As a naturally over-excitable person I have long nourished an envious respect for the languid. Now more than ever. Ours is an age of passionate political commitments, of buoyant self-promotion, of dementedly zealous CVs. The disaffected and the unenthused have always been cool but they have also become glamorously subversive of the historical moment.
Indifference more than ever is a quality to be admired — even by those of us prone to gesticulating too much in conversation and to helplessly and repeatedly believing the last thing we saw at the cinema to be the best film ever. Few things are as oppressive as compulsory enthusiasm.
The present cult of enthusiasm is, I think, a symptom of the commercialisation of our culture. This is why we feel it most intensely at work. Nobody familiar with office life will have managed to avoid the absurd pantomime of excitement which now attends almost all corporate activities: from the greying and weary middle managers who must pretend to be thrilled about PowerPoint presentations to the prospective interns who have to write begging letters proclaiming themselves to be “passionate” about the prospect of making those same greying and weary middle managers coffee for a couple of weeks.
A survey of my email inbox reveals that on average I receive about ten professions of excitement a day, including “exciting emerging voices”, an “exciting” shawl, an “exciting array of influential brands”. Not to mention passion of course. In the last few hours I’ve been informed of somebody’s “passion for holistic healing”, a company’s “passion for tech-led innovation” and the “shared passion” of knitting.
In the period after graduating from university, when I was looking for work as a waiter, I had an unsuccessful interview at a chain restaurant in which I was told the employee assessment criteria had recently changed, so that the lowest acceptable grade for performance was “exceeds expectations”. A few years ago Clive Schlee, the former chief executive of Pret a Manger, revealed that when entering one of the chain’s shops “the first thing I look at is whether the staff are touching each other. Are they smiling, reacting to each other, happy, engaged? I can almost predict sales on body language alone.”
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This kind of behavioural surveillance is most explicit in the service industries (branches of Pret are haunted by anonymous company officials called “mystery shoppers”) but it pervades almost all companies via managerial techniques such as the annual performance review.
Employers increasingly expect to determine their employees’ behaviour and values as well as buying their services. And as work (thanks to longer hours and ubiquitous email) encroaches on our time and becomes more defining of who we are, the boosterish values of the workplace have become more prominent in society generally. Employees find themselves colluding in this. For, if work is the defining activity of your life, how depressing not to be passionate about it.
In a meritocracy passion is also a sign of worth. The top jobs — at least in theory — go to the eagerest beavers and are no longer insouciantly inherited by the upper classes. If you were insouciantly to inherit a job, a public display of enthusiasm might help convince sceptical colleagues you were there on merit. Hence the death of the preposterous performances of indifference that were once a mark of prestige for the English upper classes (Lord Uxbridge to the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo: “By God, sir, I’ve lost my leg.” Wellington: “By God, sir, so you have.”).
The corporate cult of enthusiasm also pervades our lives through advertising. In the years since the Second World War a kind of commercial arms race has driven advertisements to a demented pitch of enthusiasm. Once, advertisers were content to make polite suggestions in a demure corner of The Times about the usefulness of their products. Now, a Morphy Richards toaster promises to “evoke a reaction” and “create a new identity” and a Breville kettle can proclaim its power to “turn on your creativity”.
Similar absurdities surround us every day but we have become so accustomed to them we hardly notice them. Gradually, though, they have changed the emotional pitch of our civilisation: we must all live at the hysterical tenor of the ad-man. Most damaging perhaps has been the elision of advertising and real life. Social media influencers, who must “sell” a desirable lifestyle if they are to win sponsorship, promote themselves as products. And so, because humans are pliant, groupish creatures, many of us have become used to presenting ourselves as products too, even when we have nothing to sell.
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Faked enthusiasm is one of the worst kinds of dishonesty; for all but the most cynical it requires the deception of oneself as well as of others. It is not a failure to be bored by your work, to feel apathetic about a holiday, to remain indifferent to the creative potential of your kettle.
The cult of enthusiasm is most oppressive in politics. In politicians, we have come to see it as the mark of sincerity and deservingness, hence the flourishing of Boris Johnson. Online, everyone must campaign for their values or fall under suspicion. One of the most dispiriting political slogans of our times is surely “silence is violence”. Even if you don’t feel passionate you have to fake it to fit in: asseverate and assimilate.
Authentic enthusiasm has its place but there is more than enough of that around. We must not be afraid of indifference, which nowadays looks positively like a virtue.