Johnson’s Work View
I previously posted my Life View, from “Designing Your Life”, and thought I’d post my work view, too:
The benefits of everything we do should be measured against the domains enumerated in Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program. Work, like any option, work has tradeoffs — potential benefits/pros and pitfalls/cons. Some are:
Work, like any activity or tool, is potent and wonderful wielded suitably, but potentially damaging when used improperly. At its best, it’s a vehicle for human flourishing that hits all domains simultaneously; at its worst, it’s a source of pure misery, an addictive drug without even a positive hit, that twists your mind and perspective past the point of recognition.
Unfortunately, for most people, there’s no actual optionality when it comes to work, because it’s one of few activities in life that is uniquely capable of creating financial and material stability, and it’s by far the most common one (one alternative would be marrying into money, which carries its own problems; another would be becoming a Buddhist monk). So most of us have to work for a substantial part of our lives, if not the rest of it.
However, some at least have choice over the scheduling of work. I have the great privilege of not needing to work for the entire duration of my life, which means that I can choose to work more now or later.
Unfortunately, the established norm is to front load the work as much as possible to speed up retirement, the onset of not needing to work. This isn’t, strictly speaking, a bad strategy; it’s often justified by compounding financial interest, which decreases the amount of work required. However, the race to front load work has 2 main issues in my opinion:
- As we noted, work, when employed properly, is a highly efficient vehicle for human flourishing, so racing to its end (retirement) isn’t necessarily useful. There’s many examples of working people that don’t need the financial benefits of work, whose efforts contribute to personal flourishing and even the benefit of humanity (retired professionals teaching, volunteering, etc.).
- The bull rush to work leaves little time to seek out new information, to reflect on it, to process it, and to apply new wisdom in our lives. There’s a lot of things to see and learn out in this wide wide world. I’ve experienced a huge amount of personal growth every time I’ve dedicated time to this process, along each flourishing domain, as well as in enhanced meta understanding what it means to flourish each domain.
I would personally advocate for taking some time away from work earlier on in life, finances and other constraints allowing, to maximize the duration of benefits from learning and to minimize odds of being too constrained to do so.
Having said that, time away from work often does not eliminate the need to work (again, eventually). Given that we have to work some non-trivial amount, we might as well make the most of it. We should also be acutely aware of when we don’t need to work — sufficient financial/material stability and when there are better things to do, as measured against the flourishing domains. To me, making the most of work is trying to develop as much as possible against each of the flourishing domains, while avoiding the many pitfalls to be found.
