Work
Over the past several years the concept of work has undergone more change than at any point in recent history. While there’s many narratives, one common discussion centers on changing where and when we work to make work less harmful to our health. This is exemplified by remote work.
Work can certainly be harmful. Yet few among us can avoid harm. Indeed, harm often comes to us in ways we cannot and do not anticipate. Sometimes what seems good turns out to be bad. The very world in which we live is full of harmful realities. I’m not convinced the absence of work brings less harm. Nor am I convinced the changes we’re seeing now around how and where we work are as good for us as we hope they will be. I think we’re generally failing to account for a variety of negative consequences that are slowly becoming more apparent.
Work is one of the primary ways in which we spend our time. Most people will spend more of their life working than in any other activity. It’s always been about survival. In the beginning, the survival game was physical. We worked to stay alive by avoiding predators, creating shelter, etc. As we evolved, we built things, creating physical work that had the potential to cause physical harm (think Industrial Revolution). Today, a lot of work is decidedly less physical. But this less physical version of work can still cause physical harm – for example, the consequences of sitting at a desk and staring at a computer all day. Less obvious (because it’s less visible) is the impact modern work has on mental health. To be sure, the modern survival game is more complex, more nuanced. The binary outcome of life or death has been replaced with the seemingly more civilized outcomes of hire/fire, rich/poor, etc. While it’s nice to know we aren’t at daily risk of being attacked by a lion, the mental toll of losing a job, or toiling away in a job we hate, or struggling to support a family, can be significant.
As work moved from the life/death realm, it offered more choice (certainly these choices are limited by socioeconomics and other societal realities which impact different factions of society in different ways). We had the luxury of separating work from other facets of our life. The idea was we “…go to work” and then we “…go home”. We created boundaries. This worked for many decades. No, it wasn’t perfect, but we built our society around it. These days, thanks to advancements in technology, we can work from anywhere. This, with a big push from the pandemic, has caused many to want to relax the boundaries, believing they can create more work/life balance (which is another way of saying less work, more life). However, there are consequences to these changes, some of which are turning out to be less than ideal. The “working vacation” which causes us to underperform at both (work and vacation). The WFH employee who, having merged work more fully into her homelife, no longer has a refuge from her work. These are all unintended negative outcomes from actions taken to make our lives better. It happens.
Work is undergoing rapid changes that will only accelerate as AI continues to evolve. Against this backdrop it’s important for us to occasionally hit pause to think more fully about what we’re doing. It’s nice that we have more freedom of choice, but that alone does not mean we’ll make the right choices. We must each establish our own boundaries around where and how we work. We must remain vigilant and aware of how our work affects our lives, our health. But above all else, we must work. I can’t imagine life any other way.