If you only lived for a day, what would you do?

I know what I wouldn't do.

It’s been a minute. How have you been?

It’s warm here in the UK. Hell, it’s warm everywhere at the moment. I hope you’re managing to stay cool and hydrated.

It’s an apt backdrop to last week’s London Climate Action Week, and it’s been a busy one for me. I screened my film The Birdwatchers at one event, and sweated my way through a screening of a great film about indigenous wildlife protectors courtesy of Prince William’s wildlife charity.

If there’s anything to lift me out of my eco-anxiety, it’s surrounding myself with people who understand and recognise the importance of nature and are taking steps to try and protect it. It’s something I’ve had the pleasure of doing for the last three years since taking a job at a global environmental non-profit. But for a few weeks, going has been rocky.

I can thank the U.S. government’s anti-environmental policies for a sharp drop-off in grant funding which has left the future of my role uncertain. So it seems likely I’ll be wrapping up there soon and looking for something else to do.

The question is what.

If you’re living with your eyes open you can see the world’s a hell of a mess, but unfortunately I still have to do things like “pay bills” and “buy food”. I never had the technical knowledge or foresight (or, let’s be honest, the energy) to earn millions from an app or a social media platform or a bank robbery so I still need to rely on income.

For the last eleven years since I entered the workforce after graduating (Law and Criminology, first class honours, thanks for asking) I’ve been chained to a desk from 9am until 6pm from Monday to Friday, and plenty of evenings and weekends as well.

Before I worked for the non-profit, I worked in advertising. A lot of my skills are still applicable to that world in the private sector. But I don’t particularly want to spend my time applying for jobs at corporations who exist only to cause harm. I don’t want to bust a gut for some startup to ‘cut through the noise’ and I don’t want to ‘thrive in a fast-paced environment.’ I’ve done a lot of that in my career and very little of it has been for the benefit of people other than my employers.

If I’m going to continue to work every day until I die, it needs to be for a purpose. It needs to be work that’s solving genuine problems and building a better world.

A friend of mine asked me a question the other day:

“Would you take £100 million to use today if it meant you died tomorrow?”

No, I answered. I don’t need £100 million that badly.

“Then when you wake up tomorrow, you should feel like you won the lottery because you value whatever mundanity tomorrow brings to be worth more than £100 million.”

I like this a lot. It reminds me of palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware who recorded the five biggest regrets of the dying. It shouldn’t be surprising that one of the top regrets was ‘I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.’

The coming shift in my work situation is leading me to reconsider what I do and how I spend my time. The corporate ladder interests me less now than it has ever done before. AI companies are determined to replace me anyway. So perhaps this is an opportunity to reset. To prioritise filling my heart, not my bank account. If I can cover what I need to live a happy life, why should I sacrifice my precious time and energy chasing more?

If I only had a day to live, I certainly wouldn’t spend it thinking about work. I want to spend more time with my family, drink tea, and create art.

Is that so much to ask?

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A couple of weeks ago I took some time off in Denmark with my wife’s family. My brother-in-law rented a cottage by the sea on the east coast, close to where he lives.

There wasn’t much in the way of activities planned. Just a short daily walk to the beach through a rose thicket bursting with blackbirds and yellowhammers, and some bikes in the shed.

The weather was glorious: clear blue skies and an endless azure ocean. (Seemingly endless, I mean. It eventually ends in Sweden.) One afternoon it rained and I stood at the high glass windows watching it come in off the sea in great sweeps. It felt like how I’d imagine a seed in a flowerbed to feel, with the watering can of a kindly old lady dangling above me.

As is my unconscious habit these days, I kept my eyes constantly peeled for wildlife. You can imagine my thrill when I first stepped up to the house and had to duck below a pair of swallows flashing right past the doorway.

The swallows were nesting in the eaves of the shed, which was wide open. There was also a swallow nesting above the back door. The nests were perfectly formed from mud and grass and both were home to three squat and ugly little baby swallows, sticking their little beaks out and looking at me disdainfully.

I kicked myself for not taking my camera with me, so I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with a photo from my phone.

I don’t think I realised how blue swallows were before I watched them so close.

For four days I thoroughly enjoyed watching these swallows dart back and forth past the house. When someone was outside they would float around or perch on the roof and patiently wait for them to step away again. On more than one occasion, a kestrel hovered above the thickets by the beach and the protective swallows would divebomb it, trying to chase it away. The kestrel mostly ignored them.

One thing I forgot about the Nordics in the summer was the confusing lack of darkness. The sun set briefly from about 11pm and rose again at 3am. One morning I was wide awake at four o’clock and I went and stood outside while everyone was still asleep. I looked at the sea and listened to the dawn chorus, which was magical and deafening.

Yellowhammers in the UK seem to be few and far between these days. I might hear one or two on a walk near a farm, but I’ve never heard or seen any in London or Essex where I grew up. Yet here in Denmark the bushes were full of them. A flock of eight or nine of them flashed past me and settled in a small tree, making it glow yellow.

It probably helps that the entirety of Denmark has a smaller population than that of London, but there were noticeably more birds and insects around in the few days I was there. And - my goodness - not a scrap of litter to be seen. No plastic on the beach, no plastic in the verge, no plastic washing up with the gentle tides. Just sand and stones and crab shells and jellyfish and terns diving off the coast.

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One lazy afternoon, when people were napping, I took a bike from the shed and cycled down the coast. It was warm but not hot, the sun shining gold on the fields of gently sighing crops.

I could count on two hands the number of cars I saw in that 90-minute bike ride. For the most part I could cycle through open countryside past verges of poppies and feel entirely alone. My bike had one gear and a little basket on the front which I enjoyed very much. The light and the shadows and the sounds of the wheels click-clacking down the road danced together in a simple but beautiful choreography. Free-wheeling down the hills made me feel like a kid again.

I didn’t think about work at all.

Except, actually, I did think about work. Because over the weekend I read a book called Bullshit Jobs, by David Graeber.

If you’ve ever worked a corporate job before, Graeber’s theory is compelling. He argues that most white collar jobs can easily be finished in 10-15 hours a week, and the rest of the arbitrary time we’re committed to the week is spent having meetings, sending emails, and filling out paperwork that achieves absolutely nothing. In fact, most work is not only pointless but actively destructive - psychologically as well as physically.

The jobs with the most tangible social benefit - like cleaners, waste collectors, bus drivers - are not just the lowest paid roles in society but the most derided. The jobs with the least tangible social benefit - hedge fund managers, marketers, corporate lawyers - are the highest paid, most aspirational roles in society.

Yet Graeber’s book is bursting with testimonials from people who feel frustrated, distressed and in some situations clinically depressed at being stuck in jobs they know are completely worthless, often despite earning enormous salaries. They are exhausted spending their lives being tied up in meaningless bureacracy, attending aimless meetings, and filling out forms nobody reads.

We measure the health of our society by the metric of economic growth instead of, I don’t know, human health or biodiversity or happiness or education. You don’t need to be a mathematician to realise that pursuing infinite growth in a finite world is only going to end in catastrophe. GDP is of course important, but as the only metric for society it’s a complete disaster.

Consider capitalism’s best friend and only judgement of human worth: productivity. Is someone who works on the London Underground being productive when they assist a disabled person onto a train? Is a mother being productive when they look after their sick child? Both require labour and skill and time and provide indisputable benefit to society, yet this kind of ‘caring economy’ is not valued in the same way as profit-making enterprise.

Do I think my job is pointless? No. But I also don’t feel like I need to be strapped to my desk for an arbitrary number of hours each day to achieve the same output. If anything, having more flexibility in my time would probably lead to better results because I could work when I’m most engaged and not when I’m forced to.

A 2022 study explored the impacts of a four-day working week on 61 companies. It was a ‘resounding success’, with 56 of them continuing with the four-day week and 18 confirming the policy is a permanent change.

The benefits were tangible:

‘Before and after’ data shows that 39% of employees were less stressed, and 71% had reduced levels of burnout at the end of the trial. Likewise, levels of anxiety, fatigue and sleep issues decreased, while mental and physical health both improved.

And more convincingly for business owners:

Companies’ revenue…stayed broadly the same over the trial period, rising by 1.4% on average, weighted by company size, across respondent organisations. When compared to a similar period from previous years, organisations reported revenue increases of 35% on average – which indicates healthy growth during this period of working time reduction.

David Graeber is unwilling to make any explicit policy suggestions in the conclusion of Bullshit Jobs, but he does float what he sees as the most convincing alternative to pointless work: universal basic income.

When everyone - rich and poor - is paid the very same flat rate that covers the basics of housing, food and bills, society is released from the compulsion of work for the sake of work. It creates a meaningful approach to how we spend our time, giving people the freedom to choose the path they want to choose. It unlocks time for creativity. Without a bullshit job sapping our energy every day, how much meaningful art would we create? How many life-changing novels? How many technological leaps of medicine and ecological sciences? How many people could leave harmful marriages without being financially impacted?

It would provide value to unpaid work - caring for our children, our sick relatives, our land, nature, ourselves. It would decouple livelihood from work.

This might sound like an economic utopia, but governments would be foolish not to at least consider it. They have to, right? Otherwise why would they be investing billions in AI designed to replace our jobs? We can either build a society where employment is valued so much that we will harshly judge the unemployed and invent meaningless jobs just to give people things to do all day, or we can build a society where AI runs our economy and leaves us with the freedom to write, paint, care, and make music. We can’t have it both ways.

It’s no secret that life is short. Imagine if we could spend it embracing our full potential instead of being forced to rot behind a desk just to be able to afford rent.

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Last month, one Sunday, we took the train up the line a bit and went for a long walk in the countryside.

Cuckoos cuckooed, bumblebees bumbled, and we soaked it in.

Waiting at the station to catch the train back, an insect settled on my wife’s arm. It was a mayfly, and it seemed quite content to just rest for a moment.

The mayfly is known for its short lifespan. Its goal seems to be two things: hanging out with its friends and having sex. It will hatch, do those things exclusively for about a day, then die.

I don’t think I had ever seen one up close before, although I knew their swarms can be very impressive when they hatch together in spring.

I thought this one was alone - until I looked up.

Above us were dozens of mayflies. Whirling, spinning, flitting this way and that, a column of insects towering above us as we sat on the railway platform.

They circled around us, landed on our arms, our shoulders, on our son’s pram. Existing for just a single day, we found ourselves at the heart of their brief lives.

They had no concept of forms to fill in, or direct debits to set up, or two-factor authentication.

They had no interest in billboard advertisements or cherry flavoured Coke or collectible card games.

They had no opinions about football transfers or social media influencers or streaming services.

They had no notion of Microsoft Teams or emails or spam calls.

They emerged into the bright mid-May sunshine among blue water and green leaves and did what they were put on Earth to do.

They saw beauty, and they danced.

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