![]() ![]() The PM wills Britain to grow, but being the product of a bland corporate culture, cannot explain why we should make the effort. Harold Macmillan sat in the trenches reading Aeschylus. I’m with the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre: we live in the new Dark Ages, we’re just too illiterate to realise how dumb we are. The only principle we can agree matters is choice, though with the death of religion and philosophy, the range of choices that we can imagine has narrowed drastically, as culture and faith have been replaced by holiday photos and video games. Once upon a time, the key unit in society was the family. The silver lining of civilisational collapse is we might finally see the end of K-pop. The replacement rate is circa 2.1 babies per woman in South Korea it’s 0.78. This is demonstrable – UK workers have lost 4.5 working days a year since Covid – and the term is being creatively applied to relationships (where the precarious nature of online dating reflects the gig economy for work).īritons are having less sex, marrying later – if at all – and putting off babies for good, causing populations to shrink. ![]() If we’re not getting what we want, we walk away – when we can be bothered.Īcademics have identified a curious phenomenon called quiet quitting, whereby employees stay in their job, they just do less of it, having neither the will to climb the ladder nor the energy to hop off. I’m convinced that one reason why we adore the NHS is that it remains a rare locus of expertise and hard work, where people do something that matters. The failure to invest in state social care has compelled many to look after relatives.īut while I’m sure the incoming Labour government has countless policies to fix these problems (tumbleweed blows across the page), what they’ll really struggle with is the changing shape of work – the rise of the click-based, content creating “non-job” – and the cultural perception that much of what we do is simply a waste of time.īritons once built ships. A lot of modern employment is insecure and badly paid. The state told us we could stay at home and be paid to do it, that any cost will be covered by the future taxpayer. Therefore, it’s no surprise that today, despite almost one million vacancies, more than nine million of us of working age are economically inactive, including two and a half million on a sickie. ![]() The lesson of lockdown was that nothing – not your religion, your relationships, education or career – matters more than your health. By closing churches in the middle of the “Greatest Crisis Since the War”, Christian leaders sent the message that collective worship isn’t essential – and if it didn’t matter then, why would it matter now? But it’s also an illustration of how we respond to cultural cues. Some of that will be old folks dying off some of it, people losing the habit. This is a column about work, but I’m going to start with religion (atheists, bear with).Ī Telegraph analysis reveals that Church of England attendance has fallen by about 20 per cent since Covid. ![]()
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