On “Work”
They lived…
They did their work…
They made fun of their work…
They made fun of themselves for making fun of their work…
…and died peacefully in the irony of it all.
We HAVE to study our work culture in a lab.
Our goal is not to “win”, in the pure, binary sense of the term. Our goal is to not get in trouble with the boss. Our goal is to get away with doing the least amount of work. We call this “corporate slavery” because all we have to show for it is obedience and performative exhaustion.
Bare minimum is not even good enough. Bare minimum is our best. More effort is spent branding this bare minimum as excellence than actually striving for excellence. There are people who have built entire careers upon their bare minimum.
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Years of firefighting don’t ring the alarm bells that maybe if we had aimed for operational excellence from the get-go, been thorough, been able to take criticism without seeing it as a threat to our entire personhood, then we could have been great (at the least, we could have achieved product-market fit).
The worst part: we don’t even learn. If we fail, it’s the world’s fault. It’s because “people in Pakistan are not very tech-savvy”. It’s because we are “too early” or “too late”. It’s because “the competitors are shady people with shady practices”. The excuses evolve, we never run out of our excuses.
Why are we so comfortable with producing stillborn, pointless pieces of work? Are we not scared of the rot it will eventually set in our souls? 8 hours, 5 days a week, over a period of almost 25–30 years.
You do anything over a time period that long enough and it becomes a habit. When you are okay with mediocrity in your work, what else are you settling for in the rest of your life? What reflexes have you cultivated? Defensiveness and cutting corners? Who are we becoming and what example are we setting for those who come after us?
There is a carefully curated distance between what we find meaningful and what we spend 8 hours of each day doing. This is a fracture between the body and the soul …a job is just a job now. It’s not supposed to bring you meaning, purpose, or even fun. People use being “highly stressed” as a signifier of how important a job they are doing. A bad mood, bad behavior is earned and fully justified because “can’t you see I am working so hard??”. This is a more meaningful indicator of doing great work than literally anything else: being an unbearable grinch.
Why is truth and greatness not the singular Qibla? Why do we worship all the wrong gods?
I often find myself thinking of this:
“All the great saints looked at work the same way. The human being’s greatest act — his freest, most intense, most human act— is offering himself up in worship. Properly understood, work is a form of worship. A man can offer up the weariness and difficulties of his labor. Or he can offer up the pleasures of solving problems or working with his hands. Work is the way human beings worship God by collaborating with him in the on-going process of creation.”
— Peter Robinson, How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life
And I believe that this applies to all kinds of work. Yes, even if you are building the next GPT wrapper.
This is not a call to work harder. It’s a call for more depth in whatever work it is that you do.
