What is the Purpose of Work?

Not what it was and not what it should be

Chances are very good that the purpose of the work you do is to enrich someone else.

That’s it.

You sacrifice your creativity, time with people you love, sleep, playtime, travel, opportunities to help others, your peace of mind, time to be quiet and chill, and basically your life. I’ve done it. Most of us have. This forum and dozens of others are brimming over with suggestions on how to wedge time for yourself in around The Job or how to ditch The Job and stop with the sacrifices.

And, oh, aren’t those the most seductive reads? Four-hour workdays. Four hour work weeks!

But most of us live in a world where mortgages, car loans, student loan debt, children’s needs, and health care costs have us by the throat and that, I believe, is by design. Can you imagine trying to control a population who had lots of free time to read, develop critical thinking skills, do what they wanted to do when they wanted to do it? Oh, Jesus, what a mess that would be. Not only would the population be totally out of control, but the flow of wealth up into the offshore accounts of the currently wealthy would be severely compromised. Can’t have that.

What work was

It was how we stayed alive, bred successfully, and kept those kids alive long enough to breed themselves. It was how we had something to eat every day and maybe a little put aside for when things got tight.

Over time and with the introduction of agriculture work began to change. For one thing, we developed more rigid gender roles. Men pushed the plow and women kept the house. Another interesting and probably unexpected side effect of agriculture was the building of surplus. And when you’ve got extra food sitting around you’re going to have to protect it from those lazy bums who just want to play the lute, eat grapes, and lust for your wife all day long.

With agriculture, we got healthier kids, bigger families, the beginnings of larger communities and we got war.

We also, over time, got a merchant class who quickly cottoned to the idea of hiring someone to do the work while they collected the money. And with several hundred thousand years of evolution geared to survival at any cost, and some lip service to the social contract, an entire class of people began to exploit the needs of others to enrich themselves.

This has been going on for a very long time. So long that we don’t think there’s another way to live.

Work as purpose

What I’ve outlined so far is an over-simplification.

There are millions of people who have careers that they love. I’ve worked with some. I’ve worked with researchers who were in the lab at 6 am and still hard at work when I left for the day. These people are prepared to make those sacrifices because their work gives their lives purpose. These also tend to be people who are well-compensated for their work and I applaud that. They should be.

Many of us grew up reading and being told to “follow our bliss”. My bliss was getting toasty and drawing weird pictures with a rapidograph pen on illustration board until my hand cramped. I don’t think I need to tell you how well that has worked out for me professionally. I’ve never had a career or even any sense of direction toward a career. I kind of thought that if I made it to New York City, I’d be discovered as a great artist. Yeah, no.

I’ve had jobs. I’ve been working since I was 14 with gaps here and there. I started out after high school working as a maid or a housekeeper. I’ve cleaned the cages of Persian show cats and sold popcorn at the Idol Theater, starting the weekend when “Blazing Saddles” opened (I knew every line of that movie before I ever saw it), and managed to stay on the job as a waitress at the old L&K Restaurant by I-71 near Lodi, Ohio for all of three hours and on the assembly line of the Kirby Vacuum Cleaner factory in Cleveland, Ohio for a day and a half. I was a cocktail waitress in a down-market disco owned by a plastic surgeon whose paychecks routinely bounced.

Work to sleep indoors and eat daily

In my life, work has been hard to get and a pain in the ass and totally necessary to pay bills, buy “entertainment”, eat daily and sleep indoors every night. And every hour of my life that I gave up to some stupid job, money was being taken from my paycheck and a significant chunk of that went to enrich the already wealthy. Defense spending? Wars are profitable and those who fight them don’t share in the profits.

Work is a grind. I graduated from college at the age of 48 knowing I was not interested in the 9 to 5 sentence that wouldn’t leave time for my life. For years I cobbled together a decent enough living with part-time work, contract work, remote work, gigs, and side hustles and per diem jobs that only paid if my butt was in the office. I’ve worked every holiday multiple times. I’ve worked for minimum wage. I’ve also earned a decent living at some of my jobs. By accident, I wound up working in peer-reviewed scientific publishing which isn’t necessarily all that engaging, but it beats the hell out of cleaning 17 hotel rooms daily.

Now I’m not working and tossing resumes into the void and going on interviews only to be ghosted or get a form email and writing and writing and writing. I’ve got a possible in for another job in scientific publishing and if I get the chance, I’ll drop everything and slam myself back into the 9 to 5 and count myself lucky. It’s an unforgiving world for those who don’t manage to find work.

Then there’s the trap of the tedious, soul-sucking, miserable work that pays a fortune. I have a good friend in that trap. She pulls in a solid 6 figures every year and earns 5-figure bonuses annually. And she loathes her job. I think she has it worse than I ever have.

Purposeful work

I don’t even know for sure what that would look like. But I daydream about having some kind of work I can do that will make other people’s lives better and that will earn me a decent amount of money. That will ensure I get to have and keep good health care insurance (I used to joke that my health insurance plan was that I planned on staying healthy and that’s not nearly as funny at 62 as it was at 32).

I think my dream job would be writing of some sort but even those opportunities didn’t work out the way I’d hoped.

What is your purposeful work? Do we think it’s even possible to have work we enjoy that doesn’t eat our lives?

Seriously. I want to know.

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