The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [67]
A few stands away from the Iranians, I met Caroline Oakley, a young mother from Kent and the inventor of the Crisp Bar, comprising twelve centimetres of grey-hued deep-fried crisps – as many as might ordinarily be found in a twenty-five-gram bag – pressed together into one oleaginous ingot. The idea had come to Oakley during a moment of frustration at having to use two hands to eat her favourite snack, and she felt sure that the bars would, with time and the right investors, become as ubiquitous as their cereal counterparts. She had but a single home-made sample with her, which visitors were welcome to touch whilst she reviewed for them some of the notable advantages that crisps squashed into a bar form enjoyed over those loose in a bag: they were easier to fit into children’s lunchboxes, they took up less space in kitchen cupboards and they could be moulded into pine-tree shapes for Christmas and hearts for Valentine’s Day. The marketing of the product was the province of Oakley’s boyfriend, an intense young man obviously in awe of his partner’s talents, who pressured me to bite off a corner of the sample bar and take an information pack home with me. I tried to reflect on what other consumer goods were currently using up valuable space in air-filled containers and might one day benefit from being compressed into rods, but I lost my train of thought. I moved on to reflect on how the pair behind the Crisp Bar might beat a dignified retreat from this high-point of entrepreneurial energy: how they might fend off the well-meaning and unintentionally humiliating enquiries of neighbours and consider their crisp experience from the vantage point of old age, the sole memento of their venture a box of marketing materials stowed in a corner of the attic next to their children’s cast-off playthings.
Entrepreneurship appears to be almost wholly dependent on a sense that the present order is an unreliable and cowardly indicator of the possible. The absence of certain practices and products is deemed by entrepreneurs to be neither right nor inevitable, but merely evidence of the conformity and lack of imagination of the herd. Yet the milieu also demands that its protagonists develop a hard-headed awareness of certain intractable financial and legal truths, as well as an accurate sense of what other human beings are actually like. The field seems to require a painfully uncommon synthesis of imagination and realism.
3.
Given the rarity of this combination, it was particularly ominous to see so many people being encouraged to have a go. The popularity of the fair (as well as its vigorous promotion by a local authority and a government agency) suggested how closely linked the idea of launching a new business is to the modern notion of fulfilment, being filtered through our society via admiring pro-files of high-flying entrepreneurs, coupled with a relative silence regarding the bankruptcies and not-infrequent suicides of their less accomplished colleagues. The start-up company may be as central to our contemporary ideals as the ritual of praying for the souls of the dead or the maintenance of female virginity was to the values of our medieval ancestors.
Yet in reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not relentlessly play up the possibilities open to all those with a take on the future of the potato crisp, and so, in turn, did not cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one.
Our era is perverse in passing off an