Values You Don't Share

What’s one virtue that others place a lot of stock in that you just don’t value that highly. For example, some might think of beauty as overrated or a misguided goal to seek out. Others may think truth is overrated because outcomes are more important than processes. How does this part of your value system affect the way you live your life?

This will be the first of a handful of prompts that my friend Igor and I will each respond to. Perhaps in so doing, we will learn a bit more about ourselves, and push each other into sticky areas of thought that we usually avoid.

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For me, my choice is the virtue of industriousness, diligence, or hard work.

Of course this sounds absurd. What makes the world go around except for committed, well-minded and rose-hearted people striving, trying, and persisting? Of course we as a species reap rewards when people work hard. Of course that same value turns personal, when it builds in oneself discipline, order, motivation, and self-respect.

These good things, important things. But to my mind, they are second-order effects, divorced somewhat from the original value. Hard work is useful inasmuch as it’s a means to the ends above. But you can arrive at those ends through a variety of pathways.

Below, I will consider and rebut the two major arguments in favor of industriousness divided between intrinsic and extrinsic value.

The Intrinsic Value of Hard Work

The moral virtue of hard work is the reason most people raise. When your father told your fifteen-year-old self that nothing can replace pure hard grit, what he meant is that the sort of people who work really hard are usually good in other ways. They are usually competent. They are usually intelligent. They are usually disciplined. They are usually productive members of society. And usually parents want you to fulfill all of these sorts of boxes.

But is there not an entirely valid way to exist on this grand, green earth without those things? How does it directly harm you if someone else lives lazy, fat, idle, and happy in a sunny beach shack? Perhaps your hypothetical father would be disappointed in such a person, and perhaps you yourself wouldn’t want to live that way, but why stop them? As long as their pursuit of happiness doesn’t harming anyone else and doesn’t irrevocably harm their own future happiness-experiencing capacity, why condemn them?

That includes extremely hard-working people. If they’ve really questioned themselves and come up with the conclusion that working extremely hard gives them the meaning they want out of life, that would be an excellent outcome. The problem is that most people subsume this value from society without questioning it, and people who – were they to really reflect – actually value other things are stuck living a life zoned by someone else’s priorities.

The Extrinsic Value of Hard Work

The next argument for this value is one of basic decency. People who don’t work hard are not earning their place; not contributing to their fellow human. Perhaps they don’t even agree with the fundamental project of human progress. Moreover, if we don’t prevent them now, this sinful way of living will tempt all youth, and society as a whole will decline.

This is a more interesting argument. It’s tapping the nerve of communitarian value. We are all linked in a shared task, and if you free load, you are to be despised, under the hope that the social cost will eventually be unbearable enough that you will one day soon trade your freedom for a company uniform and take your place on the assembly line.

The challenge here is that the virtue here has some fuzziness at the edges. Are you being industrious if you clock in daily to a factory, producing and making continuously until your retirement years? Certainly. Are you diligent if you study, toil, and labor all on your own, and one year before your dying year, you publish a novel of fiction that moves and attracts people worldwide? Does your hard work amount to anything if you study and research and learn for your entire life, but everything you every contribute to the sum of human knowledge is derivative, unoriginal, and ultimately discarded?

Which type of work matters? More importantly, who gets to decide?

No one much likes to set boundaries around what sort of work really matters most of all. It comes up in times of crisis, when certain key or essential sectors of work have elevated responsibilities over others, but even those adjust based on the crisis. How do you compare the work of a camera technician working in entertainment with that of a pastry chef specializing in foods with no real nutritional value or with that of a cloistered nun, living a life devoted to faith, prayer, and meditation?

I think the secret is that everyone lives with the ambiguity and we all come up with rough definitions that firstly and most importantly, help us justify the narrative of our lives, and secondly, mostly comport with other people’s rough definitions. It’s not that work with positive externalities nor major societal trends around productivity and purpose don’t exist; of course they do. Rather, on the scale of a nation, it’s questionable to tie a causal line from one person’s behavior to all of a country’s.

Spending Your Days without Industriousness

This is all particularly true for people who have their basic needs – and then some – already met. By some measures, industriousness is a problem of finding the best fit between someone’s interests, their capacity, and the available options, with bonuses offered to people whose personalities award efficient job acquisition. One sells oneself for that time, and what’s left over is for oneself, to do with as one wishes.

Most of us seem to work long beyond a financial need to do so, I would posit, because of the social value from work. It can feel good to feel busy in a structured environment, where you outsource the more ambiguous questions of whether your work matters, whether your company matters, whether your professional community matters, in exchange for a more narrow focus on technical or creative excellence.

But while many, perhaps even most people need this, surely there are many people who would do more work and more interesting work if left to their own devices with enough money? Where are the Enlightenment gentlemen scientists of the current era? Must they all be part of a corporation? When not at work, as long as there are enough incentives and structures guiding a person away from unproductively addictive behaviors (see again the point about future happiness-experiencing capacity), would not most people gravitate toward spending their time on their own interests?

It seems likely that productivity increases with interest. If that’s true, I would further posit it’s simply because interest leads one to practice more and more, and it is this third factor that most frequently leads to productivity.

So if you can’t get your interests and passions fulfilled by your work – and if you’re sick of hearing from millennials the world over about how you need to just keep going until your work feels like fun – then why not live a life where you can practice the thing you’re happiest with the most? Devote less of your waking hours to work and more to personal fulfillment. It could come at a big sacrifice of money and  job convenience, as the number of employment opportunities supporting healthcare and flexible part-time work is less than the number without those restrictions.

But it might make the difference between a life being lived according to hand-me-down values and a life lived on your own terms.