Why We Work

It's safe to say any generalized view of people's motivations for doing anything is likely too simplistic to be correct. However, considering the idea in general terms that motivations change over the course of one's career is potentially useful as a basis for looking at individual examples.

What I want to do here is to lay out some hypothetical career paths and try to relate some of the circumstantial variables to the human actions and reactions that go along with them. The point is to understand life in mechanistic terms so that I can feel powerful and intelligent.

The economic motivation to work is probably the most widely understood and accepted. For others, the moral need for worthy or purposeful occupation is a significant rationale. A general sense of obligation, the feeling that you simply "have to work" with less importance on any one reason may be a better explanation for many other people. Others feel specific obligations to provide for or meet the expectations of family. Finally, ambition, pride, and desire to be successful are important drivers for those of another personality type. These impulses are often intertwined, and at any given time in one's career can be more or less absent or present.

The idea of a career generally suggests continuity and progression over time. While any individual career may be marked by frequent or infrequent changes, minor or drastic or some of each, the linear aspect of a career implies a beginning, a middle, and an end. In this a career is analogous to a story, or to life itself. A second life. Work life.

As for work itself, in the sense used here I mean the time and effort devoted to societally sanctioned activity exchanged for material and social rewards or rights. In wage-earning societies both the work and the rewards are finite and time-constrained: you work some number of hours, you earn some specific amount of money for that, by means of which you possess and consume a limited amount of goods. In other systems and from other points of view a person practices a lifestyle with obligations and privileges that attend it, but not in such discrete chunks.

A person's life in any society comes with expectations and roles as well as opportunities. The youngest people are dependent on others for care; this subsides in favor of greater cooperation and autonomy with the progression to adulthood. As people age social roles and expectations change, often ending in dependency just as it all began. In terms of the "things you're supposed to do" view of society, different kinds of work are appropriate to different stages of life. Viewed opportunistically, individuals increase specific capabilities with greater progress through the course of life by means of learning from experience.

And so a person's career can be seen as a personal story, not simply an isolated experience, but a thread along which a person's life can be tracked. Careers are not limited to one per person either. Just as it makes sense now to speak of not just a public one lives in but several different publics, or multiple or conflicting identities a person has, more careers than just one can delineate a person's progress through life. For simplicity's sake I'll keep the discussion to one career at a time for now.


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some unfounded hypothetical career stories

Early in a person's career, establishing identity and projecting autonomy are important. As a person achieves those goals gradually, work changes.

Hard work, long hours, and little sense of what it all means are the pitfalls and opportunities for many young laborers. After some time sacrificing one's self and desire to gain a life of greater comfort and security, the danger of complacency begins to present itself. For some, this danger must be met head on with the desire for more growth and new opportunity. For others, circumstances make you grateful for what you have and opportunities revolve around optimizing one's present situation. In either case, economics play a role.

The equation in any worker's mind, in one form or another, is the relation of work to reward. What constitutes a reward may change over time, but career work is defined by some kind of social reciprocity, and whether one is greedy or altruistic, the economics of a successful career describe an increase over time of reward and a corresponding relative decrease in work. More dollars per hour, more reach of influence, less time to achieve more results, all these express what a successful career is. Working harder for less, struggling more to stay in the same place, statements like that are expressions of failure--heroic effort notwithstanding, a tragic career as a whole.

Some people advance by success, some by repeated failures.

Rewards, as stated, change over time. Being able to prove oneself may be a valuable to a young worker; for a more tenured worker the same opportunity might be regarded with disdain and cynicism. The ability to understand more about the mechanics of the larger group comes to be more important as one advances. This parallels the decreasing amount of energy most people feel as they age, and the desire to rely on ingenuity to offset gradual loss of strength and drive. So the junior worker who works hard to help others advances to become the more experienced older member of the group looking for newer colleagues to hand off work to. Coincidentally, families develop as individuals simultaneously establish themselves as self-sufficient individuals and realize a need for long-term companionship that work cannot provide. Rewards change again, and the ability to reduce one's focus on work in favor of family concerns becomes increasingly valuable.

The increase of reward accompanied by a decrease in work may be success for individual workers, but could not be sustained were it not for the obligation of workers to show a progression of commitment to their careers, even as their continuous long hours and hard work gradually subside. As individuals learn with greater experience how to maximize the work output of their time, taking responsibility for others in exchange for their greater work output provides symbiotic opportunities for advancing workers to interact with their newer peers. Succession--teaching someone else how to do your work is an important part of a career path that marks both maturity and some degree of control of one's destiny. Although it is sometimes seen as characterizing the end of a career, succession also can accompany advancement, especially in situations where neither one is guaranteed.

there are a lot of loose ends here, and I'm not sure if it's advancing. That's enough for now.