In the late 1930s, the Roosevelt administration embarked on a curious project. Officials hired thousands of unemployed writers to produce guidebooks, children’s books, local histories, collections of folklore and a variety of other essays. Some of these writers were, or would become, American greats such as May Swenson, Ralph Ellison, Studs Terkel and Saul Bellow. Many others were more “writers” than writers: literate white-collar workers such as lawyers and librarians who were in desperate need of gainful employment.
This Federal Writers Project was just a tiny part of Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, which aimed to do much the same thing on a grander scale: find something useful for millions of unemployed Americans to do and pay them to do it. One of its outputs was American Life Histories, nearly 3,000 recollections of Americans, typically the elderly. Many of these were retellings of folk stories or local history, but about half were autobiographical. Venerable citizens reflected on their lives while being interviewed by a government-employed writer.
Even if the main goal of the project was to give literate workers something remunerative to do, the resulting archive — several million words — is fascinating: chapter-length stories of life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some of the interviewees were born in slavery; some lived lives of hardship and violence; some had flourished.
Minnie Marshall told her interviewer that her father had died at sea before she ever knew him and her mother died when Minnie was 14. She married at 16, but her husband abandoned her — after knocking her front teeth out and taking all the money. At the age of 34 — although looking much older — Minnie worked as a maid, grinding out a living in New York City. “Whut ah’m gonna do? Ah got to live.”
Elmo Acosta had a more fortunate existence, interviewed at the age of 66 while working as a grocer in Jacksonville, Florida. Elmo had worked as city councillor and parks commissioner and proudly recalled his role in expanding the city’s parks, planting “holly, oak and magnolia trees as a memorial to the soldiers of the [first] World War” and making it possible to build a bridge across the river — the St Elmo Acosta Bridge is still standing.
Very different stories — and there are hundreds more in the archives. Last year three economists, David Lagakos, Stelios Michalopoulos and Hans-Joachim Voth, analysed these life histories with the goal of assessing what people had identified as significant or meaningful in their lives.
The received wisdom is that social connections are what make life worth living. Life gets its meaning from the quality of friendships, family ties and other social relationships.
American Life Histories suggests a slightly broader lesson. The stories people told about themselves, and especially the stories women told about themselves, did indeed often mention friends and family. But they also emphasised, over and over again, the importance of work as a foundation for a meaningful life.
Maybe this says something about the fact that the stories were collected against a backdrop of worklessness — not to mention as an antidote to it. But there is a more general lesson to be learnt about our puzzling relationship with work, and a lesson that will prove particularly useful if AI dislocates the labour market. The puzzle is that we have a love-hate relationship with working for a living. Look closely and you find that people do not tend to enjoy their work. Step back and you find that they can’t do without it.
Twenty years ago, a team of social scientists, including Alan Krueger, an economist, and Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate psychologist, investigated the wellbeing of nearly 1,000 employed women living in Texas. Kahneman and Krueger asked these women to reconstruct a recent day, episode by episode, and to rate the emotions experienced during meals, stretches of childcare, commuting and so on. Emotional labels included “happy”, “enjoying myself”, “annoyed”, “depressed” and “anxious”.
A Douglas Adams character once ruefully reflected about his job that the hours were good but “most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy”. The point of Kahneman and Krueger’s research was to examine that distinction, directing people away from grand evaluations of their lives and towards the moment-to-moment experiences of which life is made.
Their day reconstruction method suggests that the three activities most likely to elicit positive emotions in these women were relaxing, socialising after work and, best of all, sex. The three most miserable activities were the evening commute, the morning commute and work itself. Work was simply the least enjoyable thing in their lives.
Yet to return to that puzzle, one of the most robust findings in social science is that when we ask people to evaluate their lives overall, there are few more reliable sources of dissatisfaction and disappointment than being unemployed. This isn’t just about money: the swings in life-satisfaction are much greater than income alone would explain.
Why is this? One revealing study conducted in Germany found that long-term unemployed people gave much more positive evaluations of their lives once they hit retirement age — presumably because unemployment signified failure or laziness, whereas retirement did not have the same stigma.
Another piece of evidence, from the UK, is that the psychic cost of being unemployed seems to be lower when regional unemployment rates rise: the more other people are unemployed, the less you look or feel bad for being unemployed yourself.
All this seems painfully relevant in a world where there is so much talk about artificial intelligence taking our jobs. Which is ironic, since Lagakos and his colleagues did not read millions of words of American Life Histories, nor even ask their research assistants to do so. Instead, they tweaked ChatGPT until it was delivering answers that were indistinguishable from human reviewers on a small subset of these memoirs. Then they unleashed the chatbot on the entire corpus.
American Life Histories began as a Depression-era make-work project for white-collar Americans and has been analysed by AI tools which were cheaper than human researchers, to produce the conclusion that work is profoundly important. If you don’t find that darkly funny, I’m sure we can ask ChatGPT to explain the joke.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 21 Jan 2026.
I’m running the London Marathon in April in support of a very good cause. If you felt able to contribute something, I’d be extremely grateful.
