We Should Be Laughing At Ourselves at Work

I have recently come across a couple anecdotes about two famous figures which have served as a reminder that we need to lighten up more at work.

Above: Franz Kafka on the left, Albert Einstein on the right

Franz Kafka amused by his own work

This is an excerpt from The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together As Things Fall Apart by Astra Taylor; Taylor is referring to Kafka's short story, "The Burrow,:

Kafka supposedly found his own writings very amusing. I can picture him chuckling to his friends as he read this story aloud, recounting the mole's frantic, fruitless labours [...]

Did you know that writing was not Kafka's day job? For over a decade, he worked for a government insurance agency in Prague! By night he helped define the Western literary canon, but by day he helped to save thousands of workers lives by advising on and completing studies for worker's safety! Taylor explains in her book:

For fourteen years, Kafka was employed at the Prague office of the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute of the Kingdom of Bohemia, a semi-government agency where he penned countless reports, briefs, and speeches. These less illustrious texts, published between 1908 and 1915, include "The Scope of Compulsory Insurance for the Building Trade," Risk Classification and Accident Prevention in War Time," and "Fixed-Rate Insurance Premiums for Small Farms Using Machinery."

These documents are every bit as tedious as their titles imply. And yet they also make it clear how much Kafka's day job fed his incredible creativity: the nightmarish bureaucracies and harrowed characters he so memorably conjures were informed by his alienating and stifling professional milieu. By day, Kafka was a diligent and dedicated functionary of a government insurance agency [...] Kafka had talent, and he also had a conscience. During his short life, he was known less as an artist than as a devoted industrial reformer. While on the clock, Kafka did his best to make the bureaucracy he represented more responsive to ordinary people and to make their lives less perilous.? The Prague Institute insured more than 720,000 workers, or about one-third of Austria's entire industrial workforce, and Kafka studied the conditions in which they toiled in minute and technical detail.

- p. 223-224 of The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together As Things Fall Apart by Astra Taylor

also

Kafka's own approach to security offers one route to a more humane and appealing alternative. His response to employers who sought to deflect responsibility for workplace accidents was to try to stop accidents from happening at all. He conducted an in-depth study of the conditions at quarries, analyzing blasting practices and the process of "erratic" boulder extraction and proposing remedies to keep workers alive-including an end to bosses cost-saving measure of paying wages in brandy, which he sensibly noted made blowing up massive rocks a lot more dangerous. His study "Measures for Preventing Accidents on Wood-Planing Machines"contained diagrams of both tools and workers fingerless hands, offering plans for saws that would merely cause "lacerations."120 With these contributions and others, Kafka insisted that insurance need not only be retrospective but that it could also be preventive and protective. Why compensate workers or their widows for lost appendages or lives when you could spare them suffering in the first place? His efforts, scholars agree, averted untold injuries and unnecessary deaths.

p. 274-245 of The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together As Things Fall Apart by Astra Taylor

Albert Einstein laughing at work

It turns out that laughter is the only free emotion- the only one that can't be compelled. We can be made to fear. We can even be made to believe we're in love because, if we're kept dependent and isolated for long enough, we bond in order to survive. But laughter explodes like an aha! It comes when the punch line changes everything that has gone before, when two opposites collide and make a third, when we suddenly see a new reality. Einstein said he had to be very careful while shaving, because when he had an idea, he laughed —and he cut himself.

- from My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem, emphasis mine