Labor days

LABOR GAINS De Botton looks for the meaningful side of work.

Photograph: Vincent Starr

The author of works such as How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton has long elevated self-help themes by filtering them through high-minded topics. His latest book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, examines careers—something a lot of us spend the majority of our days pursuing—and tries to identify what’s rewarding and also soul-crushing about them. The Londoner’s book examines a variety of jobs in subtle detail—rocket scientist, career counselor, biscuit manufacturer—and boils them down to their essentials. But does he have any droll spiritual advice for out-of-work Wall Street traders or disaffected MTA workers? TONY asked him to comment briefly on the pleasures and sorrows of nine New York jobs.

Subway conductor
Pleasure: The sight of lights and animated faces waiting for you at a station as you leave behind the cavernous darkness.
Sorrow: Suicides (see below).

Mayor of NYC
Pleasure: Feeling that the city is your home and you’ve made it a happier place.
Sorrow: A sense that the work is never done, and that even great cities succumb over time. Look what happened to the glories of ancient Rome.

Wall Street guy
Pleasure: Making the fortune with which you hope to show the world that you too have the right to exist and be loved.
Sorrow: Contemplating life after an old friend at a rival firm earned an $11 million bonus and you pulled in a mere $10.5 million.

Traffic newscaster
Pleasure: A spilt load of something like bean curd or liquorice across a major intersection, which leads to a traffic jam stretching deep into New Jersey—and for a few hours, places her at the center of the region’s collective consciousness.
Sorrow: Light traffic.

Player on the New York Knicks
Pleasure: Getting the ball to where it needs to be.
Sorrow: The ball with other intentions.

Elevator inspector
Pleasure: The discovery of advanced corrosion on a cable, requiring urgent and immediate assistance, bringing with it a sense of mission and responsibility.
Sorrow: The unhelpful and grand doormen of Fifth Avenue.

MoMA security guard
Pleasure: Van Gogh’s The Starry Night in Saint Remy, viewed at 3am.
Sorrow: Feelings of longing and impossible desire generated by Matisse’s Dance.

Teacher
Pleasure: After phases of classroom destruction and lewd remarks, 15-year-old Billy has discovered literature with a vengeance. He declares a love for the novels of Michel Houellebecq and begins to date a desperately shy girl, the daughter of divorced parents, revolutionizing the value system of the entire school.
Sorrow: The utterly unrebellious, entirely conformist attitudes of preppy kids focused exclusively on SAT scores and Harvard entrance exams.

Beat reporter for The New York Times
Pleasure: Suicides (see above).
Sorrow: Arianna Huffington.

Cop
Pleasure: Snapping the handcuffs shut on an urbane, impeccably dressed, European art dealer in his Manhattan duplex for systematically defrauding a group of good-for-nothing Eurotrashers out of millions of dollars.
Sorrow: Someone has written something disrespectful on the back of the patrol car.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (Pantheon, $26) is out now.

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