"What we call creative work, ought not to be called work at all, because it isn't. I imagine that Thomas Edison never did a day's work in his last fifty years"
About this Quote
Leacock isn’t praising hustle; he’s needling it. By flatly declaring that “creative work” shouldn’t be called work, he’s baiting a culture that treats moral worth like a timecard. The line is structured as a provocation: first a categorical claim (“ought not to be called work”), then a cheeky example that both flatters genius and punctures the myth of toil. Edison is the perfect foil: a patron saint of industrious invention who, in popular imagination, practically sweated light bulbs into existence. Leacock twists that image into a punchline. If Edison is the emblem of work ethic, and even he “never did a day’s work,” then maybe “work” is less about effort than about how we frame effort.
The subtext is slyly political, too, coming from an economist who understood how language polices class. Calling something “not work” can be admiration (creation as play, curiosity as fuel) but also a warning: societies often undervalue what they can’t measure in units and hours. Leacock toggles between those meanings. He’s defending creative absorption - the state where difficulty doesn’t feel like drudgery - while also mocking the Protestant-adjacent fetish for suffering as proof of productivity.
Context matters: early 20th-century industrial modernity was turning labor into a managerial science, and “work” was increasingly synonymous with discipline, regimentation, and fatigue. Leacock’s joke is a refusal to let invention be reduced to the factory model. The barb lands because it exposes a cultural contradiction: we celebrate creativity, then insist it justify itself in the vocabulary of grind.
The subtext is slyly political, too, coming from an economist who understood how language polices class. Calling something “not work” can be admiration (creation as play, curiosity as fuel) but also a warning: societies often undervalue what they can’t measure in units and hours. Leacock toggles between those meanings. He’s defending creative absorption - the state where difficulty doesn’t feel like drudgery - while also mocking the Protestant-adjacent fetish for suffering as proof of productivity.
Context matters: early 20th-century industrial modernity was turning labor into a managerial science, and “work” was increasingly synonymous with discipline, regimentation, and fatigue. Leacock’s joke is a refusal to let invention be reduced to the factory model. The barb lands because it exposes a cultural contradiction: we celebrate creativity, then insist it justify itself in the vocabulary of grind.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work |
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