The Meaning of My Work

Why do we bother going to work if it is just grinding? Is work just about preparing for the retirement?

This question came to my mind casually when I was still a teenager. I didn’t find an answer back then. In recent years I have gradually put together a more complete answer for this question.

I wrote in my earlier post that I wanted to “work towards more efficient ways to work”. Now I want to give it some more elaboration.

Work Is Inevitable

Some people propose that further advancements in AI may one day transform our world into a post-work society. No one or just a small proportion of us have to work. I doubt this would happen. I believe that even far into the future, our current concept of work will still persist, or at least a concept equivalent to what we call work today will persist.

In a hunter-gatherer society, humans worked to gather food for survival. Later, we have farming, assembling in factory, and eventually, tapping on a keyboard every day in front of a monitor, sitting in a small cubicle. At every age of human history, there is work. The meaning of work is most of the time very clear: to gather enough food and daily necessities. Only until the last hundred years, the format has changed drastically. Most of us (in city) have more higher level types of jobs. We call these tertiary industry or service industry. Less people are farming on land or making products. More people are working on things that are more intangible.

In reality most of these tertiary jobs can be traced to the original purpose of surviving. On a broader level, they are like arteries, making sure that resources we produced are sent to places where they are needed. These functions are critical in the modern society where the division of labour is much more detailed than ever. Even though on a narrower level, some of us may no longer “feel” the outcome of our work as much as farming or gathering our food on the table, they are certainly necessary in keeping the human society functional (which means each of us can enjoy a living standard like a king in the medival age in terms of material goods). Imagine having a cold, refreshing soda on a hot, humid day. I don’t think some rulers in ancient Egypt or medival Europe could have this privilege.

Hence, work is inevitable and more importantly, meaningful to our quality of everyday life. If so, why does work acquire such a bad reputation in the recent years? My hypothesis is that we are doing it wrong now, and it makes work some meaningless Sisyphean grind.

Money Is Not (Principally) Important

In the economic model, money is a signal that facilitates the proper allocation of resources. This is true on the marco level and most of the time on a micro level. However, money is not everything. Certainly money is useful, but there are many other factors contributing to our well-being that are not money. In fact, research in last few decades has shown that after a certain level of income, money no longer matters.

I believe this is where the problem is. We have associated work or business only with the aim to earn money for something else, but there is another side of it. We produce (work) for the gain (money, which in turn we use it to buy food and stuff), while we should also produce for someone else’s gains, if not for oneself. It is the bilateral benefit that gives the tertiary work the meaning.

I am not a millionaire/billionaire now and I don’t know if I will be one, but I can understand why more and more rich and successful people say something similar to “money cannot buy happiness” (e.g., this article from DHH, one of the founders of Basecamp). Some think that they are the lucky group so they don’t understand the less fortunate group in the society. I think they are genuine. And I can foresee that if I somehow miraclely got rich, I would feel the same. All I want in terms of material life is very simple. I am lucky that I have all I need to be happy right now.

Work As Solving Real Problems

So the meaning of my work is to make work meaningful again. By which I mean eliminating unnecessary tasks in the context of the bilateral benefit I mentioned. I originally wrote “more efficient” in my earlier post, but it feels erring more on the side of simply making technological advancements. More fundamentally, I want to make work mean something for its consumers, not just for the sake of receiving payments. Now I see that we have many unnecessary pursues.

For example, I am not particularly interested in the latest crypto/NFT mania. I am fully supportive of experiementing blockchains, cryptocurrencies or NFTs to solve some of the inefficiency in our economy. I do see some practical values in them. But I do not want to work on these projects just for raising fund or making profits in order to get rich. Sadly, I see many people trying to get onto this boat with wrong intentions.

I mentioned “real problems” in the section title. The inefficiency in our economy is where I find many of these real problems. They are often on a systemic level, like world hunger. These problems are often complex, which lead to people oversimplifying and proposing some unfeasible solutions. Let’s stay with the world hunger example. It is true that there are worrying trend of food waste in more developed countries, but it cannot help that if people there waste less food. To me, the actual source of problem is logistics. How can we distribute food more effectively? It involves many finer technical issues like keeping them fresh or faster transport. I may not able to help with these areas, but I might help other issues that how to make use of data and information gathered to make better decisions. These are complex, hard problems. And they mean something to its eventual consumers (e.g., distributing foods more efficiently, hence making them cheaper and more accessible to those who currently suffer from hunger).

The Movement Is Already In Motion

Almostly certainly I am not the first one to say all these. In fact, there are so many symptoms showing that humans already started to adapt: the startup culture, the follow-your-passion idea, the slash culture. Many people feel the problem of work detached from meaning. I’d say it is a sign of our progression. We finally reach the stage where we find out that materials start not to matter that much. And it is time to adjust our way of living and organisation of society. It is a spontaneous movement, like all other successful economical movements in the past.

I want to solve real problems. At the same time, I also want to contribute to the future where we have less unnecessary work. So now I start with people who I work with:

• Minimising “fake” problems, like meaningless pursues, bureaucracy or internal politics, while;
• Maximising meaningful output, like helping clients to address their actual technical challenges better, faster or in a cheaper way.