Why do we work?

Labor Day weekend in America celebrates working people. Or, at least it was supposed to. The actual purpose is to have a last 3-day weekend of summer before all the fall activities around school begin. As Don Norman writes in the beginning of his latest work, Design for a Better World: Meaningful, Sustainable, Humanity Centered, a day relates to nature, a year relates to nature, but the actual date of summer or fall or winter beginning is an artificial construct of humans. Thus, we have agreed in America that this weekend we say good-bye to summer and hello to autumn.

Let’s return to the original meaning of Labor Day. It was a reaction, or perhaps recognition, of the labor movement that began in the early-to-mid-1800s as men and their families grew disenchanted with life as laboring cogs in the industrial system dragging first men, later women, and also children from their homes for many hours daily even seven days a week. All this for a subsistence level income and no family or social life.

I worked in manufacturing for a year during my time in university. One of my many interests at the university was political philosophy. I stumbled across an early writing of Karl Marx from the time before he embedded himself in the London Library trying to root out the historical inevitability of the demise of capitalism. The essay, largely philosophical in the early 19th Century German tradition, concerned how humans have become alienated from the product of their work.

Skipping the philosophy stuff, let’s look at it this way. Humans were historically craftsmen or farmers. Let’s look at the craftsmen. This could be male or female historically. There were blacksmiths who made things from metal. There were weavers and potters and other skilled trades workers. When you made something, it was a little bit of you in there. When you were just a cog in the machine doing just one action repetitively, the product was meaningless to you. Just stuff.

Scholars of the economics of manufacturing began writing in the 1980s about a coming return to a type of craftsmanship within the system. Indeed, many of my readers are craftsmen of a sort. And even where I worked both while at university and for almost 10 years after all the workers took pride in the product, cared about the eventual owner and the pleasure they would receive. We build the top quality recreation vehicle of the time—Airstream.

Why do we work? Well, we need an income. That’s for sure. But also, we need to feel that what we do adds meaning to someone’s life. And maybe we should stop working at companies that manipulate and deceive people, and indeed, even those that cause harm.

Other thoughts:

I’ve read Om Malik (formerly GigaOm) for many years. Always an enjoyable read. Here, Om considers how companies begin to treat customers poorly.

Another Om on data misuse by technology companies.

John Gruber is a leading Apple pundit. His podcast The Talk Show, Daring Fireball is a great listen. In this one he talks about something I tried for several years—use the iPad as my main productivity tool. After years of lost productivity, I quit that culture. He and his guest discuss that as well as opening the show discussing how mainstream media has resorted to misleading, click-bait headlines to generate views.

In his next podcast at The Talk Show on Daring Fireball, Gruber discusses Apple’s VisionPro with a developer fresh from one of the first developer labs. Some surprising conclusions. 

Here is one of my podcasts on digital productivity tools.

Another of my podcasts, this one on YouTube — Software is Eating Manufacturing.

One of my recent blog posts—We can finally see the effects of AR technology and networks for remote expert assistance in maintenance and also design engineering.

Gary