Make your work mean something

I am called to help people become more expansive, wiser, more capable, more imaginative, more themselves, especially when the tide is pulling the other way. That calling can live in many places— friendship, love, family, public and political life—but the place that I keep returning to is work.

When I ask what work is worth, this is my answer. I have come to hold work as five things:

Worth is not waiting at the finish line. It is in the being engaged, in the discipline, the giving, the making, the being-bound-to, the becoming. They work together, and they are the point.

And yet it is so easy to lose sight of these seeds and get lost in the doing—to trade craft and communion and character for motion, for being seen to move.

Isn’t that a kind of tragedy? To forfeit the deeper thing on offer and not even notice the trade? Isn’t it strange that attending to any of it can feel like a privilege reserved for a few?

Perhaps it is less a tragedy than a challenge. To attend to these things, you have to ask yourself questions that aren’t comfortable. You have to stay checked in, attuned to your inner and outer experience in a way most of us are never taught to be.

I find that enlivening, but I understand why some people don’t.

I saw a clip recently from Looking for Richard, Al Pacino’s 1999 docu drama, asking whether Shakespeare still matters. On the steps of a courthouse, a Black man stops and says,

And then:

I have not been able to stop thinking about that. He’s saying that Shakespeare’s gift was instruction of feeling. And that people who cannot feel their words will say things that mean nothing and do things to each other that should be unthinkable.

Replace “words” with “work,” and every line still holds. It still carries weight.

If we felt what we worked, we would do less and mean more.

Because we do act as if work doesn’t mean much. As if 35, 40, 50 hours are only the production of money, economic value, something to fill the day. We forget craft, contribution, creation, communion, character. We forget that this is where a life is largely spent and largely formed.

I have been paying attention. I have been listening because I think the world of work is about to change in ways many of us cannot yet picture.

I recently watched Dr. Kai-Fu Lee in conversation with Mishal Husain on Bloomberg. Lee is one of the pioneers of the field of artificial intelligence, a computer scientist, investor, and one of the most serious voices thinking about where this goes. He argues that AI will fundamentally reshape the landscape of work: significant displacement of labor, organisations growing leaner, companies smaller, and—if it all goes well—a great deal of wealth alongside a great deal of dislocation. He says we will have to move away from equating a person’s identity, a person’s value, solely with their job. I’m currently reading his book, AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future.

What I appreciated is how deeply humanistic his perspective is. This is not a technologist waving away the human cost. It is someone who sees it clearly and is asking what we’ll have to put in its place. But even in his deeply considered, humanistic reading, he was clear that a reckoning is coming in the world of work.

From what I’ve seen and experienced, it’s already here.

You only have to listen to some of the people building AI and releasing it to hear it. From what I see, the way we are bringing AI into our work, the choices about how it rolls out, what it replaces, how little we do to carry people through the change, and how unprepared we have let ourselves stay can be violent and can be experienced as violence.

This is equivalent of the gun and the shooting the man in Looking for Richard was warning of.

The reason mass AI-job replacement has become an ordinary, dominant part of our discourse, barely worth grieving—and increasingly, a part of our lived reality—is the same absence of feeling he named. If work is only production, a faster producer is simply an upgrade. A person displaced is simply obsolete. There is no weight to it, and so there is nothing to mourn, so nothing needs care.

I am not writing this in fear, and I’m not against AI. I’m using it right now to think this through, and I use it gladly and constantly. It does not threaten me. It makes my multitudes possible, and not because I’m unusually secure. It is because I have done the work on the value question. I know what work is for me, so when the landscape shifts, I don’t lose my footing.

When someone compares me to a machine, I can meet it, even inside myself, because I know what I am here for.

I know my craft, contribution, and my community. I know what I am creating, I know my character and who I aspire to become through my work. And that’s not a conversation I have once with myself. It is continuous.

I tend to see things as both a reckoning and an opening, and this is no different. Which one it becomes for us (collapse of meaning or its recovery) will depend almost entirely on how we answer the question underneath all of it: What is work to us? What do I value? What is my value?

The tide is coming either way. The people who are able to swim with it, rather than be pulled under, will be the ones who knew that work was never only doing.

So make your work mean something.

Do less, mean more.