Everyone works.

Employment, careers, jobs, and money are different questions entirely. What’s not in question is that everyone works.

It’s worth exploring the economic questions of work — how much our work is worth, when we should expect to get paid, and how we think about the way(s) in which we earn. (Are we capturing value we create? Collecting rents? Engaged in trade? Or being compensated for something taken from us?)

But the better question — or at least the prior one — is, What is work for? Where and how are we going to direct the energies of eight billion people?

That’s a lot of work, after all, and there’s no question that it makes a difference — for better or worse, sooner or later.

I’d argue that the fundamental purpose of work is dignity. Being both social and creative by nature, people work in order to express themselves and connect with others.

That’s not a passing interest of the privileged few, but a deep human urge. And that begs a lot of important questions about outsourcing, automation, and “labor-saving.” After all, jobs might be “creatively destroyed” all the time, but the same can’t be said of the people who used to do them (thank goodness).

Most people are grateful for labor-saving innovations. But they’re not eager to do less work, or especially to have less opportunity or dignity. For some of us, the ratchet is working in the right direction: AI-assisted email allows us to reach more people and do more work that’s more meaningful.

But, for a lot of other people, the ratchet is working against them: the thing they do — their identity, their dignity, their stability — can be done cheaper and faster by someone else, something else, somewhere else.

And when the jobs go, what will they work on then?

I had a professor in college who said that the human person is distinguished by the combination of the head, the heart, and the hand.

What he meant was that people are the only animals that combine intellect, emotion, and our peculiar ability to put both into the world through our work — to make real the products of our thought, feelings, and imagination.

It’s possible to do good work with any combination of these. But it’s worth paying attention to the balance between them: each, operating in isolation from the others, has its own kind of overreach.

Today is trash day at my house. The big green trucks will spend a noisy couple of hours circling the neighborhood this morning, and then we’ll all pull our empty bins back in to fill them up again.

This has always struck me as a little bit miraculous. I grew up helping my parents take the garbage to the town disposal facility, and the weekly dump run quickly became one of my chores as soon as I could drive.

But in neither case do I know where the garbage goes after it leaves — whether by Mom’s minivan or the big green truck. We just throw it “away.”

Every economy, from the human body to a municipality to a “global” society, generates some waste as a byproduct of its function. And all of that waste has to go somewhere, to be dealt with somehow.

I once heard someone sum this up in the phrase “Away is a place.” I’d add that there are people there, too.

Out of sight, out of mind might turn out not to be a miracle at all. Or, if it is a miracle, it’s one of mindlessness — another way in which it’s easy to not see the people and places that make up The Economy beyond our own households.

In his 2012 lecture “It All Turns on Affection,” Wendell Berry said:

For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. . . . As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.

So much of our economy is structured to stifle imagination. Whether for simple convenience or more complicated motives, food in plastic containers — at any price point — is not designed to help us imagine our relationship to the farms and farmers who produced it.

It’s easy to beat up on people who get their groceries at the corner store. But how well can “knowledge workers” imagine their place in the world as they move from offices to jets to car-shares to cafés?

Maybe that, too, is by design, and maybe it’s not. But knowledge and energy without imagination and affection have historically done real damage to real people and places.

My house just had an energy assessment. And, on his way out, the technician left us a box full of LED lightbulbs.

In my childhood, changing a lightbulb was a fairly regular event. We expected lightbulbs to burn out. Then, when the first non-incandescent bulbs showed up, they didn’t work very well and they caused a big political fuss.

Just a few years later, LED bulbs are the regular kind. They work when you flip the switch, you can put them on a dimmer, and (if you believe the packaging), you probably won’t have to think about them for 15–20 years after making the switch. Plus, they’ll only use a few dollars’ worth of electricity in that time.

All of those things are good for the consumer and the planet. And they’re a useful lesson in how technology works: something new shows up, it’s a little buggy at first, and then it’s invisible.

Of course, someone, somewhere, at some time, defined himself as a lightbulb maker. Surely he was good at his work, and took pride in it. But his paycheck was based on lightbulbs burning out every year or so, not every decade or two.

I’m thrilled with our new bulbs, and I wouldn’t want the old ones back. But I have to wonder: who made these ones, and what’s become of the people who made the old ones?

One of the most powerful — and challenging — questions I’ve ever confronted in career and financial planning is the “lottery question:” what would you do if money were no object in your consideration?

Economists sometimes insist that economics and markets are amoral, but of course that’s not true. More to the point, are we willing to tolerate a culture that insists it is all right to do wrong in the marketplace or public square?

Even if you can’t even imagine what it would be like to have a billion dollars, it’s worth imagining what you’d do with it — how you’d live, what decisions you’d make, how and with whom you’d spend it.

The answers might be slipperier than you think, since a billion dollars can go awfully far. Keep asking “and then what?” until you have a real answer. You might learn something about your values — and how you’re living them.

Putting a price on labor has never been all that easy.

Industry made it somewhat easier when it decided that all work would be performed and rewarded the same way, to the same standard.

But of course that was never the full story: people brought their whole selves to work, as they always have. They were paid for their ability to accomplish defined tasks, but not for the decision to get out of bed and go to work each day, or the ability to keep fellow workers going with a wry joke.

Today, the great invitation is to create our own work. That means giving up what we came to accept as certainties: the job description, the pay scale, the shift whistle.

It means knowing when and how and why we work and valuing it accurately and appropriately — even and especially when our labors are untraditional or completely unseen.

The Industrial Revolution didn’t just break bodies — it broke minds.

The solution, which had a twisted genius to it, was to provide gin to the workers in order to take their minds off their work so the factories could have their bodies. In Seth Godin’s telling,

“there were 20 years when basically everyone in Manchester, England, was an alcoholic. Instead of having coffee carts, they had gin carts that went up and down the streets. Because it was so hard to shift from being a farmer to sitting in a dark room for 12 hours every day doing what you were told. But we culturally evolved to be able to handle a new world order.”

The economy is (slowly, painfully, unevenly) evolving beyond industrialism.

But is our cultural evolution keeping up?

Being on the farm, not being told what to do, isn’t nearly as unnatural to the human experience as it might seem to those of us who can read and write blogs all day.

The connection economy demands the freedom and responsibility of our now-latent agrarianism, but it won’t forget the scale and efficiency of the industrialists, either. The pendulum swings back, but the world has turned.

Cultural evolution is never easy, and evolution toward freedom might be much harder than it sounds. Right on time, along comes Facebook with the greatest gin cart ever invented (until it, too, is out-“innovated”).

Bottoms up?

In his essay “The Agrarian Standard,” the philosopher, poet, and farmer Wendell Berry writes:

“What we have undertaken to defend is the complex accomplishment of knowledge, cultural memory, skill, self-mastery, good sense, and fundamental decency — the high and indispensable art — for which we can probably find no better name than ‘good farming.’ I mean farming as defined by agrarianism as opposed to farming as defined by industrialism: farming as the proper use and care of an immeasurable gift.”

If it’s true that, in the connection/creative economy, “we are all artists now,” it stands to reason that we all bear the responsibility of “good farming,” as Berry uses the term here.

The great news and the scary news are one and the same: the price of moving beyond industrialism is re-learning the proper use and care of immeasurable gifts — inside us and outside of us; given and earned.

As long as there have been industrialists (at least of the old school), they have wanted to make it seem more frightening to take that responsibility upon ourselves than to cede it (along with our labor) to the captains of industry. After all, they know best.

Except, of course, they don’t. And the price of refusing responsibility is starting to look higher and higher.

If we’re already flying into the waves, staying low is no longer the safe option. Flying higher only feels scarier — as any immeasurable gift should.

One of the easiest ways to get stuck in scarcity mode is to leave needs and wants unspecified.

All you can feel is I never have enough, and as long as enough seems unimaginably far away, you don’t do the relatively easy work of imagining it.

You don’t have to connect too many dots to make some rough calculations about what it would take to feel you have enough to live with. Pick a place, find the average rent. Pick a job, find the pay. Pick a goal, put a number on it. Pick enough, you’ll have budget.

Then work backward: it’s not much of a leap from there to figure out what you’ll have to earn for the number of hours you’re willing to work to support the life you want.

Don’t throw out the calculations, though — once you’ve made enough, you can start taking less money for opportunities to make a bigger difference.