Our Jobs and What They Say About Us

Our Occupations and What They Say About Us
What we have done - or currently do - is often seen by others to define us; whether as the student, parent, teacher, employer or employee. These roles occupy us for a very large part of our lives. How important are they?

Our Own Experiences Of Work
How did you come to be in the main occupation of your life? If you specialised at all, then how did you arrive in that subject or role? Have you occupied many roles? To what extent did you occupy a role by accident?

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit." This quote is often attributed to Aristotle, but the wording is actually from historian Will Durant summarising Aristotle's ethics. To what extent has any role you have had influenced how you are as a person? Given that we have often occupied a role for a long time, it must surely have molded how we approach problems and our thought processes. For example, does an author obsess about grammar? Does an IT worker like technical problem solving? Another example: do you think a lawyer would refer first to rules and then intentions? Or is it the other way around and do we occupy jobs based on our characters?

Aristotle's idea of eudaimonia suggests that meaningful activity lets us exercise our distinctive human capacities - reason, judgment, skill - rather than performing rote, undemanding tasks. Hegel argued that labour is where humans first come to recognize themselves through their effect on the world and through the recognition of others; work becomes meaningful partly through mutual recognition, being seen and valued by other people for what you contribute. Care ethicists (Nel Noddings, Virginia Held) similarly emphasize that meaning often comes from the relational impact of work; feeling that what you do matters to someone else. What makes work meaningful to you?

One of Marx's most famous ideas on labour comes from his theory of alienation, laid out in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. He argued that under capitalism, the worker becomes estranged from their labor because the product they create doesn't belong to them; it becomes, in his words, "an alien object, a power independent of the producer." If you have retired, are you still interested in what you used to do as an occupation? I think this is one test of if your job was a vocation, or if you have become alienated from your work.

To what extent do we currently - or have we in the past - taken up a profession solely for the gain of money?

Some jobs are perceived as being cool (e.g. perhaps a sportsperson) while others are seen negatively, perhaps such as being an investment banker. Just suppose you are at a party and have to introduce yourself: what, ideally, would you wish to say your job is and why?

How Society Values Work
How does society put a value on a role, and is there a sort of hierarchy, perhaps based on education or other criteria? Does a capitalist society value output, rather than work?

Most canonical philosophers - Aristotle, Kant, Locke - wrote about "labour" and "work" in ways that implicitly excluded domestic and reproductive labour from serious consideration. Feminist philosophers like Genevieve Lloyd and Susan Moller Okin have argued this exclusion wasn't incidental - the "public/private" divide in Western philosophy was built partly to keep domestic labour, including mothering, outside the frame of what counts as meaningful work or civic contribution. De Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) is more skeptical. She worried that motherhood, as constructed in patriarchal society, was often imposed on women as their primary source of identity and value, foreclosing other paths to transcendence and selfhood. How can we better reward parenting and value contributions towards society?

Idleness Versus Work
"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time." is a popular unattributed quote which reflects the thoughts of Bertrand Russell, although the exact wording does not appear in his published works. It reflects the themes of his essay In Praise of Idleness. "The morality of work is the morality of slaves." is a quote from this essay. Russell argued that advances in productivity should allow people to work fewer hours and devote more time to education, art, and leisure. Would we benefit from a shorter working day as suggested by Bertrand Russel in his essay In Praise of Idleness?

The Future Of Work
How have roles and occupations changed in our lifetimes? What futures do we see for the world of work?