Chapter 1: All Labor and No Work

College was predominantly a let-down for me. Outside of a few standout teachers the entire experience felt like an expensive waste of time. For the most part I was simply expected to memorize certain facts and to have the basic elements of a sentence on call and that was it. Rarely did I feel like I was being challenged or that I was growing in any meaningful way. Honestly the whole situation put a bad taste in my mouth and when graduation finally came I couldn't wait to get onto anything else. I know that I'll have to go back soon--there's not much I can do with a bachelors in psychology that would interest me--but I felt I needed a bit of time to save money and to get out of that environment before I would be ready to dive back in.

So I got a job here at a financial company and for a few months it felt wonderful. There was a lot to learn and the company was new enough that there were always things that needed improvement or building. It also helped that the people were incredible and I settled pretty quickly into my life there. Still, there was always a needling thought in the back of my head that I needed to be using my time more constructively, but I was so engaged in solving problems it was easy enough to ignore most days. In time though I mastered the basics and had explored about as much as I could at that position and was suddenly confronted with walls on every side. I could see the problems, and even had solutions I was confident in pitching. No matter how hard I pushed or how often I tried though I found myself shoved unceremoniously aside. After some months of this the frustration had mounted sufficiently that I simply couldn't ignore it any more. The job was well paying but I had reached a peak and could no longer let my quality of life suffer in the name of a paycheck. Simply existing was insufficient

Hannah Arendt spends a large portion of her first chapter carefully defining the terms Labor, Work, and Action.

Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor. The human condition of labor is life itself.

Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species' ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an "artificial" world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness.

We'll leave action for a later essay and focus on work and labor today. Generally labor contains those things tied directly to our animal nature; to our biological being. That we need to eat, to sleep, to move, etc., and that these needs are recurring so long as we remain alive and embodied. The timeline of nature is thus cyclical, with each event transforming seamlessly into the next until we return ultimately to the place we were before. The products of labor are thus consumable; they serve the moment. Every day a creature needs to find food and and water but once they are found the problem is merely postponed; the cycle is perpetuated. Even the life cycle of animals has this characteristic in that while the life of a single animal may be finite, through procreation they can continue the cycle into another generation. That we are biological beings encompasses that labor is a necessary condition of our existence.

In work though we find something more distinctly human. Work encompasses all those things we do which have no direct bearing on our survival but instead lead to durable creations. A person does not paint because the painting will allow them to survive (though in a market economy that work can become a commodity and thus be traded for consumables) but it is in some way its own end-state. You do not require a chair but making it may feel fulfilling and it can improve your quality of life. Importantly though, the chair is not consumed in the way the products of labor are. Once made it takes on an existence of its own and can be used indefinitely so long as it is whole. Thus the products of Work become, over time, the major contents of the specifically human world and lend it its character. The timeline of work is thus linear, with a distinct beginning and endpoint to its progression.

I listened to a series of psychology lectures some time back (not at my own school unfortunately) and the professor was giving a breakdown on some of the underlying neuroscience behind the personality. One of the more interesting points was about our exploratory drive and the experience of anticipation and fear. I'll lay some scaffolding here before elaborating. I'll assume our brains are the product of a long evolutionary process, which implies that it is the product of tinkering as opposed to design. Given this, "Newer" features of the brain are outgrowths of older features and so can can only elaborate on them within a field of parameters. Our brains then could be thought of as successively diverse additions to and remixes of older (successful) iterations. One of the oldest and most basic functions we know of is the exploratory drive. This is the circuit that pushes an organism to "do" even when all its needs are satiated and may very well be one of our most ancient aspects.

It's not hard to understand its utility. The environment generally is full of things that may give an organism an advantage, or may harm it. Staying in one place limits options and makes the organism more vulnerable and so those that instead explore increase their likelihood of survival. As the environment also contains threats, though, a basic system develops in which harmful stimuli are registered as negative (retreat to previously safe territory) and benefits are registered as positive (advance into new environment which will become new safe territory). Finally, when no input is presented begin cautious exploration to discover where positive and negative valences exist. You can even imagine how this very rudimentary system can be built upon to allow our emotions of fear or excitement and eventually more and more complex iterations of these.

The take away is this: we are biologically designed to feel dissatisfied in a static state and will be increasingly motivated to find novelty. This motivation is older than our species and certainly older than conscious thought.

Human beings (as far as we can tell) stand above all of our fellow creatures in the arenas of abstract thought and self awareness. We are capable of incredibly elaborate mental simulations, introspection, and extrapolation. Amongst other things this has likely given us our strong sense of the past and future, as well as our sense of self identity. While undoubtedly advantageous in many ways it does leave us with a new dilemma. We are aware of our own mortality and that our own locus of experience will disappear. Moreover, given our ability to communicate we are conscious of our own emotional states as well as the fact that they are in some sense unique and fleeting. Now this is obviously an incredibly rich and intricate field of discussion but for our purposes here I'll limit it to this one point. Given all of the above I believe that it is this confluence of forces that has "torn" humanity out of the great cycle of nature in the way that we are and made it such that we will be forever bound to the necessary demands of labor but will never be truly fulfilled by them. We care very deeply about our own short time here and crave richness an impact.

I thought about this a lot as I became more and more frustrated at work, as every tactic I tried was shot down or ignored. It helped to have titles to label my feelings though and reading through The Human Condition provided me with plenty to try. I began to take stock of how much of my job was Labor and how much was Work and found that it had become entirely one-sided in favor of monotony. Looking at the times in which I'd been happiest there all of them revolved around projects and plans with definable end-states. The days felt dead I was being asked to labor and being denied work. I was expected to perform the same handful of tasks in an endless cycle but given no ability to make lasting change or to engage with anything at all beyond the same cycle of drudgery as before. Worse, even were I to find my way toward a promotion it would only lead to the same cycle with different details.

Perhaps a useful parallel exists in the field of learning. Generally speaking, when we are developing a new skill it requires a tremendous amount of conscious effort on our part. For example, when learning an instrument the initial stages take constant reiteration physically and mentally to begin mastering the process. As we regularly perform the activity through it feels easier and easier and soon our attention begins focusing on more advanced or complex lessons and the basics become automatic. We can even feel this automation in action if we ever need to fix some bad habit made in the basics (some adjustment to how we hold the instrument or where exactly we place our fingers). This can be incredibly frustrating, feeling as if our own body simply won't obey instructions and falls back endlessly on bad habits. In this instance our conscious attention is focused on the inaccuracies of movements that have become automatic and so the process of retraining our body to reflect our mental state stands in relief. This basic process can be extended to almost any activity we do.

What is important in the above example is the slow retreat of conscious engagement. While learning to walk likely took every ounce of focus we could muster in infancy it has become so well learned the we do it now without even registering. It has become habitual and thus boring; literally beneath our notice. The connecting thought is this: our conscious mind, as our problem solving aspect, is only activated when we need to update encoded information in our wider selves. To the extent that something is "mastered" it passes out of conscious awareness. An important part of human life-flourishing though is our own conscious experience of our lives, and so this is something of a double edged sword. While disengaging our limited attention from rote things frees us up to tackle the new--and previous acquisitions become the building blocks of ever more complex tasks--it also means that we are never really complete. Our conscious mind will become bored or frustrated and look for something new to do.

As labor contains all that is considered habitual/cyclical by definition we're presented with the problem of shelf life. What was once engaging quickly becomes tedious, but in an economy and society that has place only for labor (performing the cyclic tasks of the work day in as identical a way as possible) we should expect a population of dissatisfied, psychologically injured, and distracted population. What is missing is work. What is missing is some outlet for tackling interesting problems and developing durable and useful solutions to them; for being human as well as animal. Keep in mind, this does not have to be a work project but can be a social problem, an interesting idea to work out or just a hobby.. What matters is that the entire person be engaged instead of becoming some repetitive instrument. What matters is engagement and meaning.

There are entire books worth of discussion to be had about wage labor, individuality, the limits of markets, our separations and marriages between social, economic, and political spheres, etc., but I'll shelve those for now. Salient here is the evidence that we have built a system which, to function as intended, guarantees an existential trauma to the people living within it. That is we've built a habitat unsuited to the kind of creature we are; but as the process of conditioning to one's environment we resist changing it. I'm not even sure we're really aware that there's a problem, let alone that it's tractable. We speak about the meaning of life as if it was something ephemeral; handed down from on high or a useful fiction. I counter that, in fact, meaning is the word we give to the experience of real human flourishing and taking it seriously has become the most important political question of the next century or more.

If we do not solve it, if instead we allow ourselves to be bogged down in arguments about the details of a game we wouldn't even be playing if given another option, then what we can expect instead is a period of widespread human suffering followed by social unrest and partial of total collapse. Our world makes place for cogs but not humans and leaves no options for human beings; if a cog is no longer needed it can be discarded. Following our current trajectory we will continue to automate and commodify until enough of the population has been relegated to starvation that the entire castle topples down. Keep in mind, the economic and social system being discussed depends on the majority of people working, earning, and spending; Bezos has no billions if no one has money to buy what Amazon is selling. We built a world that can only be inhabited by a model of ourselves we created for ulterior motives and then held generations accountable to maintaining it upon pain of death.

I don't have any real solutions to offer yet, at least none that feel complete, but if we do not take the discussion out of the realms of semantics and academia then we will very quickly find ourselves in a fight with neither weapons nor strategy and very little time to develop either. If we do not then what exactly is it we're doing here?