“Funny, you know? After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive,” says Willie Loman when he has finally been burnt out by his life’s pursuit of the quixotic American dream. Death of A Salesman debuted on Broadway in February 1949. Afterwards, US society could never quite escape the rancid aftertaste of a message that the system would ultimately chew them up.
A collective belief in the importance and rewards of hard work is the engine that drives American society. It’s one of the messages the White House constantly imparts about the 47th president: that Donald Trump is “always working”; that he is working “24/7 to deliver for the American people”.
In a country of 350 million people, the competition to become the best at anything is overwhelming, so it’s little surprise that contemporary gods of sport or business will habitually reflect on the countless hours they dedicated to their craft.
Elon Musk’s lifetime of hard work recently earned him the title of the world’s first trillion-dollar company man – no mean feat. Musk, too, likes to advertise himself as a positive role model for dedication to the job.
“You need to work super-hard” he said at a commencement speech at the University of Southern California a decade ago.
“If somebody else is working 50 hours [a week] and you’re working 100, you’ll get twice as much done in the course of a year as the other company,” he said, pointing out that it is just “simple math”. It really is!
The late Kobe Bryant used to advocate that same ethic as he became the post-Jordan basketball lodestone, rising absurdly early for a 4.30am shooting session that he knew nobody else in the league would wake for.
[ Donald Trump the storyteller no longer has full control of the narrativeOpens in new window ]
This week Musk was back in the White House, in black tie and in the good graces of Donald Trump again. In Washington he offered a startling vision of how the future of work is going to look.
“Maybe it’s 10, 20 years, something like that. For me that’s long term: my prediction is work will be optional,” he told the gathering at the US-Saudi Investment Forum.
“Optional?” repeated his host in a voice that suggested he was instinctively wondering when he himself might be canned.
A smattering of nervous applause broke out in the auditorium.
“We’ll take that,” said the host, relieved, as Musk elaborated on his vision.
“It will be like playing sports or a video game or something like that ... if you want to work ... you know the same way, like, you can go to the store and just buy some vegetables or you could grow some vegetables in your back yard. It’s much harder to grow vegetables in your back yard, but people still do it because they like growing vegetables. So that will be what work is like. Optional. But there is a lot of work to get to that point.”
Not for the first time, you listen to Musk and wonder how the entire world is blithely permitting this banal cabal of AI and tech innovators, also including Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman, to inform society that, like it or not, they will soon be downing tools.
But it is both fascinating and terrifying to consider the implications of Musk’s latest announcement coming to pass. Doha, Istanbul and Santiago are regarded as three of the front-runners to host the 2036 Olympics and are beavering away in preparation. If the entire western world is liberated from working by then and money is (as Musk suggested) no longer relevant, then they’d better have the bars stocked.
A 2023 Pew Research poll found that four in every 10 Americans regard their work as being absolutely central to their sense of identity – and that rises to more than 50 per cent mong postgraduate workers. “A man is his job,” says Shelley Levene, David Mamet’s 1980s iteration of Willie Loman in the play Glengarry Glen Ross.
[ US adds 119,000 jobs in September but unemployment hits four-year peakOpens in new window ]
Trump’s spectacular political renaissance was partly based on his uncanny ability to channel his own Willie Loman and sell to Americans the vision of a returning prosperity through the smoke stacks and teeming factory floors and blue-collar sweat. The Democrats could conjure up nothing with the same quixotic appeal – so they lost.
Right now the Trump White House has begun to plead for more time to turn the economy around. Rising unemployment figures, however slight, are causing jitters. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent gave a queasy smile on Thursday when asked about Musk’s breezy forecast about the end of work.
“What happens if generations of Americans don’t have work and is that a good thing?” wondered Laura Ingraham in a voice that suggested that it definitely is not. It was a good question and one that left Bessent flailing in the dark.
“Look, I think there’s always going to be work. Historically when you get productivity increases, more jobs always follow.”
“But he’s saying work is basically not going to be necessary – at all!” Ingraham said, and the look on Bessent’s face said it all.
Good luck selling that version of the American dream on the campaign trail.
