The 20th century will be remembered for having decided that humans should not work too hard. In 1800, all but a few worked for 70% of their waking hours over a lifetime. Life was work. Today work in the prosperous West occupies only 16% of our waking hours partly because we spend so many years in education and retirement and partly because we now give almost exactly as much time to watching TV as we have gained by living longer. But that has only produced an explosion of complaints about increasing stress and pressure at work. Why are more and more taking early retirement despite being protected by a myriad of rules about conditions of employment, health and safety? Why do so many work to acquire wealth so that they can stop working? Why do those in the most sought-after privileged jobs receive “compensation” as though they deserve damages for the pain and suffering they endure? Why do so many seemingly normal people, who have a job and a home, feel that some aspect of their work is mutilating their mind and sucking life out of their soul? How many of us are becoming part-time slaves, battered by drudgery in pointless tasks, wasting big portions of our lives? Work/life balance is theoretically our ideal but it is also our scourge. It does nothing to diminish the frustrations of work, which can remain as boring or disagreeable as ever, with the excuse that we have more leisure time to recover. What we do at work still dominates our lives.

The CEO of one of Britain’s multinationals says that he no longer interviews graduate applicants for jobs: they have become so choosy that it is they who interview him. They want adventure and excitement, not just money; they want to explore the world, to meet interesting people, to grow as individuals, to develop all sides of their personality. A career is no longer a life-long commitment but a pub-crawl through different jobs, because there are not enough really interesting ones to satisfy the aspirations of the ever-increasing number of educated graduates. They demand that work should suit them rather than that they should fit into a pigeon-hole with an impersonal job-description which ignores their unique characteristics. Only 5% of people (according to one survey) are totally passionate about their work and only 20% are convinced that the work they do is a really valuable to society at large. So where do we go from here? Work and life have divorced but I think they can be reunited.

Today’s fastest growing industry – tourism – also has the worst staff turnover rates. That is because it is stuck in the belief that hotels are just places to sleep in or venues for business conferences, though many other ambitions are hidden behind their facades. The cheap foreign labour they rely on is often interested, above all, in learning a language and improving qualifications but no hotel has yet advertised itself as a language school. The foreign chambermaids – often well-educated in their own country – are exhausted after cleaning 14 rooms a day and are not given a chance to use all their talents and knowledge. Many guests want to participate in the local social and cultural life rather than just stare at ancient monuments. With a little more imagination, hotels could be cultural centres where local talents of all kinds could engage with visitors to mutual benefit. The hotel staff could proactively promote cultural events; they could collaborate with the local university to provide an introduction to local knowledge that tourists never even glimpse. But hotel managers are specialists. They see their hotel as a self-sufficient island. Middle management is often wary of change: “My job is to teach chambermaids to be chambermaids”, said one manager. But that is not what chambermaids really want to learn. When the tourist industry catches up with the new aspirations of both staff and customers, it will appreciate that good food is improved if it is accompanied by good conversation and restaurants have still to learn how to provide that. A significant number of leaders of the “hospitality industry” are becoming aware that they could contribute much more to society as intermediaries between civilisations and professions instead of acting on the assumption that their customers are too exhausted to want anything more than pampering and therapy. But these leaders are not equipped or trained to collaborate effectively with other branches of activity and knowledge. A catalyst is needed.

How a catalyst can change things can be seen in a project – still in progress – which is confronting the boredom of repetitive manual work. Rich countries are eliminating many such jobs by transferring manufacturing to poorer countries. But there is an alternative to recreating the horrors of the industrial revolution somewhere else. One of the visionary entrepreneurs in India, who wants their country to outdo the West not just in money-making but also in the quality of life that they foster, has offered the 800 women he employs – successfully exporting household goods at very keen prices – a general education in the middle of each day so that they can learn to become entrepreneurs themselves or be better qualified to help their children to do so. It means slightly shorter hours and a small cut in wages. Some 20% of the workers refused and resigned: money mattered most to them but the rest, poor though they are, are now embarking on an experiment that could show how dead-end jobs can be turned into adventures and how workers can feel that they are stretching their minds to good purpose. It is possible to move out of the tradition of the dark satanic mills.

All it takes is to break the separation between work and the good life. It means not just training people to do their job more efficiently but giving them broader perspectives to help them develop more life-enhancing jobs.

That approach is in the process of being applied to other industries, as different as retail and insurance, and to the public services too.

What about the managers? All professions are in crisis today, even the most privileged. There are few professionals who do not complain that they are working harder than in the past; with less satisfaction. “Progress” has intensified the pressures of work and damaged its quality by making organisations and ever-changing regulations and procedures increasingly complex. Bureaucracy is growing into a cancer that transmutes the joy of exercising a professional skill into a pain. “You cannot add to the statute book ad infinitum,” said Lord Palmerston 150 years ago but he has been ignored; Brussels has apparently produced over 80,000 directives and regulations and Britain has 27,000 standards to comply with. As a result, becoming a professional means becoming a narrow specialist battling against contradictory forces rather than embarking on a journey on the road to independence, to public respect, and to being a trusted adviser. Every time a big corporation is convicted of fraud, the motivations of a far wider range of people are called into question. So the time has come for every profession to be rethought – its boring training, its rigid organisation, its incapacity to meet contemporary expectations. But professions are closed worlds, resenting outside interference. How can they find new ways to talk to one another in more inventive, constructive and collaborative ways? The clue to the missing link is to be found in the university.

Universities are perhaps the most culpable sinners in the narrowness of their ambitions. They were invented 800 years ago and something different is needed now to supplement them. With the expansion of knowledge, they have become ever more specialised, teaching people chemistry or whatever but very little about what the young want to know, most of all which is how to live. A degree is not an indication of wisdom. Graduates frequently feel lost when they emerge from their expensive studies. And yet it is now fashionable to prolong the agony with a postgraduate degree which normally involves becoming an even narrower specialist. Beyond specialist knowledge – desirable and essential though that undoubtedly is – all who have to make decisions about the future need a generalist education in addition. That would introduce people, and not just the young, to all the personal, professional and cultural possibilities open to them, enhance their capacity to learn from every kind of person by penetrating the different ways of thinking of different disciplines – scientific, artistic, commercial, legal, spiritual, and the numerous variations within them. It would systematically invite people of every profession to create a record of their experience, ambitions and difficulties, and enable them to pass this on to the next generation: wiping the slate clean only means that mistakes are endlessly repeated. I have called this project the MCA – one stage beyond the MA and the MBA.

These are examples of the catalysing projects being pursued by the Oxford Muse Foundation. It advances them through the most neglected of all the arts, which is conversation. A survey of MBA graduates found that they “thought that the ability to communicate effectively with another person was the single most useful skill in their career, but that only 6% of business schools were even moderately effective in teaching that skill”. The Oxford Muse’s Conversation Dinners, and its Menu of Conversation (which have already been used at Davos, and by departments of government, the police, businesses and municipalities) are one way to begin. Conversation is quite different from communication, which is just the transmission of information. A good conversation makes you say what you have never said before, and listen with more empathy than you thought you had. Conversation is the basis on which all good relationships – in love, friendship, family and work – depend, and yet no one has so far succeeded in teaching how to do it well.

At a Muse Dinner, you are seated in pairs with someone you do not know. You are given a Menu of Conversation which looks like a restaurant menu – hors d’oeuvres, fish, grills, desserts etc – but under each heading there are 25 different topics for conversation from which you can choose, and you are invited to go through as many as appeal to you. What have you learnt from your experience in each domain of your existence and what can others learn from it? You discover what your partner values most and you clarify your own thoughts. One eminent public figure who attended such a dinner said he would never have a dinner party again without this Menu, because he was bored by small talk; another said that his partner was someone he bumped into very often, but in two hours he got to know him better than he had in twenty years. Each human ambition, emotion and sensitivity has been modified over the ages in different civilisations; we have repeatedly developed different priorities in the way we love, make friends, converse, fight against fear, boredom, loneliness and enemies, treat our spouses, children or strangers, and ultimately try to win respect. Why have humans changed so much in some ways, and not in others? The menu stimulates reflection on what one’s agenda for the future could be, and how developing more sophisticated conversation can improve personal, professional and intercultural relations.

At present, philanthropy is about coming to the aid of catastrophe, disease and misfortune, and rarely concerns itself with the frustrations of ordinary people who are outwardly comfortable. But it is this silent majority that gives a society its character and determines the balance between gloom and hope. Healing the breach between what people do and what they are proud of is no less urgent.

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