Perhaps this is an odd title—Living through the Barbarism—but it seems that ours is an age of unthinking strife. As a Lyceum Member asks: What is work and what is its purpose? This is something I have been thinking about a lot recently but also as a follow up to our conversation on Private Property [discussed on 11 October 2023]. It seems like most people do not see any purpose in the work that they do. This I believe is a broader societal problem about the value we hold toward our own lives and the lives of others. We no longer really seek the Good but instead seek what is most expedient and lucrative. We work, it seems, so that we can make a company bigger and bigger, whether it be in market share, notability, number of employees, etc. Whether these companies themselves seek any good is never really considered, however.
What Makes Something Work?
“Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life”—this statement contains multitudes, and most of them, I would submit, are lies. The first is the literal sense of the conjunction: as though operations undertaken for the sake of a beloved object entail no labor, no toil, no struggle, no difficulty—not only with the accomplishment of the task but with one’s own motivation to carry it out.
The second and implicit lie is that work is something per se hateful or unfortunate. In other words: do we regard work as a necessary evil, only? Is work itself something we do simply because we must? Is there no good to working itself, and only a good to the product of work?
More fundamentally we must ask, therefore, is the question of what makes something to be “work” in the first place? What is “work”?
What is the End of Work?
Closely related to this question: why do we work? As just mentioned, there exists an obvious answer: we work to produce something, be it a car, a toy, a report, or, in an extended sense, money—so that we can buy food, and clothes, and shelter, and provide for a family, so that we can… what? Continue going to work? Teach our children to work? Buy better and better luxury items with or through which we seek pleasures? Retire in comfort and enjoy our “Golden Years”?
Can there be a life without work? In a sense, yes. There are quite a few whose lives entail no servility: that is, demands of labor for ends not one’s own, in exchange for which one receives some supposedly proportional material benefit. Often these persons—anecdotally, from my own experience and from the accounts of literature and the like—appear not only spoiled and out-of-touch with the realities of the world but, even more tellingly, deeply dissatisfied with their own lives. Might it be that work is not merely a necessary evil… but something that ought to be integral to living well?
I would argue so. But I believe the modern structure of work has made this rather difficult to realize. Perhaps recapturing some distinctions about different ways in which work may be performed can be helpful.
How can we make Work Better?
A Pew Survey conducted earlier this year—with the caveat that such surveys may be misrepresentative in many ways* (consider the skewing by age)—reported that only a very slightly majority (51%) of Americans find their jobs “highly satisfying”. I suspect that both the word “highly” and the percentage are inaccurate. I also suspect that many who do report a satisfaction with their job (and note how much higher it is among those who are paid well!) are satisfied with its outcomes (like being paid)… and not with the work itself.
So how, let us ask, can we make work better? Join us this Wednesday (6 December 2023) to discuss! Links below:
Philosophical Happy Hour
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Come join us for drinks (adult or otherwise) and a meaningful conversation. Open to the public! Held every Wednesday from 5:45–7:15pm ET.
*E.g., while the methodology of randomization is fair, the self-selective nature of those responding to the survey cannot be controlled by those conducting the poll.
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