Work is reliable. It will never leave you. And it defines you. What you value says who you are, clearly.
And just as there are many ways of people relating to one another, there are many ways to relate to work, and many forms of work to love.
But what I think all share is a sense of being present, of being engaged, of feeling good, and of the commitment of energy.
Freud said the keys to happiness where love and work, but I would suggest that for most people work is vastly more important. You can love a person, but what do you do with them? Does fucking feel as good when you’ve been doing it for ten years? Twenty?
What does feel as good? A quiet day after a long week? Yes, I think so. Conversations about shared passions. Yes. And what is the main passion of most of us? Our work.
They say you should not define someone by what they do for a living, which is somewhat true, but I think people who choose long term to stay in a field cannot but adopt they mindsets and habits of that field. Cops are cops. Doctors are doctors. Accountants are accountants. Sales people are sales people. Construction workers are construction workers.
And the point, to me, is not that any one kind of work is better than another. It is that every form of work offers an opportunity to share love and attention with the world, to bring your best.
Nothing can be more deadening to the soul than to lack work, to lack purpose, to lack an outlet for creative energy. And there can be no more pernicious belief than that work is bad and being lazy is good.
Being lazy IS good sometimes, but only in the context of a larger purpose. Whitman spent a lot of time lounging. But he also wrote Leaves of Grass. He was not really lounging: he was drinking Life, and that is work.
And I will comment that we conflate work with effort, and effort with difficulty and pain. But look, as one obvious example, at Donald Trump: he LOVES what he is doing. He’s not working: he’s playing. He’s enjoying himself. Work is the natural result of loosening the restraints on yourself. It is an outflowing every bit as natural as water flowing downhill. It is only when we fear it, when we reject it in advance, that it comes to be scary.
And to be sure, there can be too much. Too much is not good. But that means something is out of balance.
It is often forgotten that one of the main criticisms Marx made of “Capitalism” as it existed in his day, was that it deprived the individual of the feeling of the value of his labor. However, this was not then and is not now a necessary consequence. I myself have had jobs where I spent the day filing, or answering phones, or inputting data. You can make all a pleasure by engaging fully with them, by making games of it, by offering your self, rather than your resistance and resentment.