Is all work meaningless?
I have a new essay out this week on this question. The answer may surprise you.
My New York Times opinion essay on forging a post-pandemic vision of work’s role in a good life has garnered more positive attention than anything I’ve written before, and it has generated some early interest in my book, The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives, which will be out on January 4. (You can preorder it from the publisher — click “Buying Options” — and all the other usual places.)
I appeared briefly on KCBS radio in San Francisco — right after traffic and weather together on the eights — and then had a longer conversation with Sasha-Ann Simons, host of “Reset” on WBEZ in Chicago. The essay was just translated into Spanish.
It has also brought new readers to this newsletter. I’m grateful you’re all here.
Another essay I wrote on the topic of work’s meaning was just published in the new issue of Notre Dame Magazine. The theme of the issue is “The Work of Human Hands,” and my essay, “What Are We Doing?” was meant to bring the theme to the fore and pose some questions that would echo through the other pieces in the issue, which focus on people doing mundane and unusual work from Alaska to to the Southern African kingdom of Eswatini. I wanted to pose the meaning of work as a problem. All these people around the world are doing things, taking pride in accomplishment.
But what am I doing? What about you? Don’t we just spend all day typing? How can we see our work as meaningful, when we often can’t point to what we’ve accomplished at the end of a day? To answer that, I thought about the work of bakers in Boston, a physician in Mississippi, Benedictine sisters in Minnesota, and my own work as a parking lot attendant in Virginia a decade and a half ago.
Many people today are trying … to make their accomplishments more visible, so they can place what they do in those bigger, more meaningful narratives.
But for many forms of office work, this ideal is impossible. Some of what we do is just hopelessly abstract — and possibly pointless. I couldn’t even guess what it might mean to be a category management planner or data engagement coordinator — positions advertised on LinkedIn as I write this. But people will do those jobs, and they will want to make sense of what they’re doing. To do so, they may need to embrace the reality that work isn’t always designed to accomplish something tangible. We don’t always get to take pride in a job well done.
I know the good that can come, in the right conditions, from work that has no product. After finishing graduate school, I got a job as a parking lot attendant. My workplace was a small, rough-hewn wooden booth behind a pizza shop. I would open the lot at 8:30 a.m., get coffee and enjoy two hours of solitude before the first customers arrived….
As former attendant John Lindaman says in The Parking Lot Movie, a 2010 documentary about the lot where we both worked, “If 600 times a day you are taking a ticket from somebody, you have 600 opportunities to take a ticket from somebody with your full awareness and to really be present in that action.”
So we can find meaning in our work, even if there’s no tangible product, nothing to take a clear sense of pride in. We might find it in mindfulness, as John Lindaman did. Or, as I argue in the essay, we might find it in narratives of solidarity with our coworkers or in the hope that our work will bear fruit that distant strangers may enjoy.
This is not what I was arguing a few years ago. My first essay for The New Republic, in 2015, was headlined, “Don’t Search for ‘Purpose.’ You Will Fail,” and was about the false idol of finding the meaning of your life in paid employment. Then in a 2018 Hedgehog Review essay titled, “When Work and Meaning Part Ways,” I argued that work doesn’t remotely live up to what we expect of it. It doesn’t deliver the meaning it promises. I argued that that wasn’t a wholly bad thing, because we don’t need meaningful work; we just need meaning, and we can get it in any number of places.
In the Hedgehog essay, I imagined what would happen in an automated, post-work future. We’ve built so much social, moral, and spiritual meaning into work; what if work as we knew it went away?
The end of work doesn’t just threaten livelihoods and people’s sense of self-worth. It isn’t just the loss of a good within the system of meaning. It’s the loss of the system itself…. The robot revolution will instead be one in which there is no more employment or unemployment, in which the whole employed/unemployed dichotomy … doesn’t exist. To the extent that our culture is organized around jobs, the mass deployment of artificially intelligent machines that can perform job functions will amount to a cultural collapse. All the meanings we associate with work will evaporate. Our culture will be at a loss to explain itself.
That sounds scary. I suggested that we face up to this fear and start building models of meaning that don’t depend so much on work. And in the NYT essay and even more in the book, I show what those models might look like.
That might make it sound like I’m now contradicting myself by arguing that we really can find meaning in work. But I think these various strands of thought can, in fact, be reconciled. You’ll see in the new essay that I don’t find work’s meaning in the traditional places. It’s not in the industrial-age sense of accomplishment, the pride in a job well done. It is instead in the solidarity workers have with each other, or in the often-invisible social connections between the work and the people it serves — in other words, in the non-productive aspects of labor. Your work isn’t valuable because it creates revenue. It’s valuable because it creates human connections.
When and if machines start doing the bulk of the productive labor, we will still need meaning. For now, while we’re working, we can get used to creating it outside of our jobs. And then, when we have to give them up, we won’t miss them.
I do hope you’ll read and share “What Are We Doing?” and the other essays in this issue of a consistently-excellent magazine.
I am starting to plan in-person and remote speaking events for early 2022, when the book is out. If you would like to inquire about me speaking about work and burnout at your university, company, or religious or civic organization, you can reply to this email. (Fingers crossed that in-person gatherings will feel safe by then.)
And otherwise, if you enjoy reading this newsletter, please consider passing it along to others by clicking the “Share” button and posting it to social media like anything else. Thanks for reading.
Jon
