Work and the Good Life

There is something to owning your work; to have control over what you do, what you make, produce, and contribute to. Mainly, to identify with what you do everyday for work. Now work is usually perceived as something that we only do to make money and earn a living, and it is safe to say that most people work in order to earn an income and support their basic needs. So while this post is about work, we are exploring it because of how tied work is with making money in order to pay the bills and live a decent life. However, work can also be doing things that are not necessarily for earning a salary or income and can be enjoyable as opposed to cumbersome. For example, parents don’t raise and take care of their newborn and children to get paid, but raising children may still be considered a form of work; after all, there is a whole profession in which people pay someone to take care of their children on their behalf. With that, we can distinguish between having a salaried job and work, but for our purpose we are approaching the totality of work, which includes having a job.

In any case, I don’t want to delve into the details of what constitutes work and what doesn’t (see Philosophical Approaches to Work and Labor). My aim is to explore work as it relates to living the good life. More precisely, if work is needed in our money-driven economy, how does the work we do impact the good life?

There are many factors that contribute to living a good life. From friendships, relationships, virtues, health, comfort, and more. Yet, what constitutes a good life might vary among different people, and there are distinct perspectives on approaching what makes or is a good life.

For example, according to absurdists such as Camus, the good life is achieved by the individual’s own values and subjective perception. There are no rules, objective factors, or a set formula to follow that makes a good life, since in the chaos and meaninglessness of the world, as an absurdist would say, it is individuals who construct their own meaning to their lives based on what they themselves value, enjoy, and deem their “truth”. In other words, it is up to the individual to attribute meaning to their life and whatever they choose to spend their time on. For that line of thinking, the good life can be achieved based on what people subjectively choose to be worthwhile and meaningful to them. On the other hand, someone like Aristotle would say that there are certain activities, lifestyles, and virtues that are essential for everyone to practice in order to truly live the good life. For example, a life driven by reason, the search for knowledge, and virtuous traits are necessities for achieving the good life according to Aristotle. From that perspective, there might be a framework to follow that will lead to the good life.

Nevertheless, in both cases, the good life is what we are after, regardless of the different means of achieving it. Also, we can argue that in both cases someone’s potential is key to living a good life. For Aristotle, there is an ultimate potential for everyone, a sort of becoming; and so living a good life is about achieving your innate potential and developing into your best, purposeful self. For Camus, we can say that potential isn’t a given – there is no innate potential and purpose – but it is determined by what the individual wants, no matter what they choose.

While there are many factors that contribute to a good life, be it subjective or objective, in our case, we are focusing on one aspect that we actually spend most of our days and lives doing: work. A lot of effort, energy, and focus is directed or allocated to the work we do during our lives. Given the amount of time, energy, and effort we spend working, it should definitely have a role in the good life.

I want to be clear that you don’t need to be working, or to be more precise, working to earn a living and money, to have a good life. As we said, there are distinctions between having a job and work. However, we want to be realists in our line of thinking and acknowledge that in our current economic system, most people need work in order to make a living, afford basic needs, and have a good standard of living, so we are approaching work as something that we have to do to sustain our lives, but, as we’ll see, not necessarily from a material perspective only.

Having no work or being unemployed is said to be detrimental on one's health, which, in other words, means it is detrimental to achieving the good life. The most obvious reason is that work provides an income that sustains a living – no work equals no money for most people, and that puts a lot of pressure and stress on people. But it is also true that having no work also affects people’s self-esteem. It can make someone feel low and can affect one’s health because of the boredom and void someone might feel by spending days doing nothing and not able to exert energy on productive, stimulating, or engaging activities. That said, being unemployed may allow people to spend time doing the things they want to do, on things that are actually more engaging and stimulating than what they might do being employed for a job if money wasn’t important. If you aren’t tied to a job, you are free to enjoy most of your days doing what you want. But since people need an income, even if they are unemployed and spending their days doing what matters to them, the pressure of needing to make money will get to them regardless of the free time they have (unless they have a lot of savings of course). Now, if they can turn what they are doing in their free time into an activity or position that generates money, then they won’t need to get a job that takes up their time and prohibits them to do what they want to be doing and spending their days on.

With that we can see that there are two types of work. The first being work that feels like a burden: the type of work we drag ourselves to every morning and is something that has to be done just for money and a salary, which we can argue is the case for most people these days. The other is work that people willfully do for the sake of self-realization, self-expression, and to exercise their capabilities and capacity.

I started by mentioning that there is something to having control over your work and to identify with the things you do for a living. This could be any type of work as long as one considers it to be an extension of who they are and a natural tendency or inclination. When saying “I do this for a living”, this sentiment should come from the same place as saying “I like jazz music” or what have you. In this sense, work could be part of a personality trait of some sort or could relate to your character. It is a part of who you are and an activity you genuinely identify with; it is intimate and personal.

Having this type of relationship with work is important given the amount of time and energy we spend working. Since the reality now a days is that we have to spend most of our days working, then work should be a part of who we are. It should be something that is stimulating and satisfactory. If I finish my work and feel satisfied or content, then that is a day worth living, and being satisfied and happy with how you spend your days is essential for the good life.

Now having meaningful work you identify with doesn’t always need to be impactful or purposeful work such as curing diseases, inventing new technology, or producing valuable art. Any type of work that makes one feel content and satisfied is considered work that contributes to the good life. Also, while I said that identifying with the work you do is essential, that does not necessarily mean that your work is hundred percent who you are and your complete identity. Work being a part of who you are that allows you to be yourself, express yourself, or achieve some sort of self-realization and satisfaction is important for the good life, but work isn’t your complete identity. You may prioritize parts of your life that you identify with more than your work. Those other parts may provide more satisfaction and enable you to be who you are more. That said, since work is something we have to do to earn money to live a comfortable life in our economic system, and since we spend most of our days and time working, then the type of work you do should align with at least a part of who you are as a person and with your values in order to have a well rounded good life.

In contrast, doing work that doesn’t align with who you are and that you don’t identify with may conflict with your values and potential. As we mentioned, work can be a form of expressing oneself and is a form of exerting energy into things that matter to you. If no part of you identifies with the work that you do, and if the work that you are doing doesn’t matter to you and is just being done because you are obliged to in order to earn money to sustain your life, then such work can be or get draining. It becomes draining because it’s an activity that conflicts with your values, potential, and who you are. This is why work seems like a burden for many people. There is no engagement with work because it is work that we have to do just for money rather than work we want to do to exercise our capacity, potential, creativity, and personal values. This type of burdensome work becomes a load that leads to discontent and mental health issues.

It is also important to note that work isn’t only about what you are doing, but also about who you are engaging with during your work day and the social community around or at work. A benefit of work is that it puts you in a position to interact and engage with others. In other words, there is a social aspect to it. So part of what makes some work good is having good relationships with the people you work with, be it colleagues, clients, or whomever you work with or is involved in or with your work. That said, work that is more of a burden and that is only practiced for the sake of money or that doesn’t align with who you are won’t allow you to be yourself with others. The whole social side of work becomes filtered, shallow, and phony to a certain degree. You are putting an act in the office or at work that you need to uphold just for professional reasons that deep down you might hate and conflicts with who you really are. In that work environment, you filter yourself and stop being your true social self, so the whole workplace, including the social aspect, becomes detached from your identity. This also results in alienation, since, for most of your days and hours, you’ll be inhibited from bringing your full self and you’ll be acting as something you are not just to meet the expectations required of you to maintain that job that earns you a salary.

Of course, some people do bring their whole selves to work and don’t put up an act, but that, for the most part, is with people who identify with the work they do, at least to a certain degree.

Therefore, work that is not aligned with who you are, your identity, and who you want to be conflicts with the good life. In fact, since we spend most of our days working, it becomes very difficult to live the good life by having to do a job or work that isn’t in harmony with who you are and your potential, and that is just pursued for the sake of earning a living.

Unfortunately, many jobs or types of work that a variety of people identify with don’t pay a good enough salary (this is true especially for people residing in big cities with high costs of living). For example, someone might identify with social work because it is in their nature to help others and contribute to their community, but the pay for social work isn’t always as sufficient. In this case, pursuing work that is part of who you are will not allow for a good, comfortable standard of living and might eventually lead to financial constraints and difficulties. In fact, this is the case with most work that we deem essential, which also happen to be types of work that many people feel compelled to do because they can identify with and recognize as part of who they are.

At the other end of the spectrum, careers in arts or sports may be very lucrative, but such career paths are extremely competitive and only a relatively small percentage make a decent amount of money if they stick with those types of careers. In this case, many individuals who identify with this type of creative or athletic work may end up being “starving artists” or “starving athletes”.

Of course, there are many types of work that people can identify with and that pay well. These positions may be widely available or very specialized, and the people pursuing them might be practicing their full potential while earning a decent amount of money for a high standard of living. That said, not everyone should be conditioned or forced to pursue such work if this work doesn’t align with who they are. It is exactly that limited box of work that might stand in the way of the good life for a variety of individuals.

Now, money isn’t everything, but being able to live comfortably without worrying about how you’re going to pay basic bills and how you’re going to support yourself and your family is crucial for living a good life. So, if you have to either sacrifice money and material comfort to pursue work that is part of who you are or sacrifice work you identify with to get a job that pays well enough so that you can live comfortably, doesn’t that mean that you are sacrificing the good life? Having to choose one or the other conflicts with a well rounded good life, and if we are in a position where we have to pick one or the other, then the good life might as well be stripped away from us.

We must acknowledge that there are many other factors when it comes to work that can stand in the way of the good life, even if you are pursuing work that is part of who you are. For example, a toxic work environment, being taken advantage of and overworked, etc. Yet, for our purposes, we wanted to approach the first step of wholesome work, since doing work that you don’t identify with and that you’re not eager to do will always be detrimental, even if all the other aspects of the work environment are good enough and not in the way of the good life.

Whether the good life is a set framework of practiced virtues as Aristotle would discuss or a subjective choice and preference that the individual determines as absurdists such as Camus would argue, it seems that being able to make a living and earn money from work that is part of who you are and that allows for self-realization is crucial for living the good life.