In 1954, when my father was fourteen years old, he became a plumber's apprentice at a shipyard in Moss, a small industrial town in the southeast of Norway. The shipyard primarily built large tankers. It was the largest company in Moss, and 2,000 workers were employed there. At the age of eighteen my father became a regular plumber, and about ten years later he became a foreman. In 2002 he retired owing to health problems, having been exposed to large amounts of asbestos at the shipyard early in his career. He was employed at the same company for his entire professional life. My impression was always that he, for the most part, enjoyed working at the shipyard. Yet he was also eager to leave at exactly 3.30pm every single workday, and as a child I usually met him at the gates of the shipyard before we walked home together. There was a very strict distinction between work and leisure, and my father had limited contact with his work colleagues outside the workplace. If a particularly close colleague had fallen ill, he might pay him a visit in the afternoon, but otherwise work and leisure were strictly isolated social spheres. Questions as to whether his job was “meaningful” or whether it was an expression of his “true self” do not seem to have occurred to him.

This description of my father's career is in many ways the exact opposite of current descriptions of what work is supposed to be all about.