Work, What Is It?
...a contributor to Chicago Public Radio, and associate editor of Business Ethics Quarterly. In this excerpt from his book My Job My Self, Gini explores the meaning of work in our society.
You can’t eat for eight hours a day, nor drink for eight hours a day—all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason man makes himself and everybody so miserable and unhappy!
—William Faulkner
In perhaps the most poetic phrasing I have ever come across on the topic of work, Pope Pius XI said, “Man is born to labor, as a bird to fly.”1 More parochially, sociologist Peter Berger wrote “to be human and to work appear as inextricably intertwined notions.”2 The first sounds like a gift and a blessing; the other more like a report and a curse. The truth of the matter, I think, lies somewhere in between.
For most of us, working is an entirely nondiscretionary activity, an inescapable fact of existence. In its worst light, work is seen as something evil, a punishment, the grindingly inevitable burden of toil bestowed, along with mortality, upon the human condition. At best, work looms so large and problematic in our lives that we either take it for granted or we actively suppress its full significance.
In fact, none of us is neutral and completely silent on the topic of work. Everyone has an opinion. The reason is simple. Work, food, and sex are the most commonly shared behavioral activities of adult life. While the latter two are subject to aesthetic taste and availability and therefore constitute a discretionary choice, work, for 99 percent of us, is an entirely nondiscretionary matter. Most of us must work. What other option do we have?
As adults there is nothing that more preoccupies our lives than work. From the ages of approximately eighteen to seventy we will spend our lives working. We will not spend as much time sleeping, enjoying our families, eating, or...
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