What is your work?

A question I’ve been asking myself more often these days is: what is my work?

The question was spurred by Mandy Brown, as many of my thoughts these days are. She asks:

When talking to people about their work, one question I often ask is, “what is your work now?” Not what is your job or career, but what is your work. Jobs and careers are, at best, the means by which we get our work done while also keeping a roof over our heads; but our work is always bigger than that. Our work is not only what we deliver for a boss or an organization, not only the metrics we’re unjustly measured on or the revenue targets we’re held to, but all the change we make in the world, all the ways we we use our unique gifts to contribute to a living world, to our own liberation and to the liberation of every living being around us. This is the work that rarely shows up on a job description but we can never let go of, the work we yearn for even when we’re tired, the work we grieve when we’re cleaved from it.

There was a time in my life when I knew my work, and when my work was intrinsically aligned to my career: I spent my years trying to understand how technology–in particular, the internet–could make the lives of the people around me better, and then taking that understanding and putting it into practice. It was work I did in my job, in my spare time, in my civic advocacy. It ignited my passion, and drove my action.

These days, my job doesn’t align with that work, and part of me has lost the passion that once came from exploring the intersection of tech and public service. It doesn’t help that the people with whom I surrounded myself to do this work are starting to lose their jobs and passions as well. But Mandy reminds us that when we rue the dismantling of civil service, we need to keep focused on fighting for the work, too:

What’s under assault right now isn’t jobs. A great many jobs are being extinguished, and each lost job is a measure of misery for many people. But the greater heartbreak is the loss of work—the separation from meaningful, changeful work, and from the impacts of that work, from the world that comes into being when our work is oriented towards the living. It’s telling that so many of the jobs currently under attack are those of technology people performing civil service: these are people who chose work that was less glamorous, and less remunerative, than the standard tech path, but also more purposeful, more likely to actually deliver on tech’s otherwise empty promise of a better world. The message is clear: you will work for the needs of capital, or you will work not at all. That means it’s not enough to simply get the jobs back; we have to fight for the work, too.

And so where I am right now is a time of reckoning: what is my work? Is it to listen, reflect, and share–to tell the stories of others whose voices may not be heard right now? Is it to collect, synthesize, and explain–to help make sense of things that don’t always make sense? Or is it, as I’m starting to suspect it is, to support, to uphold, to strengthen–to recognize those who are doing good work and spend time in the background creating the conditions that make that work easier to do.

When was the last time you asked yourself about the work? What is your work now? It’s a question I’ll ask myself a lot in the next few days and weeks, and will hold this thought by Mandy as I reflect: “What keeps you going is knowing what you’re good at, knowing what you have to give, and then giving it all you’ve got.”

→ work → reflection