In the real world, Ken really needs a job to feel fulfilled – just like the rest of us
Ken doesn’t need to question his masculinity, he just needs to contribute to the economy and get a job, writes Phoebe Arslanagic-Wakefield.
In a scene that generated much mirth when first released as a teaser trailer, and which I can testify continues to please fans in cinema, Ken explains to Barbie that though it’s a “common misconception” that his job is surfer or lifeguard, “Actually, my job, it’s just beach.”
Just beach. This is true tragicomedy – behind Ken’s smouldering plastic gaze, a howling internal waste stretches, a desolation for which we will see him desperately seek remedy over the course of the film. But the emptiness of Ken’s life mirrors that at the heart of all of Barbie Land.
Our heroine, Stereotypical Barbie, wakes up every day in her Barbie Dream House and then spends a faux-productive day waving vigorously at and hanging out with other Barbies. This vapid existence is spiritually sustainable only because Stereotypical Barbie is fuelled by the knowledge that she and her kindred have achieved a feminist utopia for the women of the real world. When it begins to dawn on Barbie that this may not be the case, what passes for life in Barbie Land begins to lose its sheen.
Perhaps, while watching Barbie or hearing about a world where every night is girls’ night, you felt a little jealous. You thought about the time you sat in a damp seat on the tube (white jeans!) on your way to work, or remembered that it’s bin day, and that you promised Friend A you’d order Friend B’s birthday cake. There are people counting on you, tasks to be completed, obstacles to be negotiated: an alternate reality in which your biggest daily decision is picking out an outfit is not without charm.
But the evidence is clear that just like Ken and Barbie, we too would eventually sicken and tire of living such a life. Certainly there is such a thing as too much free time, with research suggesting that between two to five hours a day has a positive effect on wellbeing, and that more than five hours is likelier to actively decrease your happiness.
And even if you can’t quite believe me as your phone buzzes with yet another email alert, the link between happiness and having a job – no, beach doesn’t count – is strong.
Econometric analysis of European data shows that a single percentage point increase in the unemployment rate lowers wellbeing more than five times as much as a corresponding single point increase in inflation: the researchers call this phenomenon the “misery ratio”. Multiple studies have also drawn a link between suicide rates and unemployment – particularly for men.
The nature of your work matters too. There is evidence that a wide range of factors influence the relationship between work and wellbeing, from the extent to which your job aligns with your values, to whether it gives you a sense of accomplishment and achievement. The Harvard Study of Adult Development – an extraordinary piece of longitudinal research that has been following its original cohort for eighty years – found a clear link between happiness and the chance to develop high-quality human connections in the workplace.
Beyond but perhaps including work, a study of three hundred Americans published in 2013 found that having a greater sense of self-reported purpose in life was predictive of faster recovery from exposure to negative stimuli in the form of a picture. We can see how for many of us, a job that we like, that we excel at, and where we are needed, provides that vital sense of purpose that may in turn lend us this resilience. Equally, it becomes clear how a life of pure leisure – in which we go unstimulated and are of no service to friends or loved ones – may pall and make us fragile.
And whither then, for the man whose job is “beach”?