(News)

As Professor Joanne B. Ciulla puts it in her book The Working Life (2000): “For many, life consists mostly of exhaustion from work and then rejuvenation for work.”

“Their lives are like the Danaides’ leaky water jars – they pour bits of happiness in, but the jar itself will never be full.”

From his studies on happiness, the American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found that people experienced “flow”, or peaking joy, 50% of the time when they were at work. Oddly, they enjoyed flow only 18% of the time when they were at play. So is work happiness, or happiness work?

In the book Good Work (2001), Prof Csikszentmihalyi, Howard Gardner and William Damon ponder the sometimes uneasy bedfellows of excellence and ethics in life. Their clear-cut gauge of a person’s identity is what they call “the universal mirror test”, named after a German ambassador who, pressed to provide a bevy of prostitutes for a royal celebration, resigned. Asked why, he said: “I refused to see a pimp in the mirror in the morning when I shave.”