By David Gill, reprinted from The 313.
Celeste Headlee is an award-winning journalist and professional speaker. Her TEDx talk on ten ways to have better conversations had more than twenty million views as of the writing of Do Nothing in 2020. In her more than twenty-year career in public radio, Celeste has anchored NPR’s Tell Me More, Talk of the Nation, All Things Considered and Weekend Edition. I became a fan when she was co-host of the national morning news show The Takeaway. In Do Nothing, we encounter an avalanche of her amazing work projects and accomplishments as a writer and speaker.
In Part One of Do Nothing (“The Cult of Efficiency”), Headlee explores in admirable depth the sources of today’s workaholism. Why is our identity so tightly bound to our workplace productivity and achievement? Why does our work overwhelm and dominate all other aspects of who we are and how we live? She faults the industrial revolution and its transformation of work, not least for its emphasis on quantifiable production and time-based compensation. She also takes to task both the secular ideology of work as the meaning and purpose of life – and religious themes, chiefly the “Protestant work ethic” studied by sociologist Max Weber. She argues that anthropological and historical research do not support the narrow view that people are (mostly) by nature made for work as their defining characteristic.
Part One of Do Nothing is a rich and thoughtful discussion, well worth reading and discussing. I think her view of technology is too device/machine centered and fails to explore the deeper colonization of our minds with technological values and methods. Her blast against the “Protestant work ethic” is against a deformation of the biblical view of work which locates work in relation to God, neighbor, beauty (not just utility), celebration and rest. A robust biblical theology of work and rest is the answer, not part of the problem.
With Part Two (“Leaving the Cult – How to Go from Life Hack to Life Back”), Headlee really hits her stride with six great discussions of strategies to escape the workaholic life. We need to change our perceptions and our perspective on life and work, resist the dominance of social media, step away from our work desk, invest in leisure, invest in real human connections, and take the longer view on life, work and career. Headley provides dozens of examples from her own life and from other voices as she develops these recommendations. It is not just a theory but a real life possibility.
The Green Room 