Opinion: Ode to work
When I was 19, I worked at a microfinance bank in rural Uganda that specialized in lending and business support for farmers and agricultural entrepreneurs. I was moved to see people starting their own businesses in the context of scarcity. In addition to the financial benefits, the identity they derived from doing purposeful work really changed their lives.
It’s no mistake that we often turn to skills development and employment access as the first steps in breaking the oppressive cycles of poverty and disempowerment. Where work is the sandbox for life, the positive benefits of engaging in purposeful, good work reverberate widely. But what is good work, anyway?
Contrary to the Orwellian idea that working for “the Man” constricts individual freedom, the rise of modern capitalism has arguably perpetuated the belief that individual goals supersede that of the community.
Before companies started paying living wages and the state started providing benefits, we were fully dependent on our communities.
But with an increased focus on individuality comes a growing pressure to build a personal identity. We have to know ourselves not just in terms of our immediate communities, but also in terms of our place in the world. Better yet, we must define ourselves — and work is the perfect playground for this exercise.
In Western classical culture, leisure time was considered moral. The Ancient Greek word for work was ponos, derived from the Latin word for sorrow. Philosophers like Plato and Aristotle said that the right of the elite was to engage in art, philosophy, and politics.
And then the Protestant Reformation brought us the Protestant work ethic. Punctuality and diligence became crucial to workers, who accepted long working hours and poor working conditions. And it was this work ethic that proved important during the Industrial Revolution, with much of the workforce engaged in gruelling, monotonous manufacturing work.
Today, as the Information Age has ushered in creative and knowledge-based work, people are increasingly turning towards their jobs for meaning, fulfillment, and identity. The modern worker is often loyal to their personal mission and to the skillset they’ve chosen to develop. Far from the punch-in, punch-out mores of the Office Space era, we now want to work somewhere that shares our mission and values our skills.
The idea of good work means different things to different people. For me, it means pursuing a common vision with people I respect, people who inspire and challenge me, and who, in turn, believe in me as I am today, and as who I may become tomorrow. On a good team, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. There is who I am as an individual, and there is who you are as an individual — and then there is that third entity we create together. Together we explore, play with big ideas, and create purposeful things.
“There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.” — Alain de Botton
The ripples of my work experiences have reached every corner of my life and identity. Through work, I’ve learned how to believe in myself, when to gracefully admit defeat, when to stand my ground, where to change my mind, how to give up, when to stick it out, how to find out what I stand for, and, perhaps most importantly, that I can always learn and evolve.
With every passing minute is another chance to turn it all around.
