The Ant, the Grasshopper, and the Fool

Why you should want to work.

People who don't want to work are often presented with 'The Ant and the Grasshopper' to prime them for shame and deprivation.

To recap the fable, a grasshopper who spent summer dancing is refused food come a lean winter by ants who used their season to store a surplus.

The message seems clear: 

Grainy day savings

"Don't be the grasshopper."

But ...

Around a million Australians were able, available, but not willing to work in February 2021.

U.S. Labor force participation has fallen since 2000. 

Across the OECD, almost a quarter of working-age people are not in the workforce.

That's a lot of grasshoppers.

Ant-y-work

The grasshopper being a frivolous wastrel was not always the point. Various versions of the fable turn the spotlight on the uncharitable ants.

Un-occupied humans and grasshoppers are not idle. They perform home duties, child care, or ... performance arts. They are just not being formally employed or educated. So intense and narrow has today's work ethic become, however, that it is surprising to modern eyes to see classical artists paint the grasshopper not as targets of scorn, but worthy of sympathy.

"Stupid sexy Grasshopper!"

Moralising work raises the question, to what extent we 'work' to signal morality. It raises the larger question of what we work for.

Most of humanity past toiled for subsistence, including when the fable was probably being literally set in stone. You having the luxury to read these words over the internet today means that much of your work is done not to survive, but to indulge. The grasshopper's starvation is incomparable to the inconvenience tolerated by first-world discouraged workers.

A gentler reproval of the work-shy is to bemoan the waste of their potential. Potential for what? To address related metaphors, striking while the iron is hot or making hay while the sun shines assumes you want more iron and hay. Opportunity is only such if you want its fruits, otherwise chasing it is just rash opportunism.

Working to put food on the table differs morally from working to qualify for a new-SUV loan, is different again to working because society valorises 'work'.

Who Saves Wins?

Whether the grasshopper should have done some fieldwork or picked more compassionate friends, there is no avoiding the fact that most interpretations reduce it to its improvidence. It has no redeeming qualities. In contrast, it seems that the ant's prudence entitles them to be a dick without consequence. Criticism of their behaviour rings hollow because at least they live long enough to hear it. 

The ultimate winners are apparently those whose preparedness lets them fight another day. Those who go the extra mile. Those who think just-in-case instead of just-in-time.

While self-determination is seductive, it ignores how little control we have over survival.

Allow me to fight fable with fable.

Jesus in the New Testament tells the Parable of the Rich Fool, in which a wealthy farmer, anticipating future riches, dies before he can employ or enjoy his surplus.

Like our insect friends, we approach the end of the year. It is a time of willing or forced rest which always tests our reserves. We would do well to reflect upon whether we have enough before reflecting upon whether we have worked enough, and not reflexively respond to inactivity with 'The Ant and the Grasshopper'.