Wasting Time? #050

Aristotle on meaningful work

Hello and welcome back again to another episode of Every Dawn. We have been discussing Bertrand Russell, the great philosopher of the 20th century, and his ideas on how to be happy. This is a mostly Aristotelian idea that we need to engage with life, and the more we engage and the more we go outside of ourselves, the more we find this original interest that children have and animals have in engaging with the world. And we will forget about our worries, which are mostly human and socially created.

Another important point for him is also work. Work for us today often seems to be a source of unhappiness because much of our work is so boring and repetitive and does not provide any satisfaction. And you have this movement of young people of lying low and um not working and trying to boycott work as much as possible. But this is for us, for Aristotle, a totally wrong way to go, right? Because if you don't engage with your work, you are not developing any of your virtues, you are not developing your phronesis, you are not getting to become a better person, right? You just staying there where you are, and you never improve and you never will become better or happier.

So for Russell, he says – I will read you what he says – "Provided work is not excessive in amount, even the dullest work is to most people less painful than idleness. Work is desirable first and foremost as a preventive of boredom. For the boredom that a man feels when he is doing necessary though uninteresting work is nothing in comparison with the boredom that he feels when he has nothing to do with his days."

So now he's talking about boredom. He talked about boredom previously where he was saying that boredom is a good thing. So you might think perhaps there's a contradiction here, but I don't think there is. Um, what is happening here is that there is a good boredom and a bad boredom, obviously, right? The the good boredom is this creative boredom where I have time on my hands, I have nothing that diverts my attention, and then I can look at the world and I can discover new things. I can look around and I can make plans for my future, I can make plans for my room, I can, you know, compose a song in my mind. This is the creative, this is the good boredom.

And then there's this bad boredom, which is just the idea of having endless time with nothing to do and no purpose in life, right? And the purpose is the difference. If I have this creative space of boredom in which I develop a purpose for myself or I pursue my purposes, then this is different from the boredom where I have the feeling that I'm totally useless and there's no point to my life.

Russell identifies two different ways in which work is good for us, is, you know, enriching to our lives. I will read it to you. First, work requires the exercise of our skills – this is my um this is my way of putting it, it's not I'm not quoting Russell word for word – requires the exercise of our skills. And like Aristotle says, right, a skill is a source of pride and happiness for the person exercising that skill. So the more I practice my skill, the more I practice my virtues, the better I feel, the prouder I am of myself, the more skillful I get, right? If I'm able to, let's say, write beautifully – handwriting – then um I will feel better about my handwriting than if I'm only able to scratch, you know, on the paper and make illegible, you know, scratches. If I'm able to play an instrument well, if I'm able to program a computer well, these are all sources of pride that make me feel good about my work.

And the second, the best kind of work, Russell says, is constructive in the sense that it builds or constructs something that was not there before. So, not work that is just repetitive and formalized and where I don't see any product, but work that produces an actual product. And this might be a scientific paper or a movie or a poem, a picture, a dish, you know, a song on the guitar, whatever it is, or the plan for a holiday – something that comes out of it. And if I have these two conditions – the work is productive and it requires the exercise of my skills and it also, you know, let me develop these skills – then I have work that makes me happy. And this is the opposite of this empty boredom.

Now, we don't all have such work. Much of our work is repetitive, much of our work does not produce a result. But we all also have enough free time – at least in most Western societies, most people have a lot of free time – which we just kill instead of using it. And we can always put meaningful activities into this time that we have. So for example, you know, you could say to some extent my life is also repetitive. I'm teaching the same classes year after year, it never changes, the product of my work is, you know, some educated students but they go away, I never see them again. I could have the same sense of just repetitive, you know, meaning meaninglessness. But then I'm doing this because this produces a video which I can see on my screen, and this gives me satisfaction. And there is no reason why you cannot do this too, right? You don't need to make a video if this is not your thing. You can write a song, you can cook a dish, you can write a, you know, write a poem, you can plant something, you can garden in a pot on your balcony. There are so many things you can do that will produce a tangible result, and this will give meaning to your life and will give you a sense of happiness and satisfaction because now you're doing meaningful work.

So that's it for today. This is what Russell wants to tell us about work, and I hope that this was useful and I will see you again tomorrow. Thank you, and goodbye!