Meaning in Work

Where do we humans derive our sense of meaning? Of value? What do we base it upon? Most often, I hear people answer according to the action they take in this world - what they DO. I was recently struck by this paragraph from Studs Terkel's Introduction to his book, Working.

Perhaps it is this specter that most haunts working men and women: the planned obsolescence of the things they make. Or sell. It is perhaps this fear of no longer being needed in a world of needless things that most clearly spells out the unnaturalness, the surreality of much that is called work today.

What has been lost to us by the fact that so few people can actually be called artisans today? Everyone is a specialist. They do no more than a piece of the total work that produces the product or service being sold. The collective group of people that produces is all. The individual who might otherwise receive a sense of value as part of this team is denied that meaning by separation from the others. Many colleagues are in other parts of the globe. Parts of the work are done by those whom they will never meet or know about.

What would be returned to us if we were to go back to a situation where we were able to experience a true sense of creation? Where we all made things from beginning to end, from nothing to something? Where our collaborators in work lived next door or nearby? People with whom we actually shared life in all its aspects, not just work? What would happen if, rather than the profit produced by the product or service, the human being came back into the center of work?