit overblown. “Many jobs
are
boring, degrading, unhealthy, and a
squandering of human
potential,” says John
Danaher, a lecturer at the National
University
of Ireland in Galway who has written about a world
without work. “Global surveys find that the
vast majority of
people are unhappy at work.”
These days, because leisure time is
relatively scarce for most
workers, people use
their free time to counterbalance the
intellectual and emotional demands of their
jobs. “When I come
home from a hard day’s
work, I often feel tired,” Danaher says,
adding, “In a world in which I don’t have to
work, I might feel
rather different”—perhaps
different enough to throw himself
into a hobby
or a passion project with the intensity usually
reserved for professional matters.
Having a job can provide a measure of financial
stability, but
in addition to stressing over
how to cover life’s necessities,
today’s
jobless are frequently made to feel like social
outcasts.
“People
who avoid work are viewed as parasites and
leeches,”
Danaher says. Perhaps as a result of
this cultural attitude, for
most people, self-
esteem and identity are tied up intricately with
their job, or lack of job.
Plus, in many
modern-day societies, unemployment can also
be
downright boring. American towns and cities aren’t
really
built for lots of free time: Public
spaces tend to be small islands
in seas of
private property, and there aren’t many places
without
entry fees where adults can meet new
people or come up with
ways to entertain one
another.
The roots of this boredom may run
even deeper. Peter Gray,
a professor of
psychology at Boston College who studies the
concept of play, thinks that if work
disappeared tomorrow, people might be at a loss
for things
to do, growing bored and depressed
because they have
forgotten how to play. “We
teach children a distinction between
play and
work,” Gray explains. “Work is something that you
don’t want to do but you have to do.” He says
this training,
which starts in school, eventually “drills the
play” out of many
children, who grow up to be
adults who are aimless when
presented with
free time.
“Sometimes people retire from
their work, and they don’t
know what to do,”
Gray says. “They’ve lost the ability to create
their own activities.” It’s a problem that
never seems to plague
young children. “There
are no three-year-olds that are going to
be
lazy and depressed because they don’t have a
structured
activity,” he says.
But need
it be this way? Work-free societies are more than
just a thought experiment—they’ve existed
throughout human
history. Consider hunter-
gatherers, who have no bosses,
paychecks, or
eight-hour workdays. Ten thousand years ago, all
humans were hunter-gatherers, and some still
are. Daniel Everett,
an anthropologist at
Bentley University, in Massachusetts,
studied
a group of hunter-gathers in the Amazon called the
Pirahã for years. According to Everett, while
some might
consider hunting and gathering
work, hunter-gatherers don’t.
“They think of it as fun,” he
says. “They don’t have a concept
of work the
way we do.”
“It’s a pretty laid-back life
most of the time,” Everett says.
He described
a typical day for the Pirahã: A man might get up,
spend a few hours canoeing and fishing, have a
barbecue, go for
a swim, bring fish back to
his family, and play until the evening.
Such
subsistence living is surely not without its own
set of
worries, but the anthropologist
Marshall Sahlins argued in a
1968 essay that
hunter-gathers belonged to “the original
affluent society,” seeing as they only
“worked” a few hours a
day; Everett estimates
that Pirahã adults on average work about
20
hours a week (not to mention without bosses
peering over
their shoulders). Meanwhile,
according to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics,
the average employed American with children works
about nine hours a day.
Does this
leisurely life lead to the depression and
purposelessness seen among so many of today’s
unemployed?
“I’ve never seen anything remotely
like depression there,
except people who are physically ill,” Everett
says. “They have
a blast. They play all the
time.” While many may consider work a
staple
of human life, work as it exists today is a
relatively new
invention in the course of
thousands of years of human culture.
“We think
it’s bad to just sit around with nothing to do,”
says
Everett. “For the Pirahã, it’s quite a
desirable state.”
Gray likens these aspects
of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to
the
carefree adventures of many children in developed
countries,
who at some point in life are
expected to put away childish
things. But that
hasn’t always been the case. According to Gary
Cross’s 1990 book A Social History of Leisure
Since 1600, free
time in the U.S. looked quite
different before the 18th and 19th
centuries.
Farmers—which was a fair way to
describe a
huge number of Americans at that time—mixed
work and play in their daily lives. There were
no managers or
overseers, so they would switch
fluidly between working, taking
breaks,
joining in neighborhood games, playing pranks, and
spending time with family and friends. Not to
mention festivals
and other gatherings: France, for instance,
had 84 holidays a year
in 1700, and weather
kept them from farming another 80 or so
days a
year.
This all changed, writes Cross, during
the Industrial
Revolution, which replaced
farms with factories and farmers with
employees. Factory owners created a more
rigidly scheduled
environment that clearly
divided work from play. Meanwhile,
clocks—which were becoming widespread at that
time—began
to give life a quicker pace, and
religious leaders, who
traditionally endorsed
most festivities, started associating leisure
with sin and tried to replace rowdy festivals
with sermons.
As workers started moving into
cities, families no longer
spent their days
together on the farm. Instead, men worked in
factories, women stayed home or worked in
factories, and
children went to school, stayed
home, or worked in factories too.
During the
workday, families became physically separated,
which
affected the way people entertained
themselves: Adults stopped
playing “childish”
games and sports, and the streets were
mostly wiped clean of fun, as
middle- and upper-class families
found
working-class activities like cockfighting and
dice games
distasteful. Many such diversions
were soon outlawed.
With workers’ old
outlets for play having disappeared in a
haze
of factory smoke, many of them turned to new, more
urban
ones. Bars became a refuge where tired
workers drank and
watched live shows with
singing and dancing. If free time means
beer
and TV to a lot of Americans, this might be why.
At times, developed societies have, for a
privileged few,
produced lifestyles that were
nearly as play-filled as
hunter-gatherers’.
Throughout history, aristocrats who earned
their income simply by owning land spent only
a tiny portion of
their time minding financial
exigencies. According to Randolph
Trumbach, a
professor of history at Baruch College, 18th-
century
English aristocrats spent their days
visiting friends, eating
elaborate meals,
hosting salons, hunting, writing letters, fishing,
and going to church. They also spent a good
deal of time
participating in politics,
without pay. Their children would learn
to dance, play instruments,
speak foreign languages, and read
Latin.
Russian nobles frequently became intellectuals,
writers,
and artists. “As a 17th-century
aristocrat said, ‘We sit down to
eat and rise
up to play, for what is a gentleman but his
pleasure?’” Trumbach says.
It’s unlikely
that a world without work would be abundant
enough to provide everyone with such lavish
lifestyles. But Gray
insists that injecting
any amount of additional play into people’
s
lives would be a good thing, because, contrary to
that
17th-century aristocrat, play is about
more than pleasure.
Through play, Gray says,
children (as well as adults) learn how to
strategize, create new mental connections,
express their creativity, cooperate,
overcome narcissism, and
get along with other
people. “Male mammals typically have
difficulty living in close proximity to each
other,” he says, and
play’s harmony-promoting
properties may explain why it came
to be so
central to hunter-gatherer societies. While most
of
today’s adults may have forgotten how to
play, Gray doesn’t
believe it’s an unrecoverable skill: It’s not
uncommon, he says,
for grandparents to re-
learn the concept of play after spending
time
with their young grandchildren.
When people
ponder the nature of a world without work,
they often transpose present-day assumptions
about labor and
leisure onto a future where
they might no longer apply; if
automation does
end up rendering a good portion of human
labor
unnecessary, such a society might exist on
completely
different terms than societies do
today.
So what might a work-free U.S. look
like? Gray has some
ideas. School, for one
thing, would be very different. “I think our
system of schooling would completely fall by
the wayside,” says
Gray. “The primary purpose
of the educational system is to
teach people
to work. I don’t think anybody would want to put
our kids through what we put our kids through
now.” Instead,
Gray suggests that teachers
could build lessons around what
students are
most curious about. Or, perhaps, formal schooling
would disappear altogether.
Trumbach, meanwhile,
wonders if schooling would become
more about
teaching children to be leaders, rather than
workers,
through subjects like philosophy and
rhetoric. He also thinks
that people might
participate in political and public life more,
like aristocrats of yore. “If greater numbers
of people were using
their leisure to run the
country, that would give people a sense
of
purpose,” says Trumbach.
Social life might
look a lot different too. Since the Industrial
Revolution, mothers, fathers, and children
have spent most of
their waking hours apart.
In a work-free world, people of
different ages
might come together again. “We would become
much less isolated from each other,” Gray
imagines, perhaps a
little optimistically.
“When a mom is having a baby, everybody
in the
neighborhood would want to help that mom.”
Researchers have found that having close
relationships is the
number-one predictor of
happiness, and the social connections
that a
work-free world might enable could well displace
the
aimlessness that so many futurists
predict.
In
general, without work, Gray thinks people would be
more
likely to pursue their passions, get
involved in the arts, and visit
friends.
Perhaps leisure would cease to be about unwinding
after
a period of hard work, and would instead
become a more
colorful, varied thing. “We
wouldn’t have to be as self-oriented
as we
think we have to be now,” he says. “I believe we
would
become more human.”
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