Here's a decent piece by Peter Lawler at The Imaginative Conservative about whether a person should love his work. It criticizes the work notions coming out of Silicon Valley these days, so I like it, but I'm not sure about the other points. Due to a confluence of events, I've more or less found myself immersed in the world of "total work," as lamented by Joseph Pieper and summarized here by Roger Kimball:
It is a measure of how far the imperative of “total work” has taken hold that the opposing classical and medieval ideal–that, in Aristotle's phrase, we work in order to be at leisure–seems either unintelligible or even faintly immoral to us. Even purely intellectual activity is rebaptized as “work” in order to rescue it from the opprobrious charge of idleness. The image of “intellectual work” and the “intellectual worker” presents us with a vision of the world whose ideal is busyness.
The problem with the culture of "total work" is that it excludes leisure in principle. It seems to me the Silicon Valley work culture criticized by Lawler is the world of total work taken to its logical, extreme, conclusion: your work life is your life so make the work life as enjoyable as possible. Spend all your time "on campus," like you spent all your time on campus at college. Campus life is your life.
Lawler's criticism of the "campus" thinking/living is spot on.
But his other main point--that work can't be loved--is problematical, at least for me. If I couldn't take a genuine joy in figuring out legal problems, in helping clients, in earning money for my family . . . then my life absolutely, positively sucks right now. Lawler is careful to distinguish between "taking pleasure" in one's work and "loving" one's work, in the sense that the love becomes tyrannical and demands all one's energy and time, but when a man is thrown into the blender of life that demands so much energy at the office that he is left with no virtually energy for anything else, what is he supposed to do?
I am far (oh so far) removed from living the life of abandonment (as described by Groeschel, de Caussade, Stinissen, and others), but it seems to me that if God sends a barrage of emails and phone calls and work projects that require my constant attention from 7:00 AM Monday morning until noon on Saturday (more or less my work week these days), then I ought to accept it . . . abandon myself to it, allow myself to get immersed in it.
If I only, as Lawler suggests, do my work with the goal of getting leisure time later, I put myself into a horrible tension: every minute spent at my lowly work office zaps time and energy from the higher pursuits of leisure, with the result that time spent at work is resented. Yet the emails and phone calls and projects keep coming. Leisure time keeps getting reduced. The tension grows. Stress becomes the norm.
That's not the answer. I love Pieper, and I think Lawler makes excellent points, and I think leisure is too often neglected, but when God's will directs you uncompromisingly to the world of total work, the best response is to embrace it--aye, love it.
