formulatingwork

Though I don’t plan on this be­ing a “the dic­tio­nary de­fines work as” kind of post, we have to start some­where.

From Webster’s 1913. (Why?)

work := That which is produced as the result of labor.

I want to give a sense of four dif­fer­ent types of work. This is not an ex­haus­tive list in any as­pect, but they seem to me vaguely de­fined points along a cer­tain axis. Or at least in­cluded in many of the same sets.

|-----------------------------|
 gig   job   career   vocation

gigs

I re­al­ized to­day that I need a hobby, be­cause my work day just started, like, now. Right now. And here’s the thing, it’s not even that big a part of my day. So even if it does­n’t go well, it’s like, ah, you know, still a pretty good fuck­ing day. Like it was­n’t a “bad day”, just that one part at work — for an hour — did­n’t go to my lik­ing, and then I had a great day oth­er­wise.

Tom Segura, Completely Normal

A gig is on one side of this axis.

It’s a teenager show­ing up a few days a week to babysit their neigh­bor’s kid, or a band book­ing spo­radic shows at lo­cal venues. It’s not even that big a part of your day. This is dif­fer­ent from vol­un­teer la­bor, since a gig should prob­a­bly in­volve some form of ex­change / pay­ment, but there’s not usu­ally an ex­pec­ta­tion that the work will be fre­quent or sta­ble.

So, start­ing with work, we could ex­pand our de­f­i­n­i­tion and say:

gig = work + (reward, purpose)

A gig does­n’t need to have the neg­a­tive con­no­ta­tions that it of­ten does. As long as we can meet the ba­sic re­quire­ments of liv­ing, then gigs al­low us a cer­tain kind of free­dom (even if it’s of­ten an un­cer­tain and anx­ious kind of free­dom), or they al­low us to pack up and leave if things don’t work out the way we’d like.

For those souls that need as­sur­ance, they might in­stead seek…

jobs

See how many a pretty thing
I al­ways from the cube can bring:
Chair and sofa, bench and table,
Desk to write at when I’m able,
All the house­hold fur­ni­ture,
Even baby’s bed I’m sure;
Not a few such things I see;
Stove and side­board here can be.
Many things, both old and new,
My dear cube brings into view;
So my cube much pleases me,
Because through it so much I see.
It is a lit­tle world.

Ellen Lupton, The ABC’s of ⚠️🆘🔵: Bauhaus and Design Theory

This quote has very lit­tle to do with jobs per se, and it’s not even re­ally about work at all, but I like to imag­ine that “cube” here refers to an of­fice cu­bi­cle — and that makes the mean­ing of the poem some­how a lot sad­der than the orig­i­nal about build­ing blocks and cre­ativ­ity.

I can think of no bet­ter ob­ject to sym­bol­ize jobs than a cu­bi­cle. It is a lit­tle world.

(there’s more to say here, though I’m not sure what yet)

job = gig + (commitment, formality)

The in­clu­sion of “commitment” here brings up an in­ter­est­ing point about gigs. You might say that even if you’re not com­mit­ted to any gigs in par­tic­u­lar, you’re com­mit­ted to a cer­tain kind of lifestyle or way of work­ing that they en­able. Hence “the gig econ­omy”.

In the same way, the jobs you hold may in the long run be­come…

ca­reers

It’s dif­fi­cult to com­mit one­self to some­thing, a ca­reer for in­stance, if all you see is the most likely un­ex­cep­tional sce­nario ten years down the road. Why bother? Why not wait un­til you’re so ex­cited about some­thing, so pas­sion­ate, that not de­vot­ing your life to it would hardly even oc­cur to you?

Well, the fact is that the world turns, and if your in­ter­nal time­piece does­n’t get wise to that idea, you’ll never be able to catch up to the peo­ple whose has.

James Somers, How to Be a Loser

I use this quote at the risk of blur­ring the lines be­tween a lot of these words even fur­ther, as Somers uses the word “commit” above where I might in­stead sug­gest “dedicate”. But the in­ten­tion is the same.

career = job + (dedication, experience)

vo­ca­tions

Weber’s German word for a vo­ca­tion, Beruf, con­tains two res­o­nances: the grad­ual ac­cu­mu­la­tion of knowl­edge and skills and the ever-stronger con­vic­tion that one was meant to do this one par­tic­u­lar thing in one’s life.

An English lo­cu­tion roughly con­veys what he meant: your life ‘adds up’.

Richard Sennett, The Craftsman

A vo­ca­tion is the dif­fer­ence be­tween I do this and I am this. It’s not an in­evitable state of be­ing — ei­ther by ne­ces­sity or in­er­tia, I may spend my whole life work­ing on some­thing I don’t be­lieve de­fines me as a per­son. I may value my free time, or my re­la­tion­ships, or my free­dom in ways that pre­clude me from feel­ing that I was meant to do the thing I spent 8 hours of most week­days do­ing.

The sense of the word mean­ing here is dif­fer­ent from that of pur­pose in the de­f­i­n­i­tion of gig. A gig has a pur­pose in that it pro­duces some­thing of tan­gi­ble, eco­nomic value. The “purpose” of a vo­ca­tion is, in ad­di­tion, ex­is­ten­tial — my pur­pose on Earth.

And so we say:

vocation = career + (identity, meaning)

one poem for a life

To build one’s house is very much like mak­ing one’s will. When the time does ar­rive for build­ing this house, it is not the ma­son’s nor the crafts­man’s mo­ment, but that mo­ment in which every man makes one poem, at any rate, in his life. And so, in our towns and their out­skirts, we have had dur­ing the last forty years not so much houses as po­ems, po­ems of an Indian sum­mer, for a house is the crown­ing of a ca­reer.

Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture