Why do we work?
This post is part of a series called I Finished A Book, in which I write about a book I’ve read recently. I don’t finish every book I start, so if I do manage to get to the end, that means I must have really liked it.
For most people, work sucks. It always has, since the dawn of time, and it likely always will.
But recently, influencers on the internet have been peddling the idea that enjoyable and meaningful work is within everyone’s grasp, if we only knew how to find it and were willing to take the necessary risks.
The problem with that idea is that it’s snake oil. Most of us will spend our careers on pursuits which will seem futile, boring, and pointless to everyone around us.
The internet would have us treat this as some kind of moral failure. If you find your job boring or unfulfilling, it must be your fault. But this is nonsense.
Nothing has shown this more plainly to me than Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, in which he logs his experiences following a number of people doing their work. He spends time with manufacturers, artists, accountants, and product marketers. The book doesn’t offer an explicit conclustion, but I certainly took away an important insight: most work rarely matters to more than a very small number of people.
The invisible work of others
One chapter explores the aviation industry, through the lens of an aviation trade show. It exposes the inner workings of the unfathomably huge industry which makes planes.
It’s clear that almost all of this work goes totally unnoticed by passengers. Have you ever thought about all the sales pitches, negotiations, entertainment and ass-kissing that leads to a particular upholstery being applied to your seat? Or the fierce bidding war to decide which company gets to fit the plastic window casing on your Boeing 747? It would be totally understandable if you hadn’t.
Another chapter explores the inner workings of an accounting firm. An entire industry is built upon crunching numbers in business accounts, but this work never makes its way into anyone’s final product. Consumers are blissfully unaware of the office politics, late nights, procrastination, stress, and inordinate international travel which lie behind the incredibly complex tax affairs of the company which manufactures the biscuits they’re eating.
But people aren’t leaving accountancy in droves, and engineering firms aren’t on the brink of collapse due to lack of recruitment opportunities. So there must be something other than external validation driving people to continue working in these industries.
What can we learn?
This book gave me a helpful nudge for me to reset my expectations and shift my perspective. We are all told to search for work which has impact and meaning, but the reality is that all work is, on many levels, uninteresting to everyone else on the planet.
So instead of looking for extrinsic motivation, we need to learn to appreciate the very act of doing the work. Accountants might enter that career based on an obsession with spreadsheets. Software developers (like me) end up writing code because they just love understanding how computers work, and hacking them into doing their bidding. Administrators may love the feeling of creating order from chaos. Salespeople might enjoy the thrill of the chase.
I’ve struggled recently to feel motivated at work, and my instinct is to blame this on a missing sense of purpose or impact. But I’m realising that this sense of purpose or impact may never come from outside; I must start to look back at why I wanted to be a software developer in the first place.
Looking for external validation for the work we do is futile; you will simply find yourself feeling under-appreciated, misunderstood, or simply unnoticed. Society tells us to find work that matters to others, but this book reminds us to focus on finding joy in the work itself.