what if difficulty is part of the point?
we need a (better) theology of work
Most everything we do, say, or believe in this life emanates from what we see as the purpose of our life. Our perception of purpose—the Greek word telos, which I will use from here on out—defines our engagement with the world.
I would hazard to say that most people are fairly unaware of their functional telos. They just sort of exist. They have no particular problem with just sort of existing, but I say this only to note that these people, too, are living out a telos. An undefined or unreflective telos is still a telos.
From what I can understand, the telos of most people in the late-modern West, perhaps the default mood, is having a good time. How this is defined is naturally subjective and individual, but the overwhelming thesis on life is, “I am here to have a good time before I die.” Some folks would append the following phrase to the end of that sentence: “. . . before I die and my body returns to the earth.” Some would add “. . . before I die and return to the eternal consciousness.” Some, sadly, would add “. . . before I die and go to heaven.” Presumably to continue having a good time.
One of the things we have also seemed to decide does not lead to a good time is hard work. Thus, we have been inundated for the past decade or so with the cult of optimization, the prophets of productivity, the masters of the life-hack. These folks plead with us to ditch ungratifying labor and wasted time and hustle our little hearts out.
However, even the productivity, rise-and-grind crowd online doesn’t want you to work really hard at a job because of the inherent meaning of work. Heck no, 9-5 jobs are for sheeple. You’ve got to get passive income. You’ve got to go all in for crypto. You’ve got to make your money make money so you can. . . listen to podcasts about life hacks, preferably while living an expat life somewhere cheaper and blasting yourself with red light.
In a recent article, Freddie DeBoer puts it like this: “But fundamentally, I don’t understand what becomes of a human species when we no longer are able to celebrate the value of caring about sh*t and doing your best in an effort to get a good outcome. So much of online culture today is dependent on the idea of real effort as the interest of chumps.”
Nowhere is the desire to mitigate work and our time spent working more active than in the way we sell and engage with new technologies. Every new device and software under the sun is touted for its time-saving capabilities. Such has it been, time out of mind.
And some do exactly that, for sure. Please don’t read this as a jeremiad against owning a rental property or using a calculator or using wheels. Further, my purpose here has little to do with the desire to make more money or invest that money wisely. What I am interested in is what such pursuits tell us about what we believe the purpose of our lives are.
One of the things that I always ask in response to optimization and the digital offloading of responsibilities is, What are we making time for? What are you doing with the time this life-hack saves you? Why has time-saving become such a goal, an end in itself?
The answer goes back to purpose: because our purpose is not to meaningfully struggle with meaningful work, but to have a good time. We have mostly discounted the very human notion that hard work leads to a type of fulfillment unavailable through vacationing. After all, a vacation is most powerful when it comes at the end of a season of hard work and struggle. It means less if everyday is functionally a Saturday.
None of this is necessarily new. The modern age did not invent lazy people or people who mistake unfettered leisure as the surefire path to happiness. But our technologies have exacerbated this desire and made it seem more attainable. If I can increasingly offload onerous responsibilities to chatbots, then maybe there will come a time when I don’t need to work at all. For most of human history, this was not a reasonable goal or a realistic desire for most of the population. Now, it seems within reach. And maybe it is within reach.
But even if it was, would that be a good thing? I just don’t think so. Nothing will ever make me think so.
One issue that some would have with my argument is that much of modern work does not entail “meaningful” struggle at a meaningful job but pointless time-wasting for an inhuman corporation. I do not necessarily disagree. What I will say is that it is hard to differentiate with perfect clarity the difference between meaningful work and pointless work.
There is also the old idea that we grow in our character through hard work. This is why hard work was traditionally venerated. Once the Protestant reformers began to argue that we glorify God through our labor, even the pointless parts of our work took on divine meaning and implications.
I think we need to recover this attitude to work, not to make us passive wage-earners dutifully following corporate’s high commands, but because God has allowed us to give him glory through the mundane. If a dairymaid can milk cows to the glory of God, a Starbucks barista can make her 50th pumpkin spice latte of the day to the glory of God.
Finally, we are humans. It is not because of the fall that we work. Adam and Eve were assigned duties in the garden. We should work for fair and humane work practices wherever we can, but we cannot be complicit in a culture that treats work as an evil to be avoided. Our lives are enriched when we do the work the Lord has given us to do. Our character is sharpened when we see duties that lie outside of our enjoyment.
To a world engaged in a life of pointless pleasure, we can offer transcendent meaning and otherworldly purpose.