Work Worth Doing

Conversations regarding the place of work in our lives have become decidedly more fraught in this age of the commoditisation of AI. We will lose our jobs to AI, we’re frequently warned, it’s a matter of when, not if. Which begs the question: who do we become if we do not have our work? Let’s stretch our optimism taut for a moment and imagine that the world is able to pivot successfully into one that provides a Universal Basic Income so that everyone has the resources they need to live a dignified life when the robots take over at the factory. In this scenario, when there is scarce opportunity for employment and no need to work, will we still work? What kind of work will we do? What will the purpose of work be?

I turned fifty-five this year, the age at which my parents retired from their formal jobs and pivoted into small-scale farming where they have been steadfastly engaged ever since. Getting here makes me pensive. I cannot fathom retiring in the near future but I fully intend to gain more control of what I do, how I do it, when I do it and with whom I do it. Get off the corporate highway, so to speak, step into a drophead coupe, and explore those scenic back routes in the world of work. Perhaps this too explains my current preoccupation with the nature and purpose of work, what its possibilities and boundaries are.

I came across a thought provoking essay titled Why Work by the brilliant Dorothy Sayers, first given as an address in 1942 in the middle of the second World War. Could this octogenarian essay’s ideas on work inform my thinking on work in our very different age?

Her definition of work crosses the bridge of time without incident because we are ideologically aligned. Work is an expression of our humanity, she says, and it should be undertaken for no other reason than love of the work itself and for the sake of doing that work well. It is a reflection of the image of God in us: God made things, and we who are made in His image, should make things. This notion of doing meaningful work for its own sake and for the satisfaction of doing it with excellence resonates. Perhaps it rings a tad idealistic in our present world where there are always bills to pay though, something we might reach for and not expect to grasp. But we must continue to work in the day of the robots, else we lose a critical part of what it means to be human.

Sayers insists that all work is sacred, whether it takes place in the secular arena or what she calls the ecclesiastical arena. Any barrier between so-called secular work and God is a barrier we ourselves have erected. The very first demand that the Church should make of a carpenter, she says, is that he should make good tables. A pious carpenter insults God if he produces bad carpentry. I love this to a tingle on my skin. Yes to all of it. Diligence and excellence in our work are an expression of our devotion to God. To her, a building must be good architecture before it is a good church and work must be good before it can call itself God’s work. Also: if you want to produce Christian work, be a Christian and do excellent work. That is what Christian work is.

An idea that seeps out of her essay though not fully developed: It does not matter what the details of the work are as long as it aligns with your giftings, talents and inclinations and is not contemptible, soul destroying or harmful. Writer, barrister, janitor, astronaut or farmer.

This idea is a noble one, but it sits in tension with what anthropologist David Graeber disdains as the proliferation of ‘Bullshit Jobs’. In a 2013 essay, Graeber, intrigued by the realisation that despite unprecedented technological advancement in the preceding century, everyone was working more, not less, set out to understand why. A deep dive led him to the conclusion that a vast majority of modern jobs are in the administrative domain. Professional, managerial and clerical jobs, that is. The paper pusher class. Noting the burgeoning of this administrative class, Graeber had a vision of hell as ‘a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at.’ This vivid image stands in stark contrast to what I deduce from her essay to be Sayers’ vision of heaven: a collection of individuals spending the bulk of their time working on projects they love and are very good at.

Graeber might consider Sayers’ framing of work as sacred responsibility a socialist construct but they have in common a desire to escape the modern day ‘squirrel cage’. Sayers might bristle on account of Graeber’s worker productivity language, but she would resonate with his questioning why society such as it is currently constructed seems to generate very limited demand for poet-musicians and nigh infinite demand for specialists in corporate law.

Sayers also asserts in her essay that the first duty of the worker is to serve the work first, the community second. This is a controversial sounding notion at the first reading. It immediately calls to mind Dr House of the TV series House MD for me.

Here’s a character, fictional, yes, who is technically brilliant and relationally disastrous. He is a genius diagnostician, no one can dispute this. Time and again his work saves lives no one else can. He does deeply impactful work. But, he is also a misanthrope. He constantly uses, misuses and mistreats the people around him in service of his own selfish ends. Throughout the series, the writers resist writing him a sustained redemptive arc. The underlying message seems to be that he is just who he is. He is not interested in his patients’ humanity, only in solving the puzzle of their complex medical conditions. His work produces indisputable good in the world, but his methods consistently sow pain and discord. He serves the work but he shirks any responsibility to the community at every turn. Sometimes it makes for mildly uncomfortable viewing, and sometimes is painful to watch.

This is not what Sayers had in mind by what I can gather from her essay. The only true way to serve, she says, is to truly be in sympathy with the community, to be a genuine part of the community and then to serve the work without giving the community another thought so that the work is true to itself.

Dr House ignores the community because he disdains it, not because he seeks to serve it with his best work. Its only value is in delivering a steady stream of human puzzles that he can poke and prod to satisfy his deep analytical nature and his obsessive curiosity.

Still, Sayers warning to keep community at arm’s length from the work is wise. Creative work in particular. It is true that it is impossible to do great work if you are constantly worried what other people think. That worry will distract you and lead you to produce subpar work. Do the work from a place of love for the community but at a distance from the community that allows you to give the work your very best. As with most things, the principle is universal, but the application will be personal.

In his introduction to Sheed’s translation of Augustine’s Confessions, Peter Brown describes Augustine’s posture in the work as having his back turned to his audience throughout the work, oriented instead towards the God, in order to draw us into the sacred mysteries.

If I had leeway to dictate the nature of work in the coming age of the robots, I would design one fairly close to the one that I understand Sayers to have envisioned: one where we spend our time applying ourselves to work that we enjoy, find meaningful and are able to consistently deliver to a high degree of excellence. This is the vision for the post 55 life too. And although I should not like to be beholden to the community, I would hope that my work would serve it. The point on which Sayers and I might quibble would be on the monetary compensation. But that’s an essay for another day.

I wish you the privilege of meaningful work today, and the competence and patience to do it with excellence.