The Meaning of Work
Seeking virtue through work
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"By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return." _ Genesis 3:19_
Can man eat bread without the sweat of his face? We have done everything to make life easier, using tools and inventing machines, thus maximizing our capacity to produce. Despite these prodigious improvements, Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher from the 19th century, says the following:
“So there I sat and smoked my cigarette until my mind began to think. You are advancing in age, getting old without having become anything or having any project. On the other hand, when we examine literature or life, we see names and figures of celebrities, valuable and acclaimed people for their deeds, the benefactors of the age who know how to benefit humanity by making life easier, some through railways, buses, and steamboats, others through the telegraph, others through brief and easy-to-understand publications about what is worth knowing, and finally the true benefactors of the age who by virtue of systematic thought make spiritual existence increasingly easier and yet more meaningful — and what am I doing? Only one thing is missing [in our age], although it is not yet felt, difficulty is missing. For the love of humanity and despair regarding my strange proclamation of having achieved nothing nor succeeded in making anything easier, despite the genuine interest in those who make things easier, I finally understood that it was my task: to create difficulties everywhere.” Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, published in 1846. Søren Kierkegaard (pseudonym Johannes Climacus)
This excerpt from a text by Kierkegaard comes as a punch in the stomach, alerting us to an inescapable reality: the need for sacrifice. No matter how seemingly easy life becomes, we still need sacrifice as a way to fulfill our purpose as human beings. Sacrifice, illustrated by difficulty in Kierkegaard's text, is what allows us to negotiate with existence itself and offer something in the present in the hope of obtaining something in the future. Sacrifice also allows us to know more deeply our limits and weaknesses and create an opportunity to transcend these limits. Without sacrifice, there is no love, for sacrifice implies that we have the capacity to see beyond ourselves, beyond our most immediate selfish interest. Through sacrifice, we are therefore invited to renounce something with the purpose of offering it.
Angelus (painting) – by Jean-François Millet shows two peasants praying, giving thanks for the harvest obtained through the sweat and effort of many days.
Since work is also a form of sacrifice, it is good to remember that this is an exercise we do with a useful end in view. Nature does not automatically satisfy all human needs, hence the need for work to meet them. Besides all this, work is also an antidote to some evils and a promoter of virtues. It allows us, for example, to combat idleness and laziness, while on the other hand, it allows us to enhance solidarity since we have obtained resources that we can now share. This means that work creates a propitiatory atmosphere for the person because it develops their ethics and morals on various levels. It seems more important at this time to reflect on this because we often fall into the error of seeking the enjoyment of immediate pleasures, the promises of an easy life, forgetting these realities. Not that having pleasure in itself evil, but this must always be subordinated to the values that organize our lives because obtaining pleasure is not the ultimate goal of life. It is evident that not all jobs are the same, and some are more conducive to virtues than others, something to which we must pay careful attention, hence it makes sense to seek to make work subordinate to our values. For there is no good work that does not express these values. Let us then use work as a springboard for our growth, and begin not to wish for an easy life, but rather to increasingly desire an honorable life in which we are not deceived by superficial gratuities.
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