Episode 101: What Is Work?

Play Saves the World

To define what play is, we have to define what work is.
(This isn’t all that unusual – scholars do it with secular vs. religious, or prose vs. poetry.)

Work or labor is intentional human activity to support our needs and wants, or those of others or our larger group.

Work is something we do for another purpose – it is 2-eyed, 1 eye to the activity itself and 1 to its outside result (payment, food, etc.).
It is a means to an end.

Work isn’t inherently bad. In the Bible it is implied that humans would work the earth before the Fall. Work is not a result of original sin, but original sin corrupts work, so that the ground is cursed, and there are thorns and thistles in our gardening. We will now sweat to make the bread we must eat.

In fact, work can be marvelous

• a sense of purpose and contribution and accomplishment
• The pleasure of your earned paycheck for your labor
• The ability to form and improve our world
• The freedom to engage in different kinds of work to support us
• The notion of vocation, that our work might be something God calls us to do with our time and energy

Work and play are not necessarily opposed to each other

• Sometimes the distinction is said to be productivity, but this isn’t true (e.g., work day with nothing getting done versus Minecraft)
• Jane McGonagal says that play is just work we enjoy
• Brian Sutton-Smith: the opposite of work is depression
• One person’s work can be another person’s play (e.g., computer programming, professional athletes, spreadsheets)
• Work being play would be awesome!!!

But clearly work can be oppressive

• Some forms of work are oppressive or dangerous – factories, or gig economy with no benefits and vulnerable employment
• Being underpaid because your labor is set by supply and demand
• You might hate your job but are stuck with it because you need the money
• If you cannot work you will have no way to support yourself
• You are vulnerable to work changing, being fired, AI
• The instrumentalization of all things, including our time (Oliver Burkeman)
  • When we are only a cog in the machine, when we spend our days only in service to some other goal, then everything become a means to an end, and we never get to the end itself.
  • Such instrumentalization also generates a disturbing lack of presence. We are always lost in the future (or sometimes the past), which spiritual traditions (and psychology) tell us are often the causes of restlessness and fear: “do not worry about tomorrow” (Luke 12), Buddhism’s grounding the present

Protestant work ethic

• A rather strange valuing of work due to Protestant ideas about grace, salvation, and human effort (since you are saved by grace alone but cannot know if you are truly among the elect who are saved, your best hope is to be a good worker in the vague hope that this indicates your salvation, but it cannot actually impact it)
• As a result, we come to tie our sense of self worth and value to our work, to our productivity through work – so if you fail at work you fail at life. We value others based on their wealth and work habits
• Martin Luther King Jr. tied the Protestant Work Ethic to racism and the exploitation of the poor (“We have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice. The fact is that capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor—both black and white, here and abroad.”)
• This impacts many Western Protestant cultures where one should stay extremely busy and complain about work a lot – don’t take vacation, let work consume you because it’s inherently good to work.

As a result, we can feel a profound lack of freedom, value, and agency.

The truth is: work is often overwhelming. It can be good. But it cannot save us. It is not our true purpose.