Meaningful Returns

I used to work for the premier accounting firm in the world. That’s a subjective statement, but so is “Dook basketball is the worst.”

But you know something about that place? Besides being the best at what we did, and besides having incredibly talented people there that were, for lack of better phrasing, just good as hell at doing their jobs (mostly), “work” was a word that took on a meaning all its own.

What I mean by that is that somehow, through means of which I’m not quite sure even today, “work” became detached from the things that we were actually doing for our clients. It became less and less about the nuts and bolts of the job and more and more about everything except the nuts and bolts of the job. The title, the career path, the money, the opportunities, the prestige, the security, the pride, etc.

And, rather unfortunately, this dynamic is not uncommon in professional American circles. We have gotten away from thinking of work as THE WORK, the actual tasks and projects you do that other people don’t or can’t do, and started substituting that with thoughts about how work can change the world’s perception of us.

So, perhaps unsurprisingly, our relationship with work (and consequently, leisure) in this country appears to have suffered the unfortunate fate of being tossed into a dumpster fire. Having spurned the importance of the intrinsic value of THE WORK, and missing its value deeply in our lives, we have just started working more and more and more so that we get more of “everything else.” The irony is painful, like we are the hamsters in the wheel who are ignoring the fact that the blame for our perpetual tiredness rests squarely on our own shoulders.

I came across this excerpt in a piece from The Atlantic yesterday, a piece that I can’t recommend highly enough:

Elite men in the U.S. are the world’s chief workaholics. They work longer hours than poorer men in the U.S. and rich men in other advanced countries. In the last generation, they have reduced their leisure time by more than any other demographic. As the economist Robert Frank wrote, “building wealth to them is a creative process, and the closest thing they have to fun.”

How sad is that last sentence? “Building wealth to them is a creative process, and the closest thing they have to fun.” The closest thing they have to fun. I’m all for building wealth responsibly, and if building wealth is the closest thing you have for fun, I will go ahead and say you’re doing it wrong. All wrong.

Do good work. Do amazing work. Do work you can be proud of. But do it for THE WORK. The other stuff matters, and it’s important, but concentrate on the actual work. And don’t do so much of it. And when you have leisure time, concentrate on the leisure time. There’s so much in the culture of American work that goes against all of this, but if we don’t at least try to push the boundaries back (or start building them where they don’t currently exist), then we don’t stand a chance.