What do you do?

This is part of the Total Work sequence, in which I discuss the nature of work and its impact on our life.

Total Work is the state where work is the primary focus of our lives. The term comes from Josef Pieper’s “Leisure: The Basis of Culture”, a delightful if slightly eccentric book by mid-20th century German Christian philsoopher.

As part of the project of exploring Total Work, I’m currently reading Thomas F. Green’s “Work, Leisure, and the American Schools”. Green seems to disagree with Pieper about a lot of things, and would probably reject the label “Total Work” entirely, but, from another point of view, his book can be seen as quite compatible with the idea that work has taken over too much of our lives.

One of Green’s core arguments in this book is that the idea of work has insidiously crept into an area of life that would previously have been regarded as sacrosanct, a place often deeply inappropriate for work to introduce upon: Our jobs.

That might need unpacking a bit.

Consider the titular question: “What do you do?”

You probably get asked this question all the time. It’s hard to avoid. What do you say to it?

Well, if you asked me, I’d probably say “I’m a PhD student.” In a previous life I’d have said “I’m a software developer.”

It’s interesting that the format of the answer does not match the format of the question. You asked me what I do, but that’s not what I answered: I answered that this is what I am.

(I tested out on Twitter to see if this replicates, and it seems like although this is the most common style of response it’s likely not universal)

But, more importantly, when you asked what I do, my answer is about my paid job.

In this case my job is relatively central to what I do (at least on my good days. See Why am I not working on my Phd? for a discussion of some of my struggles), but there are also plenty of other things I do - I occasionally do paid writing or consulting, but some of the most important things I do are clearly not my job at all. I work on Hypothesis, I write this newsletter (technically paid, but it’ll be a while before that’s self sustaining), I write my notebook, I tweet far too much, I run a discord server for talking about books, I read a ridiculous amount myself, I am a member a mutual support group, and have a number of other mutually supportive relationships.

All of these things are part of what Green would consider my work, but only some of them are things I get paid for, and only the PhD is something I could reasonably call my job.

Conversely, consider my previous (and potentially future) software development jobs. Many of them were interesting. Few to none of them have produced much in the way of lasting impact on the world. They’re not things that I consider particularly central to my identity, or that I’m particularly proud of. None of them are things I feel bad about, but they’re certainly not things that I would have done unprompted.

But they do all have two important, compelling, central, and shared characteristics: Somebody wanted them done, and I got paid a whole bunch of money to do them.

This can go further - software development is something that can easily be your work if you want it to be, but many jobs aren’t. Probably nobody (or almost nobody) ever chose to be a manager in a sewage plant, or a cleaner, or a filing clerk, because that what they were personally deeply called to be. These are important and vital jobs, and if you do them and find them deeply and personally meaningful then that’s great, but ultimately there’s no reason to expect the supply of people who deeply want to run a sewage plant to be sufficient for the amount of sewage we produce.

Roughly, the division that Green is making is that you can use work to mean something more like “life work” or “vocation”. You produce a work, but you do a job. Your work is what you do because you feel called to do it, while your job is what you get paid to do.

These two are logically quite distinct, and he argues (convincingly, in my opinion) that actually it’s unreasonable to structure society as if your job should be your work, but it seems we have an awful lot of cultural norms designed to blur that distinction.

I think there are a couple reasons for this, and I think they’re mostly things that are bad even if your job and work do coincide.

The first reason I think this happens is that our jobs are often exhausting, leaving us with little emotional and mental energy to find a work that motivates us outside of that job. This is especially bad if our job burns us out - as I argued in Burnout as Acedia, one of the symptoms of burnout is difficulty caring about things, which makes it very hard to seek sources of intrinsic motivation. If we want a source of meaning, we often try to find it in our job because we’re impoverished for others because of how much our job takes out of us.

The second is that we do rely on people doing their jobs well, and it’s really hard to achieve that through extrinsic motivation - you need to align the incentives exactly right, and it’s hard to design incentives so well as to not be easily gamed. One of the easiest ways to get people to do a good job is to get them to care personally about that job. Green talks a lot about this issue, and I’ll likely write more about it at a later date, but I think a better solution is to care strongly about the idea of doing our jobs well regardless of whether we care particularly about the job.

The third, and the one that I want to focus on, is that our employers, and culture in general, encourage this attitude as a tool of control.

There’s an interesting common thread you see in a lot of jobs (especially “creative” ones) that people want to do for intrinsic reasons: They’re awful and abusive.

This happens partly because there’s an endless supply of replacement bodies to fill the roles when an employee finally quits. Don’t like the emotional toll of video game development? Tough luck buddy, there’s ten other applicants drooling at the idea of getting your job.

I think it also happens because people will just genuinely put up with a lot more when they’re there for intrinsic reasons. If you really want a job for intrinsic reasons, you’ll take a lower salary, you’ll put up with more bullshit and abuse, you’ll be reluctant to leave, etc. This is exactly why so many employers want employees with “passion” and encourage “loyalty to the company”: So they can more easily exploit us. Making your job the source of your meaning very much feeds in to this.

(Most employers are not maximally evil in how they try to exploit their employees, but generally employers are amoral enough that it’s still better not to leave stray incentives lying around just waiting to be weaponized against you).

One way to counterbalance this is that, regardless of whether we personally find our jobs meaningful, we should vehemently defend the right of people to do jobs they don’t find meaningful. This is especially true of our coworkers - as well as it being the right thing to do, it benefits us personally by improving working conditions for everyone, ourselves included.

In contrast, I think we often do the opposite and end up enforcing the norm of equating job and work against our coworkers. I’m not quite sure why we do this - it feels like we’re doing morality, but I won’t speculate too much more about that for now. It’s a question you might find it useful to examine in yourself.

Of course, none of this is to say that your job shouldn’t be the source of meaning for you, only that it needn’t be. It is both morally justifiable and indeed probably actively healthy to have a job that is mostly just there to pay the bills and that you clock out of and forget about at 5PM every day.

Even if you do want your job to be part of your work, I suspect it is very helpful to be able to decouple the two: To be able to hold down, and excel at, a job without it having to be deeply personally meaningful, and to be able to pursue that which is deeply personally meaningful without it being our job. Once we are able to excel at both on their own, it becomes easier to excel at their combination.

I think this decoupling starts by trying to cultivate some skills:

• Setting better boundaries with our employers.

• Being able to work on things we don’t particularly care about.

• Finding sources of meaning in our life without someone handing them to us.

I don’t currently have any great ideas on how to cultivate these, partly because I’m terrible at all of them! I’ll be exploring them further in future issues, but for now if you have any ideas I’d love to hear them.