Meaningful Work: A Necessary Evil?

Building on Tysune’s review of the book, here are my thoughts on The 4-Hour Workweek.

I disagree with the concept of  a 4-hour long working week. I used to be a huge fan of this book towards the end of my high school days, but in retrospect, I disagree with its underlying message.

What is Tim Ferris promoting? He is suggesting that we ought to profit as much as possible while putting in the minimum amount of effort. Why is his book so successful? In a society driven by caffeine and YouTube, his “life-hacking” message offers people an easy way out. No wonder it sells. Real life simply doesn’t work that way.

I’d like to borrow a passage from a chapter titled “Why Is There Misery in the World” from the book The Questions: A Sociological Perspective, by Joel M. Charon:

Alienation from Meaningful Work

Social alienation in modern life is accompanied by alienation from creative work. Marx’s ideas (1848) continue to be most important here. To him, the human being is a creative, hardworking, productive being…

Weber (1905) sees early capitalism as a time when people did, in fact, go out and creatively build businesses that they cared about. Early capitalism was the period of the entrepreneur, the builder of goods and business, the creative adventurer who found real meaning in work. All that creativity has passed away… in the name of efficiency. The actor is now a cog in a great machine, finding little meaning in work, seeking the security of position rather than the adventure of work.

Marx and Weber are the founders of the sociology of work. They ask some provocative questions, all concerned with the possibility of meaningful work, and conclude with an indictment of modern life as a place where humans are not able to find it easily. Making money has replaced meaningful work as a goal for most of us, and pursuing a satisfying life through leisure rather than through work has increasingly become the norm. Life for many is a struggle to win in a game that alienates us both from one another and from meaningful work.

…We worked because we believed this is what people should do, almost as a moral responsibility. Eventually, in the 1960s many young people sought what they called “meaningful work,” and this had something to do with benefiting other people or society. By the 1970s, work was becoming a means to an end, a way of achieving material success, a way to make it big in the world of business. I turned to a student in the class and asked him what his view of work was — did he regard it as something a productive life demands? Did he want to find meaningful work or was it a means of achieving material success? He looked at me and said, “I dunno.” I pushed a little harder, and he replied, “Work sucks!” “Is it not a way of becoming successful?” “No.” “Don’t you want to be wealthy?” “Sure.” “Then how are you going to do it?” His final reply: “Win the lottery.”

Since the reply by the student, work increasingly is becoming only a necessary evil, and meaning and happiness are being sought elsewhere. It seems that excessive conspicuous consumption and retirement are used unsuccessfully to try to replace fulfilling work. If, however, work itself is really so important for what it means to live a productive, meaningful life, then the increasing alienation from work in the modern world, as predicted by Marx and Weber, is certainly a source of human misery.

The above passage perfectly illustrates my point. The book’s ultimate aim is to achieve material wealth, neglecting the meaning and empowerment of work. In a way, I feel like Tim Ferris is simply a victim who was engulfed in the pre-dot-com-bubble era of retiring at twenty years of age.

On a more hopeful note, I would highly recommend the following book:

Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story talks about the journey of Dr. Ben Carson, an African-American boy who grew up in the poorest part of Detroit in a single-mother family to become the Director of Paediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins.

This book is available on the 3rd floor of the Woodward Library. I stumbled upon it, by chance, while taking a break from studying.

In my opinion, this is the kind of message young people should be getting today — working hard as opposed to hardly working.

On a side note, I’m really enjoying my courses this term. Spending thirty hours to study for each midterm exam has definitely paid off. I hope to challenge myself and think big.

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• How To Be Creative
• I Found the Elixir of Life!
• To Read