It’s not easy to be a modern renaissance man, it just looks that way. In Italy during the Renaissance there was a quality that was greatly admired and desired by courtiers called Sprezzatura. This quality in essence was the art of makings thing appear effortless or as defined by the Oxford dictionary a “studied carelessness”. It is a quality that I have cultivated even before I knew there was a name for it, and I have paid the price.
Sprezzatura is no longer an admired quality in the work a day world that we live in, where the measure of day is how hard it was at the office. We are more likely to admire someone who took twelve hours to complete their work day than eight. And we assume that the twelve hour day was inherently fifty percent more productive and therefore the value of that worker to be greater than the one who works eight hours a day. I’ve been in the corporate world long enough to know that this is rarely true. Most of the people working long hours are wasting their time going for coffee, searching Facebook and reading this blog, and creating a flurry of activity at the end of the day. Now this isn’t to say that there are not periods when work is severely demanding and people truly work long hours. But there are also a lot of make work projects and faux-hours being worked, in order to prove value.
But sprezzatura is more than just hours worked, it is also the seeming ease with which things appear to be completed. I have mastered this much to my chagrin and have come recently to the conclusion that I need to make it look as hard as it is. I have always hidden my effort from the world and made my work look easy. The assumption today is that I don’t have enough work or that I am lazy.
It also does not seem to be admired in other facets of life. Now admittedly it is perhaps a function of coming from a german/scots farmer background and growing up in Ontario where the Protestant work ethic is so engrained in our collective psyche that sitting with your feet up is considered a sin except on Sundays for 15 minutes. Effortlessness is equated with laziness where I come from and sitting down and enjoying a drink or a coffee inherently means that you don’t have enough to do and you haven’t worked enough that day. I am forever defending my efforts and my ability to make things look easy.
Whether it is whipping up a four course dinner, getting yard work done, or just piling through a bunch of errands, I am skilled at making it all look easy, much to the disdain of most people I know who assume that I am lazy. But I know so-called busy people who get far less accomplished.
So as part of my modern renaissance I am fighting to bring back an admiration for sprezzatura; work hard but make it look easy, not it’s opposite, for which there is no word, which is work easy but make it look hard. Partly because I enjoy the benefits of sprezzatura: great effort followed by relaxing times connecting with people over coffee and drinks or meals; sitting in a cafe for hours confident that the efficiency required has earned you the right to your relaxation.
Now maybe this post is just a neurotic rant about my own personal experience and the irritation I have when people assume I am lazy, perhaps I am wrong to generalize about the populace as a whole and our attitude to work. But i think our work/life balance is askew in the modern world not because things take more effort but because we value the appearance of effort over actual effort. I also am aware that this is more true in North America than in other parts of the world where people still no how to sit down, or go out Tuesday night, or take a long lunch on Friday’s in July. We need nothing less than a complete rethink of our relationship to work, before we fake work ourselves to death.
