Make Your Meaning

My partner’s mother used to refer to going to work as going off to the putty knife factory. Often in the morning, leaving our house with his lunch pail, he says, “Another day at the putty knife factory.” Sometimes work is drudgery. But other times he thinks of himself as saving the world one hot tub at a time. He claims the mantle of hot tub god. Very few people in the spa business have been around as long as he has. Knowing what he knows gives him a lot of satisfaction that compensates for the tedium of being a service tech. He enjoys meeting new people, going into their homes, and helping them solve a problem. It’s the act of helping people that makes work sacred. Even at the putty knife factory.

The one thing we have to give in this life is our time. Everything takes time. So choosing what to do each day is the moment we giftwrap our future. I know how I felt when I was working on a farm every day, taking care of animals, managing gardens and a forest, hoping for an assist from the weather. I had a religious commitment to the chores, and my farm thrived because my work was love in action. How many jobs inspire that kind of feeling?

When I worked in the corporate world as a marketing consultant, which I did for 30 years, I never had the thought that my work was sacred. But I did feel the privilege of money, and I made careful selection of ways to donate both my money and my time. My work was opportunistic. My time was a way to balance my greed with my generosity. I think that is still true for most of us. When we give our time to express our values, that’s our gift to the future.

Recently I’ve been following the evolution of our ideas about work in light of the proliferation of artificial intelligence and robotics. It is being said that digital services will replace many humans in the workplace. Okay. Got it. Tractors replaced mules. Websites replaced travel agents. Software is replacing journalists. Not all good, but probably inevitable. But I draw the line at the notion of a post-work world. Post-work. What does that mean? 

I would be so happy to see robots in the ocean collecting all the plastic garbage humans have dumped there. It would be genius if robots could dig up all the landfills and sort biodegradable from recyclable from reuseable from toxic, so we could be more efficient about land use. I would have liked a farm robot to scoop up the cow manure on the floor of the barn and move it to the compost pile. And I’m very happy to have artificial intelligence studying cures for disease. But let’s not get carried away with utopian malarky about digital services replacing humans in every endeavor.

First of all, work is not a bad thing. Suffering is bad. Suffering sucks. Work should not be suffering. That’s exactly why we have robots. But when work is an emotional exchange between people, one helping the other, one teaching the other, one inspiring the other — I think we need to appreciate ourselves. Serving each other is what gives our lives value. Most of us understand that instinctively. We are inclined to reach out and touch someone because it makes us feel good. For many of us, work makes us feel good. Work gives us purpose. Work is a medium of exchange. Being able to engage with other people in a productive way is how we build our world.

New inventions have always made some people wacky. I read a proposal for a membership nation that would be governed by a sovereign intelligence. Pause on that phrase. Sovereign intelligence. Sovereign is generally defined as supreme political power or the highest authority in a realm. The word intelligence has completely lost its meaning in our modern times. But in this case the word intelligence refers to a software program. Hopefully it’s better than Microsoft Word. The pitch in the proposal was for an island in the Mediterranean to be purchased by a coven of oligarchs who would then instate artificial intelligence to govern the island and all its citizens, who would pay around $50,000 each to join the fake nation. The proposal is essentially a pitch for software as a way of life. I wonder what they’ll eat.

Here are some things to remember when you hear the post-work pitch. The global economy is based on people buying and selling things to each other, businesses profit from the exchange, and governments tax revenue. How are people going to buy and sell things if no one works? In a post-work world, what happens to income? In a post-work world, what does a business do? Who pays taxes to fund government? Will restaurants become vending machines? Who will buy Teslas? Will people simply disappear? What’s the point?

It’s a great irony that religious extremists are resurgent in parallel to a tech bro oligarchy that would have the world run by software. But shit happens. It always does. We go through cycles. Tribes, belief systems, political parties, national borders are always going to change. And yet we persist.

Humans are the apex species because we are creative in ways that others are not. We make meaning. We give our life experience meaning. Our time has meaning because we know it has limits. It’s the scarcity of time that makes it valuable. That’s why how we spend our time can be an act of generosity. Work, even when it feels mundane, has meaning because we spend our greatest resource to do it. Work is our contribution to the public good. The public good is our common ground, the shared value that connects us. Who are we without work, what do we do with our time, and who benefits? 

We are being inundated with messages that computer programs called artificial intelligence are smarter than people or soon will be. Maybe, maybe not. AI is just another product they are selling. It looks smart because it’s really fast. Using the same logic, they also said, the internet is better. Cell phones are better. Algorithms are better. Robots are better. But it’s 2025 and we still have war, poverty, hunger, oppression, and government corruption. What’s better about that? So buyer beware. We need to get back to people power. Be thoughtful about how you spend your time. Off to the putty knife factory! Make your meaning.