One of the cultural highlights of London in 2023 was the Lightroom’s retrospective of Britain’s greatest living artist David Hockney.  It was an evocative and deeply immersive experience, surrounded on all sides by Hockney’s art, while kids tried to jump in the virtual puddles.  Hockney voiced his own world view, as a glass half-full. “There is no such thing as bad weather,” he tells us. “I can look at the little puddles in the rain and get pleasure out of them … if it’s rainy I’ll draw the rain, if it’s sunny I’ll draw the sun … The world is very, very beautiful if you look at it, but most people don’t look very much.”

As we look towards 2024, it seems that a much gloomier landscape awaits us – with ongoing wars, instability, discord, and epoch marking elections looming in the UK, Europe and USA.  Is it still possible for us to see equal beauty as Hockney does, both in the miserable rain of northern France and the blazing sun of southern California?  

The trick seems to be not to ignore what is going on the in the world, but to also look deeper and look elsewhere.  Today the news itself has become the news – mistrusted, scandalous and more often taking sides.  Are there other ways we can better understand the world than through the skewed curation of an algorithm fuelled feed?  Numerous writers and counsellors advocate a digital detox, new deep-work habits, changing the channel, avoiding social media and being more aware of its impact on our mood and our sense-making.   Maybe we need more walking, talking and listening to one another?  More time spent reading and less social-media feeding.  As Barack Obama said of his annual reading list: “While each of us has plenty that keeps us busy, outlets like literature and art can enhance our lives. They’re the fabric that helps make up a life”.

In Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, he makes the case for our lives to be seen in a broader frame than the weight and stress of the moment – the dominant mood of the here and now.  Instead, we should fully immerse ourselves in a time management horizon that has real breadth and meaning, not just the next impending milestone. It might feel more possible to do that at the start of a new year, but we need to be armed with more than just some new resolutions.  In classes at LBS, we often explore the profundity found in Andrew Scott and Lynda Gratton’s The Hundred Year Life, and the need for managers and mid-lifers to learn again, to re-invest in “intangible assets” (dormant friendships, new relationships) as well as monitoring our health and our tangible wealth.

A good touchstone for this new more optimistic way of looking at the world in 2024, might be through reappraising how we look at our working lives.  Before 2019, working from home was a rare privilege, which often needed to be grudgingly “approved”.  Employers were reluctant to unleash the autonomy genie of flexible working.  Now, hybrid, remote and flexible working is the norm for very many employees. The past three years has seen the greatest liberalisation in the form and mode of professional work ever known. Our corporate leaders have seized the zeitgeist in their garden cabin-offices, where they can broadcast townhall missives in their slippers and shorts.  The new norms of office attendance and remote technology have meant a radical recalibration of work and life that we might never have imagined possible just five years ago.

But despite this, no one seems very happy.  Gallop report worsening employee engagement, and productivity measures have seen no beneficial ‘uptick’ in our newfound freedom from the commute.  Surprisingly, Gallop’s 2023 State of The Workplace survey found that the category of worker with the greatest likelihood to quit their job are those who seemingly enjoy the best of both worlds - hybrid workers.  It seems organisations have created a new mode of working, at the expense of some organisational glue.

Now work is not perfect.  There is frustration, and monotony and boredom some days. I do not pretend that every organisation treats its employees well, and I know that bullying, malfeasance and other issues do sometimes rear their ugly heads.  But for many of us, we are able to work for decent firms, that are normally well led, with good benefits and a sense of purpose.  Some fear that 2024 may herald the explosion of AI adoption, and the increasing trivialisation and commoditisation of human expertise and ingenuity. In the near future, many professional jobs may seem more and more meaningless and economically vulnerable.  Even JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon has predicted that AI will mean that workers will be needed less and less, and soon no more than three days week.

But let’s take Hockney’s glass-full approach. Perhaps that might also mean we have more time for wandering, meeting others for coffee, for conversation and for nostalgic memories of the past.  Of the tyranny of clocking in and out, of five-day working, dress down Fridays and the illicit thrill of the occasional duvet day.  David Hockney made every day of his working life extraordinarily productive. Over 15,000 genuine works of astounding art produced, and his greatest productivity found in his Croc wearing, chain-smoking eighties.  The outlook for 2024 looks gloomy, but if it is only 52 of the 4,000 weeks we are afforded, how do we make the utmost of both the sunny days and the wet?