Is Hard Work a Virtue?

Shifting nature of work

There are two contradictory impulses about work prevalent in society today.

On the one hand, most people claim to derive purpose and meaning out of their work. It is to the extent that it seems to define who they are. The first question most people ask upon being introduced is what do you do.

On the other hand, most people seem very unhappy with their work. Even the high paying, intellectually challenging domains like coding leaves people more often complaining about their work, its monotony, looking forward desperately to the weekend etc. Not to mention the millions who work in low paying, mechanical jobs in factories, restaurants, transportation etc.

So what explains this conundrum?

Some interesting insights can be gained by reading up on how work used to be in the hunter-gatherer societies before the advent of farming. Which constitutes 95% of human history, because we evolved (a questionable term by the way as seen later) into agrarian societies only in the last 10,000 years or so out of the at least 300,000 (likely way more) years as a species. And many observations about how our hunter gatherer ancestors lived and worked are very revealing:

1. They were only working 15–20 hours a week to get sufficient food. They spent a large chunk of the remaining time in leisure activities such as music, dance, socializing etc.
2. They lived a very well nourished life with nobody going hungry.
3. They never focused on accruing for the future as it only put a cost for them to accrue and store. There was always enough to get in nature daily when going about looking for food.
4. Due to the absence of accrual, their societies were naturally egalitarian with no concept of haves and have nots.
5. Contrary to what we may assume, they lived healthier and longer lives than the agrarian societies on average.

Then came the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago. And a diametrically opposite way of living became the norm, such as working long hours, living with scarcity and fear of starvation, accruing for the future and the ensuing gulf between the rich and the poor, unhealthy and shorter lifespans.

Working hard on the land and raising a crop against the vagaries of nature over a period of many months, the need to store the harvest and therefore the hierarchy of wealth, the easier spread of germs from domestic livestock etc. caused these factors that were unknown to humans for the vast history before the advent of farming.

Agriculture certainly helped in sustaining large populations through mass production of food and thereby the growth of cities and kingdoms all the way to current nation states. It also resulted in the spawning of organized religions which is a whole another topic altogether. And all of it came at a huge cost to the quality of life at the individual level compared to the hunter-gatherer society.

Now in the last 200 years, we have moved from an agrarian society to an industrialized society with the help of various technological breakthroughs, the latest being the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI). And with global industrialization and widespread adoption of technology, we seem to have almost solved at least two key problems that came with agrarian economies.

First is that of scarcity. All industrialized societies live in abundance with obesity a greater problem than starvation. And the developing world is also fast moving into this column. Of course, there is a profound difference between the lack of scarcity among hunter-gatherers and modern industrialized societies. While the former lived content with meeting the minimal needs of food and shelter and there was enough in nature to provide, the modern societies live with ever increasing consumerist demand for more and more which is satisfied by increasingly sophisticated methods of exploiting nature and there may soon come a point where such exploitation will boomerang on humans adversely.

Second problem with agrarian societies that has also now been largely solved is health and life span. The average life expectancy has dramatically increased with better nutrition and breakthroughs in medicine.

But we still live with a few of the vestiges of the agrarian society. And most important among them is the emphasis on hard work which came out of farming. Hard work is still seen as a virtue which is an agrarian value. Another is of course the accrual for the future and related to that, the wide gulf between haves and have nots.

Now with the advent of AI with its promise of taking automation to its logical end, we may be on the cusp of interesting changes in both these fronts as well.

The most important shift is possibly the notion of hard work. When both intellectually challenging work such as coding, documenting etc. as well as mechanical work such as cleaning, driving etc. can all be done increasingly and more efficiently by machines, will hard work still be valued by society?

This goes to the original conundrum we started with. We derive meaning from work because we are naturally programmed to do something or other in our waking hours. And yet we also find ourselves complaining about work because most work we do including the so-called intellectually challenging work is mechanical.

So if we are freed of all the drudgery of work due to AI, then we will have all the time similar to the hunter-gatherer ancestors. We may have to still do some work for say 20 hours a week which would mainly involve guiding our AI co-pilots for the various business or personal needs we have. And the rest of the time can be engaged in leisure.

A core fear then that many immediately encounter with such a prospect of a large portion of ‘work’ being taken away is that it will deprive us of a sense of meaning and purpose. Therefore ironically, there is a tendency to cling on to mechanical jobs while also constantly complaining about those jobs because it doesn’t truly address the need for meaning or purpose.

Now, if we look closely at the nature of the term ‘work’ itself, we see that we use the term somewhat arbitrarily to only those endeavors related to ‘putting food on the table’. Whereas work in its true thermodynamic sense simply refers to an orderly transfer of energy (as opposed to dissipation of energy which is entropy).

Seen in the correct light then, various meaningful activities such as reading a great book, writing one’s ideas as either fiction or non-fiction, doing a nice hike, cooking a delicious meal, engaging in a deep conversation, playing and so much more are also work. It’s just that they are also fun!

And when we are engaged in fun work with no pressure, many unexpected things may come about that are inconceivable otherwise. Isaac Newton came up with calculus and laws of physics due to sitting bored during a plague. Not everyone is going to invent calculus, but the human brain won’t sit idle either and therefore can work with its unique talents when given the luxury of time and space with no pressure.

If we wake up with no schedule, no plan and absolutely all possibilities wide open, the universe brings about interesting new ideas and avenues to explore, some of which may turn out to be the most interesting work we do and experiences we encounter. But the flip side is also worth considering, that many will in fact become idle consumers of endless content of various kinds that make them dull and insipid.

Moving to the other big vestige of the agrarian mindset, let us look at the accrual mindset and the resultant gulf of wealth in modern society contrary to the naturally egalitarian lives of the hunter-gatherers. Here too, there may be a major shift coming. If more and more people are disengaged from ‘work’ as the means to put food on table and replaced by machines, then it may require a leveling solution like a universal basic income (UBI) which will meet all the needs of every individual comfortably.

It will not remove the need for accrual or the wealth gap entirely for sure, as our lifestyle will be still dictated by the agrarian paradigm of food storage, fixed homes and townships, large cities and nation-states — all of which are contrary to the natural ‘here and now’ lifestyle of hunter-gatherers. We can only romanticize such lifestyle through movies like Avatar but never go back to.

That being said, UBI like schemes have to be still encouraged by all governments as a safety net for all those whose livelihoods from farming all the way to coding are taken away by machines going forward. If nothing else, it can at least ensure that there is no unrest in society as we leave behind the paradigm of work that has defined human beings for the last 10,000 years.

In any case, the profound shift in the nature of work and the shift of societal virtue from mechanical, hard work to idle, creative work has the potential to fundamentally alter society toward a new mode of living, where we solve the original conundrum and do only meaningful work without ever complaining.

Of course, it’s highly likely and already starting to show that most creative work is also done better eventually by machines than humans. Even so, we can continue to engage with our increasingly creative AI co-pilots to keep pushing the boundaries of meaningful and fun work.

There is certainly the other possibility of a large majority of humans sliding into passive consumerist escapism which will accelerate exploitation of nature and divisive tendencies resulting in natural catastrophes and wars.

Ultimately systems are put together by thought and such systems in turn produce the ground for thoughts. Agrarian system resulted in pushing hard work, wealth accrual, creation of nation states and so on that were not found in humans for a vast majority of history. Now we are on the cusp of a new system taking over. What it brings about is largely up to how we respond to the possibilities thrown up by freeing of the drudgery of hard work.