What do we mean when we talk about work?

When he chooses the labours which are proper, and makes them labour on them, who will repine?
— Confucius, Analects, 479 BC

The word and the world of work have — like all our cultural lodestars and social foundations — been contaminated with money.

The world of profit has always sought to attach itself to the credibility of people working with integrity and passion and, now that it has succeeded we find ourselves without a useful shared vocabulary for talking about purpose and work.

We in the global north live in an age of unparalleled abundance, of unmatched potential for the marriage of purpose and integrity in our work, and yet we have accepted a framing of work as the penance we must endure for that abundance. People who enjoy their work doubt whether they’re allowed to even call it ‘work’, as though they should feel embarrassed by that fact. People in jobs they hate pacify the voice inside them that says this is wrong with the knowledge that there are other people that have it worse.

Unseating this distortion of work at the cultural scale is out of scope for the work ahead, and seeking new vocabulary for this would be a distraction from the coming projects. Besides, running from everything that money has infected in some way might leave us with nothing at all to stand on. It seems truer to push back against the idea that it is profit that legitimises work, and instead embody the idea that it is meaning that legitimises work.