The Gift of Meaningful Work
In a world preoccupied with meaningless tasks, people are ever more eager to engage in work that offers a chance to contribute, to remember how good it is to be a thinking, contributing colleague. These days, having one good conversation can reintroduce us to what it feels like to be in a satisfying human relationship. The same is true when we have the opportunity to think together and come up with a solution to a troubling situation. The human qualities that have become distant memories, or never known at all, come flooding in when we work together for a common purpose. Meaningful work reawakens us to what it feels like to be human human beings.
Throughout the years leading up to Now, the dream has been to free people from work and give them more leisure. This made sense, and still does, for those toiling in hot fields, in mines deep within the earth, on factory assembly lines, or any job that is dull, repetitive, exhausting, demeaning. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes dreamed a dream of the future: “For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem, how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.”7
In 1957, a New York Times Book Review author predicted that, as work became easier and more machine based, people would look to leisure to give their lives meaning and satisfaction.
Now it is the twenty-first century, and we can see how this future of leisure and freedom from work has materialized. While horrific working conditions and slave labor continue unchecked in far too many countries, here in the United States the people with the most leisure are young men, ages 22–30, who have no college education and have not worked in twelve months. One in five young males are idle, with no prospects for work, marriage, or independent lives (they tend to live with parents or close relatives). And what are they doing with all this time on their hands? You knew it: video games. And in self-reports, they appear to be happy with this life.
We should all be scared.
I recall a conversation with a college professor in his thirties who taught the design of video games at a technical training institute. He taught during the day and then stayed up most nights gaming—a fairly typical life for gamers. I couldn’t help myself and raised the issue of real life, that the problem with games was that people got lost in virtual reality and weren’t available for the real world. Somehow we got onto the topic of civic responsibility and an upcoming local election. When I asked him if he was paying attention to politics and if he was going to vote, he instantly and proudly replied, “I’m very involved. I’m mayor of my virtual community.”
What more is there to say?
We cannot push aside the real world or would we want to. The work that needs doing is rich in meaning and purpose. In my experience, people who notice what’s going on would rather be engaged than withdraw. But we have to amend the definition of meaningful. It is still work that makes a difference: But what is the difference we can make?
If it’s not creating change at the large scale, if it’s not striving to reintroduce sane decision making into large systems, if it doesn’t stop the disintegration, then what does it mean to make a difference?
I have sat with this question for years, and I haven’t found an answer that stops the niggling voice of “Yes, but surely you can think of something with more impact. . . .” The simple answer is found in all philosophies and spiritual traditions: Focus on serving others. Serve individuals; serve small groups; serve an entire community or organization. No matter what is going on around us, we can attend to the people in front of us, to the issues confronting us and there, we offer what we can. We can offer insight and compassion. We can be present. We can stay and not flee. We can be exemplars of the best human qualities. That is a life well lived, even if we didn’t save the world.
I’ve dubbed this the Mother, now Saint, Teresa way of engaging. Before she became an institution with all of its dilemmas, she felt called by God to go into the streets of Calcutta to aid “the unwanted, the unloved, the uncared for.” She found the dying and offered them her presence. She wasn’t trying to solve the greater problem of why people were dying on the streets; she simply wanted to give them a better death in the company of love. In later life, she willingly went into places of great suffering, in countries torn by war, to rescue children. If she were alive today, I wonder which refugee camps she would be in.
She, like all humanitarians, focused on the victims, not the causes. She sought to relieve suffering, not to eradicate it.
This is good work. And it is work that others are eager to do with us.
Over many years, I have found more than enough people who want to contribute, to fully engage in solving problems that affect them or that they care about. Or that help relieve the suffering of others. We don’t need to motivate them to join with us—we just need to invite them.
In this time of rising insanity and brutality, work that engages our better human qualities is a gift we can offer to others. This is why we create islands of sanity, so that more of us can experience the gift of doing meaningful work on behalf of others. How wonderful to have the chance to engage together in doing good work, no matter what is going on around us. We are richly blessed.
I’m comfortable with the choices I made,
I’m proud of those choices. I can be comfortable with the way I’ve lived until today. As long as we do our best to live in accordance with our values, we don’t have to worry about tomorrow because today is enough.
Edward Snowden8
WHO DO WE CHOOSE TO BE? NOTES
1 “Once people realize that their wealth is being secretly and arbitrarily confiscated and their welfare systematically degraded by underhanded rulers, the social contact is broken, with possible revolutionary consequences.” Keynes describes at length the arbitrary confiscation of wealth into the hands of governments and elites as a consequence of inflationary policies (Keynes’s italics). This destabilizes the very basis of relationships necessary for capitalism. As disorder and distrust increase, the “process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.” Quotes from William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness, pp. 60–61. I would note that this attitude seems evident in tech-generation entrepreneurs who approach getting rich as a crap shoot.
2 An ancient Tibetan prophecy, relayed by many Tibetan Buddhist teachers. Joanna Macy, who has spent her lifetime teaching deep ecology and insisting on eco-activism, grounds her work in this prophecy, given to her by her teacher. See www.joannamacy.net.
3 The Universe in a Single Atom, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, p. 200. He was addressing decision making in regard to genetics research. I use these with all leaders.
4 Their oral tradition dates the founding as 1142, following a solar eclipse. The founders were two men and one woman (Hiawatha). The “Great League of Peace” brought together five tribal nations; a sixth was added in 1722. Their constitution influenced the U.S. Constitution written in 1789. The Confederation split during the American Revolution; four of the six Iroquois nations sided with the British. George Washington ordered a scorched earth campaign against these four tribes in upper New York State. Refugees fled to Canada.
5 “Uber Begins Its Endgame: Replacing Humans,” http://motherboard.vice.com/read/uber-begins-its-endgame-replacing-humans.
6 See Dan Lyons, “Congratulations! You’ve Been Fired,” nytimes.com, April 17, 2016. This article is well worth reading to observe the adolescent cultures at a number of tech companies. “At HubSpot, the software company where I worked for almost two years, when you got fired, it was called ‘graduation.’ We all would get a cheery email from the boss saying, ‘Team, just letting you know that X has graduated and we’re all excited to see how she uses her superpowers in her next big adventure.’”
7 Derek Thompson, “The Free Time Paradox in America,” theatlantic.com, September 13, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/the-free-time-paradox-in-america.
8 Live-streamed into a conference on mass surveillance held in the Netherlands, November 10, 2016; see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98eabjjAEz8&spfreload=10. I recommend watching Snowden’s thoughtful responses to questions—a true warrior.