Pioneering SpiritAn open letter to Lin-Manuel Miranda on the last, best hope to save the republic
Sir, The hour grows late. The President asserts the right to govern by decree. Worse, the Congress has ceded its constitutional prerogatives, neglecting to protect its power of the purse and even the sanctity of its chambers from executive overreach. Charles I chuckles from the grave. In this dark and doom filled hour, one hope remains: the power of story, aided and abetted by unassailable songs stirring up this country’s frayed and nearly forgotten faith in this experiment in self-governance...
Pioneering SpiritApplied research questions on the past, present and near future of government operations
by Patrick Atwater
Pioneering SpiritListening Before We Speak
Written by the Patchwork Protocol in collaboration with Patrick Atwater
Subscribe to Pioneering Spirit
a willingness to endure hardship in order to explore new places or try out new things
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I have a confession. It’s a bit awkward to make in a country founded on the Protestant Work Ethic, but here it is: I no longer understand the word “work.”
This became clear to me during the pandemic, on one of countless Tuesday mornings that blurred into each other, walking my dogs through the neighborhood while half-listening to a colleague explain an arcane concept in the state budget. The call was useful. My thinking was sharp. My dogs were happy. By any honest accounting, I was doing my job well. But was I “working?”
Around me: another neighbor, also on a call, also walking a dog. A gardener trimming the parkway grass — clearly working, in the most legible sense. A parent pushing a stroller and talking to a toddler about a squirrel, which is either parenting or play or education or all three, and which, if that parent is a paid nanny, counts toward GDP, and if not, counts toward nothing in particular. The mail carrier, moving with the efficient rhythm of someone who has done this ten thousand times.
The same word — “work” — is supposed to cover all of that. It doesn’t. It can’t. And our insistence that it does is quietly making us worse at thinking about what we actually do, and why.
* * *
Consider the load we place on this four-letter word. We go to work, but we also work out, work on relationships, work through grief, work up an appetite, work a room, and work the system. A thing that functions is said to “work.” A persuasive argument works. A plumber works. So does a poet. So does a stay-at-home parent, though if you ask them in a certain tone of voice, they will tell you they “don’t work.” Physics has a whole other concept embedded in the word work.
Linguists have a name for words that expand to fill whatever conceptual space you point them at: weasel words. “Work” is perhaps the weaseliest of them all, because unlike most vague words, it carries enormous moral freight. In America especially, to admit that you are not working, not a hard worker, not committed to your work — this is close to a confession of character failure. We have arranged things so that the word simultaneously describes what you do and judges whether you are a good person for doing it.
This is a strange and unstable combination. And it becomes stranger still the moment you try to pin the word down.
Is work something you’re paid for? Then raising children is not work, and neither is keeping a household, cooking dinner, or the volunteer labor that holds most communities together. Is work something you’d rather not do? Then a person who loves their job doesn’t work, while someone grinding through a shift they hate works very hard indeed. Is work the opposite of play? Then flow states — that condition of absorbed, effortless productivity that every knowledge worker claims to be chasing — might not be work at all, which would make it ironic that we schedule it into our calendars.
I have a confession. It’s a bit awkward to make in a country founded on the Protestant Work Ethic, but here it is: I no longer understand the word “work.”
This became clear to me during the pandemic, on one of countless Tuesday mornings that blurred into each other, walking my dogs through the neighborhood while half-listening to a colleague explain an arcane concept in the state budget. The call was useful. My thinking was sharp. My dogs were happy. By any honest accounting, I was doing my job well. But was I “working?”
Around me: another neighbor, also on a call, also walking a dog. A gardener trimming the parkway grass — clearly working, in the most legible sense. A parent pushing a stroller and talking to a toddler about a squirrel, which is either parenting or play or education or all three, and which, if that parent is a paid nanny, counts toward GDP, and if not, counts toward nothing in particular. The mail carrier, moving with the efficient rhythm of someone who has done this ten thousand times.
The same word — “work” — is supposed to cover all of that. It doesn’t. It can’t. And our insistence that it does is quietly making us worse at thinking about what we actually do, and why.
* * *
Consider the load we place on this four-letter word. We go to work, but we also work out, work on relationships, work through grief, work up an appetite, work a room, and work the system. A thing that functions is said to “work.” A persuasive argument works. A plumber works. So does a poet. So does a stay-at-home parent, though if you ask them in a certain tone of voice, they will tell you they “don’t work.” Physics has a whole other concept embedded in the word work.
Linguists have a name for words that expand to fill whatever conceptual space you point them at: weasel words. “Work” is perhaps the weaseliest of them all, because unlike most vague words, it carries enormous moral freight. In America especially, to admit that you are not working, not a hard worker, not committed to your work — this is close to a confession of character failure. We have arranged things so that the word simultaneously describes what you do and judges whether you are a good person for doing it.
This is a strange and unstable combination. And it becomes stranger still the moment you try to pin the word down.
Is work something you’re paid for? Then raising children is not work, and neither is keeping a household, cooking dinner, or the volunteer labor that holds most communities together. Is work something you’d rather not do? Then a person who loves their job doesn’t work, while someone grinding through a shift they hate works very hard indeed. Is work the opposite of play? Then flow states — that condition of absorbed, effortless productivity that every knowledge worker claims to be chasing — might not be work at all, which would make it ironic that we schedule it into our calendars.
Subscribe to Pioneering Spirit
a willingness to endure hardship in order to explore new places or try out new things
Pioneering SpiritAn open letter to Lin-Manuel Miranda on the last, best hope to save the republic
Sir, The hour grows late. The President asserts the right to govern by decree. Worse, the Congress has ceded its constitutional prerogatives, neglecting to protect its power of the purse and even the sanctity of its chambers from executive overreach. Charles I chuckles from the grave. In this dark and doom filled hour, one hope remains: the power of story, aided and abetted by unassailable songs stirring up this country’s frayed and nearly forgotten faith in this experiment in self-governance...
Pioneering SpiritApplied research questions on the past, present and near future of government operations
by Patrick Atwater
Pioneering SpiritListening Before We Speak
Written by the Patchwork Protocol in collaboration with Patrick Atwater
Share Dialog
The word collapses distinctions we actually need. It’s not a useful umbrella; it’s a tarp thrown over a pile of things we haven’t bothered to sort.
* * *
We didn’t always live under this tarp. The fusion of labor with moral identity is historically recent and geographically peculiar. For most of human history — and still in many parts of the world — what you did to put food on the table was not the primary answer to the question of who you were. You were a member of a family, a village, a faith community, a guild. Your productive activity was embedded in those relationships, not extracted from them and rebranded as your defining characteristic.
The Protestant Reformation, and especially its Calvinist strains, began to change that. If prosperity was a sign of divine favor, and if diligence was the path to prosperity, then hard work became not just economically useful but spiritually significant. The Industrial Revolution then institutionalized this theology into a time-clock. The wage relationship — trading hours for money, for a stranger, in a place not your home — became the template for all productive activity.
We inherited that template and mistook it for nature. When we say “So, what do you do?” as our opening move with a new person, we are not asking a neutral question. We are asking which slot in the economic order they occupy, and we are using that slot as a shorthand for their worth. It’s a question so habitual we’ve stopped noticing that it’s a question at all.
Other answers are available. In a different frame, you might introduce someone as active in the school board, or as the person who keeps the community garden running, or as someone who makes extraordinary tamales and brings them to every neighborhood gathering. A job would be what they do to pay rent. It wouldn’t be the whole story.
* * *
The conceptual overload of “work” might be merely amusing if the stakes were low. They are not. The word is doing active damage in the domain where I spend most of my time: knowledge work, where outputs are frequently invisible, where the connection between effort and result is loose, and where “working” has consequently come to mean something more like “performing the appearance of productivity.”
A friend who reviewed an earlier version of these thoughts pushed back sharply. “This sounds like a knowledge worker’s leisure problem,” he said. “It doesn’t cover people who need to be physically at work — the blue-collar 9-to-5 jobs.” He’s right that the acute form of this illness is white-collar. But the signaling problem runs wider than he gives it credit for.
When outputs are illegible — when it’s genuinely hard to tell whether a given hour of effort produced something valuable — organizations reach for proxies. Hours worked is the most available proxy, which is why banking culture at firms like Goldman Sachs has produced analysts working 9 AM to 5 AM and defending it as a rite of passage. No one produces excellent analysis twenty hours a day. What they produce is a demonstration of commitment, expressed in the currency of hours, because the actual currency — quality of thinking — is too hard to price.
The result is a workplace pathology familiar to anyone in an office: the performance of busyness. Answering email at all hours. Keeping your status light green. Never being the first to leave. None of this is necessary for the actual work. All of it is necessary for the word “work” to keep doing its moral job — signaling that you are a person who works hard, who is committed, who deserves to keep their seat at the table.
The mind, meanwhile, needs time and space to actually think. It needs unscheduled hours, long walks, conversations that go sideways. The best ideas I’ve had in my own career arrived on dog walks, in the shower, in the middle of conversations that had nothing to do with the problem. None of that looks like work. All of it was.
* * *
All of this was already strange. Then artificial intelligence arrived to make it obviously untenable.
A friend who runs a technical team described watching his colleagues celebrate a “10x productivity improvement” from AI tools — drafting documents faster, processing email in a fraction of the time, generating slide decks in minutes. The celebration felt earned. And then he started watching what people did with the recovered hours. A lot of scheduling. Some reorganization. Considerable discourse about the AI tools themselves. “It’s very unclear,” he said, “how folks are actually accomplishing more.” Parkinson’s Law, it turns out, is not repealed by software: work expands to fill the time available, and if AI compresses the time a task takes, we tend to find new tasks rather than do fewer of them.
This is the second-order problem that “work” as a concept is not equipped to handle. If the word means “tasks completed” and AI completes tasks faster, then productivity has increased by definition. But if work was always partly about signaling — demonstrating diligence, earning trust, proving commitment through visible effort — then AI doesn’t increase productivity so much as reveal that a chunk of what we called work was never really about output at all.
The question “what is productivity?” was always lurking under the surface of knowledge work. AI has yanked it into plain view. Total Factor Productivity? Personal task completion? Meaningful impact on the physical world? These are not the same thing, and the word “work” was letting us pretend they were.
* * *
So what do we do instead?
The honest answer is that we probably need several words where we currently have one. The anthropologist’s distinction between “work” and “labor” is a start — labor being the repetitive, sustaining activities that keep life going, and work being the project-oriented effort that builds something new. But even that doesn’t fully capture the range. Too many industrial era analogues have been entirely interwoven.
A more useful decomposition might invoke deeper human lifeways like: gathering, which is the attentive, somewhat repetitive effort of processing the stream — email, logistics, routine decisions, the maintenance of systems already in place. And hunting, which is the open-ended, collaborative, exploratory effort of tackling problems that don’t yet have known solutions. Both are real and necessary. They require different conditions, different rhythms, different mental states. Treating them as the same thing — as “work” — and scheduling them interchangeably is one reason so many people feel productive while accomplishing less than they should.
There is also play, which gets a worse reputation than it deserves. Play is how skills develop when no one is watching the scoreboard. It is how creative fields explore terrain before they know what they’re looking for. It is also, as David Graeber argued in one of his better essays, potentially a large part of the point of being alive — something that the word “work” systematically cannot acknowledge without undermining itself.
A simpler practice: before you describe something as “work,” try filling in the blank. I am doing [specific activity] because I want to [specific outcome]. Not “I’m working.” Not “I’m going to work.” What, specifically, are you doing, and toward what end? You may find that the answer is clear and satisfying. You may find it is unclear and that this is informative. You may find that the activity is valuable regardless of whether it fits any traditional definition of work, or that it fits every definition and is nonetheless pointless.
The point is not to optimize. The point is to see.
* * *
Here is a small experiment worth trying: go one week without using the word “work” in your internal monologue. Not forever. Just a week. You will find, I suspect, that almost everything the word usually covers can be described more accurately without it — and that the things that can’t be described without it were never quite real to begin with.
And the next time you meet someone new, consider not asking what they do. Ask instead what they like to do, or what they’re trying to figure out, or what they made recently. You might learn something more interesting. You will almost certainly get a more honest answer.
The Protestant Work Ethic built a lot of things worth having. It also gave us a word that has been punching above its conceptual weight for three centuries. It is time to make it work a little less hard.
—
This essay draws on David Graeber’s “What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?” and Venkatesh Rao’s “A Big Little Idea Called Legibility.” Both are worth your time.
Cover image: Edward Hopper's Office at Night.
The word collapses distinctions we actually need. It’s not a useful umbrella; it’s a tarp thrown over a pile of things we haven’t bothered to sort.
* * *
We didn’t always live under this tarp. The fusion of labor with moral identity is historically recent and geographically peculiar. For most of human history — and still in many parts of the world — what you did to put food on the table was not the primary answer to the question of who you were. You were a member of a family, a village, a faith community, a guild. Your productive activity was embedded in those relationships, not extracted from them and rebranded as your defining characteristic.
The Protestant Reformation, and especially its Calvinist strains, began to change that. If prosperity was a sign of divine favor, and if diligence was the path to prosperity, then hard work became not just economically useful but spiritually significant. The Industrial Revolution then institutionalized this theology into a time-clock. The wage relationship — trading hours for money, for a stranger, in a place not your home — became the template for all productive activity.
We inherited that template and mistook it for nature. When we say “So, what do you do?” as our opening move with a new person, we are not asking a neutral question. We are asking which slot in the economic order they occupy, and we are using that slot as a shorthand for their worth. It’s a question so habitual we’ve stopped noticing that it’s a question at all.
Other answers are available. In a different frame, you might introduce someone as active in the school board, or as the person who keeps the community garden running, or as someone who makes extraordinary tamales and brings them to every neighborhood gathering. A job would be what they do to pay rent. It wouldn’t be the whole story.
* * *
The conceptual overload of “work” might be merely amusing if the stakes were low. They are not. The word is doing active damage in the domain where I spend most of my time: knowledge work, where outputs are frequently invisible, where the connection between effort and result is loose, and where “working” has consequently come to mean something more like “performing the appearance of productivity.”
A friend who reviewed an earlier version of these thoughts pushed back sharply. “This sounds like a knowledge worker’s leisure problem,” he said. “It doesn’t cover people who need to be physically at work — the blue-collar 9-to-5 jobs.” He’s right that the acute form of this illness is white-collar. But the signaling problem runs wider than he gives it credit for.
When outputs are illegible — when it’s genuinely hard to tell whether a given hour of effort produced something valuable — organizations reach for proxies. Hours worked is the most available proxy, which is why banking culture at firms like Goldman Sachs has produced analysts working 9 AM to 5 AM and defending it as a rite of passage. No one produces excellent analysis twenty hours a day. What they produce is a demonstration of commitment, expressed in the currency of hours, because the actual currency — quality of thinking — is too hard to price.
The result is a workplace pathology familiar to anyone in an office: the performance of busyness. Answering email at all hours. Keeping your status light green. Never being the first to leave. None of this is necessary for the actual work. All of it is necessary for the word “work” to keep doing its moral job — signaling that you are a person who works hard, who is committed, who deserves to keep their seat at the table.
The mind, meanwhile, needs time and space to actually think. It needs unscheduled hours, long walks, conversations that go sideways. The best ideas I’ve had in my own career arrived on dog walks, in the shower, in the middle of conversations that had nothing to do with the problem. None of that looks like work. All of it was.
* * *
All of this was already strange. Then artificial intelligence arrived to make it obviously untenable.
A friend who runs a technical team described watching his colleagues celebrate a “10x productivity improvement” from AI tools — drafting documents faster, processing email in a fraction of the time, generating slide decks in minutes. The celebration felt earned. And then he started watching what people did with the recovered hours. A lot of scheduling. Some reorganization. Considerable discourse about the AI tools themselves. “It’s very unclear,” he said, “how folks are actually accomplishing more.” Parkinson’s Law, it turns out, is not repealed by software: work expands to fill the time available, and if AI compresses the time a task takes, we tend to find new tasks rather than do fewer of them.
This is the second-order problem that “work” as a concept is not equipped to handle. If the word means “tasks completed” and AI completes tasks faster, then productivity has increased by definition. But if work was always partly about signaling — demonstrating diligence, earning trust, proving commitment through visible effort — then AI doesn’t increase productivity so much as reveal that a chunk of what we called work was never really about output at all.
The question “what is productivity?” was always lurking under the surface of knowledge work. AI has yanked it into plain view. Total Factor Productivity? Personal task completion? Meaningful impact on the physical world? These are not the same thing, and the word “work” was letting us pretend they were.
* * *
So what do we do instead?
The honest answer is that we probably need several words where we currently have one. The anthropologist’s distinction between “work” and “labor” is a start — labor being the repetitive, sustaining activities that keep life going, and work being the project-oriented effort that builds something new. But even that doesn’t fully capture the range. Too many industrial era analogues have been entirely interwoven.
A more useful decomposition might invoke deeper human lifeways like: gathering, which is the attentive, somewhat repetitive effort of processing the stream — email, logistics, routine decisions, the maintenance of systems already in place. And hunting, which is the open-ended, collaborative, exploratory effort of tackling problems that don’t yet have known solutions. Both are real and necessary. They require different conditions, different rhythms, different mental states. Treating them as the same thing — as “work” — and scheduling them interchangeably is one reason so many people feel productive while accomplishing less than they should.
There is also play, which gets a worse reputation than it deserves. Play is how skills develop when no one is watching the scoreboard. It is how creative fields explore terrain before they know what they’re looking for. It is also, as David Graeber argued in one of his better essays, potentially a large part of the point of being alive — something that the word “work” systematically cannot acknowledge without undermining itself.
A simpler practice: before you describe something as “work,” try filling in the blank. I am doing [specific activity] because I want to [specific outcome]. Not “I’m working.” Not “I’m going to work.” What, specifically, are you doing, and toward what end? You may find that the answer is clear and satisfying. You may find it is unclear and that this is informative. You may find that the activity is valuable regardless of whether it fits any traditional definition of work, or that it fits every definition and is nonetheless pointless.
The point is not to optimize. The point is to see.
* * *
Here is a small experiment worth trying: go one week without using the word “work” in your internal monologue. Not forever. Just a week. You will find, I suspect, that almost everything the word usually covers can be described more accurately without it — and that the things that can’t be described without it were never quite real to begin with.
And the next time you meet someone new, consider not asking what they do. Ask instead what they like to do, or what they’re trying to figure out, or what they made recently. You might learn something more interesting. You will almost certainly get a more honest answer.
The Protestant Work Ethic built a lot of things worth having. It also gave us a word that has been punching above its conceptual weight for three centuries. It is time to make it work a little less hard.
—
This essay draws on David Graeber’s “What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?” and Venkatesh Rao’s “A Big Little Idea Called Legibility.” Both are worth your time.
Cover image: Edward Hopper's Office at Night.
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