@theunitofcaring reminded me to talk about this, but - I am *simultaneously* a person who finds regular employment soul-crushing and a person who cannot live without work/accomplishment. And from where I’m standing, a lot of the ‘is work good for people’ Discourse is just plain nonsensical.
Bad ‘is work virtuous’ Discourse assumes there’s two categories of activity: “work” and “not-work”. ‘Work’ covers everything that one could, theoretically, be gainfully employed to do- as long as it’s not also something one wants to do. If that gainful employment is something that most people find fun or rewarding, it doesn’t ‘count’, even if it’s made you a millionaire. Anything else- no matter how worthwhile, and no matter how onerous- is ‘not-work’.
This Bad Discourse then expects you to take one of two stances:
- “work - meaning ‘onerous things that one could earn money doing’ - is inherently good for you, because the alternative is Idleness, which is Bad For The Soul.”
- “work- again, meaning ‘onerous things that one could earn money doing’- is inherently Bad For The Soul, and most people would be happier doing nothing than working a minimum-wage job.”
The trouble is, the Bad Discourse conflates three things: your urge to accomplish things, your capability to accomplish things, and your sense of what is and is not accomplishment. These things do not necessarily correlate. Furthermore, they do not necessarily match your society’s ideal.
Let’s step back and look at two hypothetical examples for a minute.
Bjorn lives in a society of cartoonish barbarians that spend most of their time looting and plundering. Bjorn is missing a leg, and furthermore, Bjorn doesn’t like raiding and plundering. Bjorn would rather spend his time double-checking the tribes’ stores, carving runestones, and learning how to tie new and exciting kinds of knot. The other cartoon barbarians in Bjorn’s tribe think he is lazy and a coward, because he does not want to go out to raid and plunder. Despite this, Bjorn is happy with his life; he finishes a runestone or learns how to tie a new kind of knot every so often. Thus far, that’s enough for him.
Wendell is an accountant from a world very much like our own. He works at a high-powered financial firm and spends most of his time handling very important people’s very important money. While he got his job through family connections, he’s still very good at it; he seems like a very successful person. But Wendell doesn’t feel like he’s accomplishing anything at all at his job; it seems like a treadmill. He only really feels alive on the rare weekends he can snag a day for himself to go hunting or go to the shooting range. Despite this, he keeps taking more responsibility at work, because he wants to accomplish things. Thus far, it hasn’t made him feel any better.
Neither Bjorn nor Wendell is a lazy bum who doesn’t want to work. Both of them would, if they had their ‘druthers, be doing something that’s at least moderately useful. Further, both of them would be accomplishing something– at least by their own standards.
But Bjorn can be happy, even though he’s a failure by his society’s lights, because he’s still accomplishing things he wants to. In contrast, Wendell is unhappy, even though he’s very successful, because he’s not able to accomplish what he wants to. And the real kicker is that under the right circumstances- say, putting Bjorn in Wendell’s shoes, or Wendell in Bjorn’s- both of them could be happy and outwardly successful; it’s just that neither of them are ever likely to be in those circumstances.
If you say “is work good for people” and your definition of ‘work’ is ‘being a barbarian raider’, work is bad for Bjorn, but good for Wendell. If you say ‘is work good for people’ and your definition of ‘work’ is ‘being an accountant’, work is good for Bjorn and bad for Wendell.
If you say ‘is work good for people’ and your definition of ‘work’ is ‘dealing with dangerous machinery while being screamed at by abusive angry customers for seven hours on end with no break’, work isn’t good for anyone. And if you say ‘is work good for people’ and your definition of ‘work’ is ‘anything more worthwhile than watching paint dry’, work is good for everyone.
It is bad for people to not be able to accomplish as much as they want to. It is bad for people to be under pressure to accomplish more than they can. And it’s bad for people not to be able to decide what accomplishment means for their own damn selves and act accordingly. Trying to shove all of these variables into a little box, and then passing judgement on its contents without the context… it’s illogical. It’s asinine. It’s insane troll logic.
Without context, it’s better to err on the side of ‘let people do what they want’. And most people do not want to be constantly abused and do not want to do hard manual labour until it breaks their bodies, just sayin’.
It is bad for people to not be able to accomplish as much as they want to. It is bad for people to be under pressure to accomplish more than they can. And it’s bad for people not to be able to decide what accomplishment means for their own damn selves and act accordingly.
This is true but should be complicated. I realize that I’m kind of derailing the conversation here, and overreacting to a relatively minor aspect of the argument, but this is something I find important.
I think a lot of us find it intuitive to act like the self is this totally coherent self-contained entity with discoverable, largely-unchangeable preferences. You meditate on your own emotions for a while, maybe you bum around trying out a few different things, and – voila! you know what works for you, and you should go pursue it.
This is mostly not how people work. People are embedded in culture, and culture tells them what to value. This works through a thousand different conditioning vectors, everything from “my parents buy me ice cream and stop fighting when I get good grades” to “at school I watch people being mocked and humiliated for liking babyish TV” to “I read this one book where the main character was a super awesome wizard and I really identified with him, so now I get a little twinge of joy whenever I do something that makes me feel like I’m living up to his example.”
You can’t control all the ways that culture changes people, not even close. Events like “a child identifies with one character in a random book” are too small-scale for any engineer to account for them, and they happen a billion times every day. But on the macro scale, there are things you can control. You can cheerlead for some values and work to quash others. You can guide people onto specific paths that provide particular kinds of rewards, and away from other paths that produce different rewards.
And you should.
Because if you don’t, someone else will. There is no state of total uninfluenced freedom, not for anyone. Culture happens. If it’s not managed by competent culture engineers, it will come to be ruled by the sort of people who are most naturally inclined to take over social dynamics. This is generally a disaster.
Also because pursuing satisfaction is genuinely very hard a lot of the time, even for smart well-meaning people, and left to their own devices they often flounder.
Soooo…
“decide what accomplishment means for their own damn selves”
In the sense that they should be able to opt out of any authority’s cultural regime, and pursue their own idiosyncratic preferences, if they independently find reason to do so? Yes. Absolutely. One of the most important markers of a good society is that it’s able to take care of its misfits and oddballs rather than crushing them.
But you hear this kind of thing a lot, and it often gets translated as “don’t push messages about the nature of the Good Life, don’t act like you might know what’s good for people better than they do.” Which is a terrible idea. The world should be filled with more good messages about the nature of the Good Life, and it’s quite possible that you do know what’s good for people better than they do.