What Is Work?

Manifesto(es)

WHAT IS WORK?

My life has been divided for so long that the pivotal word ‘work’ has taken on completely distinct and contradictory meanings. 

When people ask what ‘do you do?’ i.e. what is your work, the answer is what I think of as my day job as a documentary producer, and I see the boxes check off one by one in their mind, that sounds reasonably well-paid, that sounds somewhat interesting, here are some follow-up questions I have connected to other documentaries I’ve seen, this person is high status enough to warrant my respect but not so much that I feel particularly jealous or am compelled to start working some angle. 

By this time in my life I know enough to not answer that the work that I do and care about is writing, that it takes up virtually all of my thought and ‘free time,’ that over the course of my life I’ve made maybe a few thousand dollars from it and have no particular expectations of making all that much more. And to me, since I have the experience of my own life, the documentary ‘work’ (which is predominantly for television) feels like kind of an odd sideshow, based on highly irrational sluices of money, occupying a great deal of time and involving a great many jockeyings for status, resulting in a product that may be seen by a great many people but that nobody working on and that, ultimately, nobody watching, cares very much about. And the writing ‘work’ involves effort, soul, precision - all the elements that anybody would tend to think of as ‘work’ - but by this stage of my life I am self-trained enough to not bring up any of this and to answer the question in the spirit in which it is asked. 

What I’ve come to discover somewhere in my split life is that the word ‘work’ has at least four different meanings but which tend to blur together wherever anybody talks about the subject. 

1.Most of the time when people talk about what a person’s ‘work’ is, what they mean is: how does that person make their money. And the amount of money the person earns correlates to how successful they are, how good they are at their job, and, likely, how hard they work. The issue is that, as a more granular tour of the world soon reveals, it soon becomes apparent that work-qua-effort, and even salary, tend not particularly to correlate to how much money people have. So many people with money depend on passive income streams - on inheritance, on accruing real estate or stock values. Among the landed rich, it’s a kind of worldly wisdom that work is a sucker’s game; the better strategy is to ‘put your money to work.’ Meanwhile, in the industries where people really do work long hours and make money commensurate to the hours they work - banking, law, etc, and in which the phrase “well, X works really hard” is used to justify every other possible shortcoming in X’s behavior - it’s a completely open secret that the system is heavily rigged, that money is sloshing around in these occupations out of proportion to the value anybody provides, and that remuneration is based more on the whims of employers and of the market, bankers’ Christmas bonuses being a particularly striking example. And the long hours worked are, as people in the industry are quick to admit and as I myself have experienced a species of when working in television, a bit of a shell game. The working day seems to be comprised of many false starts and much busy time-wasting and then, like clockwork, a crisis hits which forces everybody to scrap all the diligent work they have been doing and to start from scratch, but now with a sense of purpose in line with the magnitude of the crisis, and on it goes, until finally some external deadline, a court date, a ‘deliverable,’ forces everybody to do a spurt of actual work and to turn in the latest draft of the item that they’ve been tossing back and forth for however many months. In the fields where people actually generate value - e.g. among the entrepreneurs - the understanding is that making money is more or less a throw of the dice. A tremendous, inordinate amount of work can go into start-ups, and everybody understands that it’s completely possible that none of that work will actually translate into earnings. The name of the game is to diversify. Venture capitalists work with many different projects at the same time; same goes for the film producers I work with. Virtually all of them are intelligent, worthy projects. Some ridiculous percentage of them will fail - i.e. ‘will never see the light of day.’ Successful professionals who work to actually generate value almost always end up having the same ethos as savvy gamblers - they know ‘to walk away,’ to not get attached, they know that the market is fickle and that intelligent betting is just to lay chips down on a number of different squares. 

2.The maybe even more common way to talk about ‘work’ is that it’s coercion, the opposite of fun, the thing that adults are made to do and if they don’t do it then they will be hurled onto the street and slowly starved to death. “Back to the salt mines,” my grandfather would inevitably say every time he sat down to do a spat of work (he was an accountant). “Get a job!” shout jerks at beggars in the street, which I find to be kind of an odd invective. Begging has always struck me as a very grueling, full-time kind of work and sort of the essence of monetary transactions - i.e. you ask other people for money because you want and need it and sometimes they give it to you. It’s always been very unclear to me if the jerks shouting about the value of work are really, from their office perches, contributing all that much more to society. What the shouting jerks on the street seem to be upset about is that the beggars have exempted themselves from the chain of coercion that is what work is usually seen to be and have, at the cost of their own humiliation, cut straight to the chase - asking to be paid without necessarily having produced a product first. And in my darker moments in office life - when there has been no product let alone revenue stream anywhere in sight and the ‘funding’ often seems to come from high-level begging, ‘angel investors,’ foundation grants and so forth - I’ve tended to see offices as just an iron chain of coercion and unpleasantness. The interns do unpleasant tasks - they make copies, replace ink cartridges, sit in boredom, etc - but the level of unpleasantness that they are asked to carry out isn’t really worthy of monetary reward. The associate-type positions - what I was doing for a long time - seemed to involve most of the ‘grunt work’ of the office and that meant a variety of unpleasant, even intern-y, tasks, but the most crucial ones were outward-facing. In my case it tended to be doing pre-interview castings with potential subjects, in other words to get people’s hopes up and then to drop them once my superiors decided that they weren’t worth pursuing. The next level up involved a similar kind of unpleasantness but internally directed - hiring and firing the associates, coercing more work out of them, taking pitches from trusted colleagues, getting their hopes up and then dashing them, backstabbing one another on the way to next level of promotion. And then the towering level up from there, the executive level, involved the willingness to do things like lay off whole divisions, cut off projects midway through that people had maybe devoted years of their life to. As Logan Roy puts it in Succession, in the process of firing a close subordinate, “You have to be a killer.” It’s not really about being good or smart - Roy acknowledges that the subordinate in the hot seat has these qualities - but he’s not a killer and at the end of the day that’s what work in the hierarchical coercive model amounts to, an unending exploitation; the ones who are the most successful distinguished by the degree of their ruthlessness. 

3.I’ve always found the demarcation between work-as-the-thing-you-do-to-submit-to-a-dehumanizing-power-structure and leisure as the-thing-you-do-to-be-yourself to be a somewhat perplexing dichotomy. Mostly because the things people do when they have an extended period of ‘leisure’ look a great deal like work - writing their novels or screenplays, ‘pursuing their passions,’ and so on. And when the champions of ‘work,’ particularly those of an older generation, sing its praises, this is often what they have in mind - the painstaking process of making something, anything, better. And there is a sort of common consent among adults that this ethic of painstaking, never-ending improvement - ‘work is its own reward’ - is the only fulfilling way to live: leisure becomes boring after not too long, and everybody, sooner or later, over the course of their lives, figures out something that they are passionate about and talented at and the only question becomes whether they are able to monetize that or not, whether they can ‘do what they love,’ which is sort of understood to be the highest form of existence. The general wisdom here is that everything fulfilling in life is ‘work.’ Childrearing is work, ‘hobbies’ are work, relationships are work, the cultivation of the self is work. It’s just that some of these happen randomly to connect to a market and some do not. Thought about in this way ‘work’ becomes a very arbitrary term. If work means ‘effort,’ then - and this is sort of my own perspective - everything in life becomes concerted work and the goal is to work more not less; and, ideally, when one is really connected to one’s purpose, one wants to work all the time.

4.There is a final common definition of work, which is different still. And that’s ‘to be of service.’ The premise here is that there is all kinds of work that is not particularly pleasurable or coercive or lucrative or even effortful but that provides some vital service to other people - being a therapist or spiritual counselor or social worker or babysitter or cook or nurse or teacher. It’s sort of understood that these are the most socially useful jobs that exist - the people doing them are sooner or later always described as ‘saints.’ And it’s understood also that the vast majority of them are also criminally underpaid and unappreciated - people are always outraged that pro athletes are paid so much more than teachers without its occurring to anybody to do something about that. The overriding reason for that is that the actual valuable work isn’t particularly specialized or difficult - it’s an extension of fairly routine activities that, for one reason or another, people choose not to do for themselves and instead hire someone else . Finishing an hour-long session with a therapist, I’m always struck at how easy the work really is, just an extension of talking essentially, but that doesn’t make it any the less valuable since, as as one discovers,  the very simple task of being listened to dispassionately needs, almost always, to be outsourced to a professional. People who do this kind of service work seem always to be a bit embarrassed by it, a little reluctant to take money for it - since it’s usually an activity that they happen to enjoy and find gratifying - but of course always do so because, inevitably, they can ‘barely make ends meet.’ 

So what is work really - since the usual somewhat sloppily and interchangeably used meanings of the word actually have just about nothing to do with each other? From the vantage-point of how a more harmonious society might think about work, I’d imagine the definition of work being something like the following sort of Maslovian pyramid. First, work is trade. It is a means for spreading around necessary supplies for the subsistence of the population. Most real work, of course, is agriculture - it used to be that almost everybody was involved in farming, at which time there was very little need to ask what the existential value was of work; its purpose was obvious enough. Second, work is a surprisingly altruistic collective endeavor for ensuring survival for large numbers of people who aren’t producing their own food. In other words, just about everything that passes as ‘work’ is in reality a variation of abundance, an outpouring of goods and services that can be exchanged, ultimately, for food. This vision of work gets very Marxist and trade unionist - some kind of guaranteed employment virtually regardless of the product that is actually being produced - but the surprisingly well-kept secret of capitalist countries is how much of the ‘free market’ actually turns to be an employment agency, a great game in which artificial needs are articulated and wonderful products generated to fulfill those not-very-serious needs and consumers are coached to act like proud parents with their children’s school projects, enthusiastic about goods that, ultimately, they have no actual use for. And many people are hired to help generate the not-very-serious products, which allows governmental economists to boast about surprisingly communistic ideas like ‘full employment’ - although as all business executives discover in economic downturns it’s usually much more effective to just lay off a whole bunch of people and a company can be kept afloat perfectly well by a ‘skeleton crew.’ In other words, most work is collective subsistence, and the tools it employs - coercion, hierarchy, efficiency  - are really just a means to that end.

There is something very beautiful, actually, about that dynamic, a pretense of being focused on ‘growth’ or ‘profit,’ when the secret goal is just employment. The difficulty is that capitalism has a way of believing its own rhetoric - mistaking the market for the ‘law of the jungle,’ as opposed to a good-humored, essentially winking game to keep as many people as possible fed and comfortable. That sense of humor about it - which is almost always missing in how people talk about work - should lead to an understanding that, for work that is non-essential, emphasis should be placed on its being pleasurable. With most work we are just kidding each other. The most valuable work - ‘services,’ helping one another, etc - is really just that, work that’s useful if it makes people happier and, really, worthless if it’s not. And artistic work, creative work, etc, is not really, at the end of the day, about producing a market-ready good but about generating pleasure for the person making it and every so often, secondarily, an audience.

What I’m saying is pretty simple-minded and I’m surprised that I even have to say it. But when everybody talks about ‘work’ they seem to forget what it actually is. What they usually have in mind is a combination of generating profit and of being part of the hierarchically-driven coercion machine - and one’s slot within those two domains is the marker of one’s social worth. But what work actually is is very different - on the one hand, the difficult struggle for subsistence, of which survival is the only metric; and, on the other, a playful process of creation and of exchange of which the only real criterion of evaluation is if one takes pleasure in what one is doing.