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What bothers me about any principle related to work is that work itself is so very contextual.
- The same work can be exciting or traumatic depending on whether it's a task you set yourself or got roped into by some other entity. A CEO can easily be less stressed than a low-level employee despite having tasks of greater responsibility and magnitude (see Whitehall study for instance)
- The adjustment of interest in the same exact task can occur in an instant, as soon as you become aware of the new context, and regardless of whether there's any material change e.g. learning that you are underpaid compared to your coworkers, or having someone tell you to do the chores you were going to do anyway, or if someone tells you they set out the task for you because they think you are the only person competent enough for it
- It's far easier for talented people like Witty or Weil to find self-actualization, because the range of tasks they can try out to satisfying effect is vaster and more compressed in time. Furthermore, they are more adept at lacing their actions with mental or aesthetic qualities such as philosophical statements, which makes rationalization easier.
- Work is becoming more virtualized and hard to pin down, especially in the digital space. Imagine describing to Witty a person whose specialty is to find vulnerabilities in Instagram's network protocols to be able to make enough queries to catch juicy usernames, which will in turn be sold to third parties optimize the sale of a virtual deed of ownership of a virtual picture of an ape. He's smart and would probably get the idea quickly, but still...
> The same work can be exciting or traumatic depending on whether it's a task you set yourself or got roped into by some other entity.
Indeed. A question I often think about: How can we keep our work from damaging us? Many of us have experienced damaging work - work (or a work environment) that is actually causing us mental or physical harm. And others can be in exactly the same job/environment and not experience any damage. I haven't come up with much of an answer to the question, but autonomy, control and choice seem to have something to do with it. But there's also futility and frustration that even those who choose a task can feel.
Is that a valuable goal? It’s like asking how can we keep from ever being sick? Or how can we keep from being sore? Damage is a necessary part of life. Suffering will drive innovations within work or drive you out of a job. Both are decent ends.
It's precisely because work-related damage is only semi-necessary that it is so traumatic. Everywhere you look, there are people who have essentially avoided surrendering decades of their lives by being lucky and/or successful in business. Even 30 decisive seconds during a job interview can lead to enormous differences in salary for a job lasting multiple years. A few minutes spent on a crypto forum in 2009 can mean 100x more than a decade of hard work and education.
By contrast, illness and soreness are humming background noises that you can get used to.
B.S. jobs and the damage they inflict are certainly not 'a necessary part of life'.
Two people can be in the same job environment which one finds damaging and the other finds enriching (or at least not damaging) . I want to find out how the one who is not damaged figured out how to do that - that seems like a worthy goal. Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" is sort of a plan for surviving the worst case scenario. Why not also use some of those insights to survive work?
for me it is the ability to put the work in a greater context. not just the work itself, but also in what it enables you to do. for some, the fact that their work provides for their family can be enough. others need a more direct relationship between the work and its impact. answering the question of the purpose of life itself, can be a factor here. for me the purpose is to contribute to an ever advancing civilization. so for me, work has to contribute something to that. but at one point i had a job that decidedly did not contribute anything positive, but it enabled me to make a positive contribution outside of work, that i would not have been able to do otherwise at that time. i didn't last in that job because it wasn't motivating enough, but it did help me to get the foot into a door, where i could find a more meaningful occupation afterwards. had i rejected that job my life would have turned out completely different.
Probably worth noting that Wittgenstein and Weil both came from relative affluence. Wittgenstein's father was one of the wealthiest men in Europe. Famous composers such as Brahms would perform at their house. While not close to Wittgenstein, Weil's father was a medical doctor.
Kinda makes sense to me that the wealthy might be the astronauts of this thinking.
My experience being voluntarily without home (and living in parks) tells me that erecting a barrier between your work and your material needs, that allows you to more objectively assess the personal value of the work. You need to run experiments of sorts, and imho it's hard to have that liberty to truly A/B test unless the requirements of normal work are relieved (whether through wealth or minimized needs).
In some ways, I felt more kinship with the wealthy and retired when I was being a hobo of sorts.
Agreed. Without the pressure of 'do this or die', these wealthy men can enjoy work. Because at any time, they can simply leave.
Kinda like Mike Rowe waxing on about Dirty Jobs and work ethic. It lacks the full weight of the cost of failure.
> Kinda like Mike Rowe waxing on about Dirty Jobs and work ethic. It lacks the full weight of the cost of failure.
Or every "CEO mans the grill for a day" garbage. Easy to find service work satisfying when you're not stuck doing it.
But it is also subtle life advice.
Set yourself up so you can leave and you’ll have a much better time at work.
Yeah, but it's only speaking to a small subset of the lucky folks who can do that.
How much do you have to earn before you can live below your means? This is all that is necessary really, spend less than you make so that you can continually build savings in order to build up fuck-you money so quitting your job and taking a few months to find a new one isn't scary.
I know waitresses who do it and have sizable amounts in savings.
There's always someone who has a similar life situation and makes less money than you. Just live life like you make 10% less or whatever. There are definitely people who live paycheck to paycheck on that much less than you earn, you can spend that much money and keep the 10% for when it is really needed.
People get mad when you suggest this and have a list of "but I have to X..." which isn't valid because there's always someone who earns less than you who also has X. You don't earn the absolute minimum amount of money for someone in your situation, that's just silly to think like that.
There are people who have serious issues like disabilities or whatever were it is quite hard, to be fair. But it isn't just the "lucky few" who don't.
Sure, but the Venn diagram of those "lucky folks" and the people on this site has unusually high overlap.
It doesn't hurt to remind some of the stressed out and overworked among us that living below one's tech-industry means can pay off in work satisfaction, even if it means foregoing some more immediate pleasures.
Basically everyone can do it, they just don't.
Not sure if this is ironic or serious.
> Wittgenstein and Weil both came from relative affluence.
I've seen this come up many times in Philosophical discussion. The words to live by are those of privilege, who have rarely experienced the lifelong hardships of slaves.
However, plenty of people have read the words of (stoic) philosophers and have adapted them to extreme environments like torture. They say it worked and got them through. Do we need a modern day slave to independently come up with the same philosophical conclusions to call them a universal nature? Or can we derive them from logic and possibly data?
When you have an open-ended job, you don't get to have a feeling of accomplishment until you finish a task. Because of this, certain forms of manual labor can feel more immediately gratifying because they allow you to see a task through to completion.
While I think that the work I do as a software developer is better and more personally meaningful work than the work I did stocking shelves in a grocery store (because it validates my previous efforts), I'm not sure that at the end of the work day that I feel more fulfilled than when I was on a grocery stock crew. Being able to exhaust myself physically through work and then doing whatever my mind wants me to do definitely felt better than working while sitting in an office chair all day and trying to find exercises that give me the same sense of satisfaction.
For a little over 10 years, I was both a full time software engineer working 8 hours a day and a part time fitness instructor. I felt much more fulfilled after a one or two hour fitness class than I did after an 8 hour workday at a computer.
I'm going to assume you were paid significantly more for the engineering work, which enabled you to live comfortably. I imagine if you reversed it such that you were working 8 hours as a PT and 2 hours as an engineer, you may find the opposite to be true.
Fair point.
This was a good read. For me, more inspiration to pick up something by Simone Weil at some point.
Another similar essay I liked, contemporary to both Wittgenstein and Weil is "Why Work?" by Dorothy Sayers [1].
[1] https://www1.villanova.edu/content/dam/villanova/mission/fai...
Published 1942, in the intriguingly titled volume Letters to the Diminished
Church.
"Ora et Labora" is an old but virtuous cycle.
>"Ora et Labora" is an old but virtuous cycle.
Like a penny farthing or a more-modern Trek (for example)? Or my mum that was known as the town bike, and so here i am - the result of linkage rather than a quick pull?
The Benedictine motto, "Ora et Labora," has also come to be understood as a direction of offering up the hardships of labor so that the offering is a prayer. Work can thus become a prayer in and of itself. Prayer and work are constantly linked, pulling on one another. Together these acts mold us into better people.
Interesting compared to le malheur mentioned in the article, wherein factory repetitive work demands no mentation at all...
Two people who did not have to work to survive found purpose generating useless semantics.
By their time physical science had placed upper and lower bounds on what’s possible even if the public was not aware of it.
I get the appeal and went through that phase in life, but no theories have superseded Entropy, Relativity; yes the information we generate is always “out there” but it loses structure, the meaning of it being out there is relative. Information theory is a model for discovery, not memorization.
Daily life is as it looks; work to survive for some, subsist on their work for others. Those who spend more time subsisting might try discovering literal self sufficiency, and those who work to live might try spending more time subsisting. That’s all I get out of past philosophy these days.
This is going to sound ironic, but it's not: another philosopher who found purpose in work was Marx. To Marx, work was central to self-expression and human thriving, and part of capitalism's failure was a de-coupling of the results of a worker's toil from the worker, leading to estrangement and alienation. There's a reason why every other people's republic, for better or for worse, valorized the coal-miner and the farmer.
The "valorization" was for the worse, and that's Marx's point. If the workers actually received contentment from their labor, they wouldn't need any external validation. They'd just do it.
When Marx spoke about alienation, he was talking about industrial manufacturing, not producing commodities. Capitalism benefits from production lines, where you're working on a small piece of a product and don't feel ownership of the process. And you don't get financial benefit because any profits go to the people who own production lines.
Early 20th century communist revolutions happened in less industrial countries, on the idea that farmers and miners who owned the farms and mines themselves would get a larger share of the profits. But it never worked out that way, for a ton of reasons -- mismanagement being key, but really the fact that commodities don't produce the kinds of profits that drove Marx's theory. Marx's ideas of alienation were driven by highly profitable industrial manufacturing.
The world today is insanely more profitable than Marx ever dreamed, and that presents a lot more opportunities for workers to feel ownership. We have the luxury of supporting artisans -- including farmers who grow less food for more effort but offer other benefits, even if purely intangible ones.
I don't think there's ever going to be "artisan mining", and I don't think miners were ever going to be well accommodated in a Marxist society. The best you could hope for is turning the mines over to the workers and letting them profit.
A good article. Two people who are remembered for the quality of their minds and their writing, but they still weren't too proud to do things that almost no one will remember them for. Except the people who saw it.
Would love to be part of the 0.01% of people who consider possibly getting a job so they can mesh their "powers with the resisting gears of the world." Lol, this article sucks. Try harder "true conservatives!"
Ayn Rand is a philosopher who talks very directly on how productive action at work (or anywhere) are the morally good.
Not sure how you can define productive action other than to say it's action that moves the universe towards a state that is desired. Desire arises from our values and a moral action is one that aligns with our values. Given this, I don't see there being any arguing against productive action being the morally correct action, I just think many people don't understand an assessment regarding whether or not any action is productive is inherently completely subjective.
Rand doesn't turn to society or god or personal whim to define productivity (all forms of subjectivism directly or indirectly). Rand turns to reality.
Productive values are values that let you sustain your life in it's biological requirements and it's requirements for happiness. (E.g. working as a programmer helps satisfy your need for food/shelter/medicine and also allows you to satisfy your passion for a life worth living in programming ). Ayn Rand shows that the requirements to man's life are objective [external to conscious desire]. There is no subjectivity in your bodies needs for energy (via need for food), there is no subjectivity in the use of reason to accomplish values, and that there is no subjectivity in the requirements for how you reach happiness by the use of your individual judgement to fulfill your life.
Productive actions come in many concretes, but all individuals are unified in that they are actions that satisfy the objective requirements of how individual maximally live.
If productivity were truly subjective, anything could keep us alive and happy. But you cannot eat off playing video games [at least not if you aren't a twitch star ;)], and you cannot find happiness by doing a career you hate.
> objective requirements of how individual maximally live.
What is it "to live"? Even more of a mystery is what is it to "maximally live"? You are reducing all of life to a single dimension that you haven't even defined. There may be an objective minimum amount of calories that are necessary to stay alive/awake but I don't think that raw survival is super relevant here; what value is there in intaking a single one beyond that? The things that make us happy at one point in our lives aren't necessarily always going to make us happy, in fact our ideas of what it is to be happy can easily fluctuate throughout our lives, and definitely do fluctuate from person to person. There's very little in this world that is as cut and dry as you seem to imply.
"To live" is to act to sustain your life and have a life worth living. To live maximally it to not half ass living. Neither being biologically operational while having a life you hate, and also not having a life you enjoy presently at the expense of greater values you have in the future.
You confuse philosophical principle with quantitative analysis. It's perfectly valid to say "you should live your life in accordance with your values, which -- when properly defined, come from rationally benefiting your existence" (or as Rand put it, "life qua man"), without then needing to define thermodynamic systems that dogmatically declare a certain number of calories taken in every day.
She wrote at such incredible length about meaningful labor in the pursuit of happiness -- "productive value" as she put it -- and a soulful existence in general.
It's a shame that there's such a negative knee-jerk reflex to the mention of her name.
In the same way that people use Stalin's policies to discredit Marx, people use the policies and behaviors of Ayn Rand's adherents to discredit her.
At some point, when everybody who reads your books uses them to justify toxic behavior, negative knee-jerk responses become the proper societal equivalent of an immune response.
Or the teachings of Jesus, as abused by the Spanish Inquisition, Jim Jones, David Koresh ...
... or the music of the Beatles, according to Charles Manson.
If a bad actor wants a scapegoat, they will find one.
> In the same way that people use Stalin's policies to discredit Marx
No, Ayn Rand and Karl Marx are not remotely comparable.
Not until you can point to dozens of countries that tried to put Rand's principles into action, and show how they failed. Can you?
Saying "true communism has never been tried" is to ignore what happened each time. "We'll do better next time" doesn't persuade unless you have a detailed understanding of how someone like Stalin or Pol Pot comes to power, and some plan more detailed than "we won't do it that way."
I can only think of one example off the top of my head of supposed adherents being used to discredit the philosophy (see Eddie Lampert with Sears), whereas the inverse is true for innumerable cases, where "they read/follow/worship Ayn Rand" is used as a negative qualifier for the person.
John Oliver's segment on Ayn Rand (Last Week Tonight, I forget the name of the segment but it was something to the effect of "Why Is This Still A Thing") did an excellent job summarizing the popular case against her, in all of its disingenuousness: without making an effort to view her statements through the lens of the terms she's defined, it sounds bad compared to vulgar neoliberal sensibilities, and because she herself as a human was less than perfect. It, like every mass media analysis of her or her works I've seen, comes from and is marketed towards a pre-established understanding the Objectivism is wrong.
Also, I'd love to see a source on "everyone who reads" Ayn Rand (or Marx, for that matter, or any author of any written work ever) being toxic sociopaths -- it stands to reason that you'd see her closest adherents, like Onkhar Ghate, Harry Binswanger, Yaron Brook, or Leonard Peikoff being known for acting upon bad ideas if that was all that was in their intellectual orbit, not cherrypicked cases of someone claiming to have read Rand before making questionable or unethical decisions.
Comparing Stalinism to Objectivism is an apples to oranges comparison. There's never been a country run on the principles of objectivism. There's many countries that followed Marxist ideology to a logical conclusion and ended up in unsurprising mass death.
Indeed, if you asked most people: "do you think your life is important?" "do you think reason is important?" "do you thinking working is important?" most people would say yes, then they turn around and totally dismiss one of the greatest advocates of individual flourishing.
Very much agree. You can find some select quotes from her fiction and non-fiction on the topic of productiveness here.