Useless work darkens the heart

“Odo wrote: A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well,—this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.” – The Dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin

I agree that our natural state is to find joy in being useful, to learn, to grow and to participate in doing what needs to be done in service of those around us. And I agree that being made to do useless work degrades that joy and invites the heart to close.

The trouble is that, while I have had decades of doing work that has been both useful and useless, it was all treated the same way. Even when the work was genuinely useful and joyful, it happened within a context that I found oppressive. I participated for a long time, though with some awareness of the thorn in my foot, but eventually there came a point when I couldn’t live with how dark my heart was becoming.

I’m not unique in this kind of experience, but I also want to acknowledge that it’s far from universal. Many people do find joy and contentment on the default path, and I sometimes wish I could be a member of their ranks.

I think there are many great things about jobs that are hard to replicate outside of employment, and I had a lot of fun while working. I met great people, I did plenty of good work, I travelled the world, and, let’s be honest, I was pretty comfortable most of the time—until I wasn’t.

That thorn, though… it comes from what Le Guin is pointing at, and I’m still learning to remove it bit by bit today. When you spend your entire life essentially forcing yourself to do something that feels useless, sure you learn discipline, self-control and a level of integrity around doing what you say you will do, but there is a cost.

I’ve since learned that, for me at least, should suppresses want. This means that if I want to do something, and then I feel that I should do that thing, or that someone is making me do it, I suddenly stop wanting to do it. Perhaps this is a flaw in my own psychology, but it’s one I wasn’t able to exorcise whilst employed, and I have no desire to try now.

I’ll give you a little example of a lingering cost from my own 18 years in formal education and a further decade of employment. In the first few weeks and months after I quit my job, I often found myself sitting at my desk at home with an air of looking like I was working.

I was so habituated to being in an open plan office that I wasn’t able to recognise that no useful work was getting done in the moment, and bouncing between emails and staring at an open document was not a good use of my time. In the office, I would feel trapped, but at home I could go for a walk, read a book, take a nap or do literally anything else. Yet I didn’t, because I still felt the need to protect myself from some authority coming to punish me in some way.

So, since I had internalised The Boss as various kinds of villain somewhere in my psyche, I found myself at home, with no boss to speak of, looking busy. And the thing about looking busy is that to look busy, you mostly need to look stressed. So what I was actually doing was making myself stressed by doing useless work to protect myself against being forced to do more useless work.

Comical, no?

Working for myself has been a much more challenging and emotional journey than I could have predicted, because I didn’t appreciate just how deep those grooves of belief and habit had been worn. I’m grateful to Le Guin for pointing out how much of it comes from the economic system I’ve grown up in.

I’m learning that my useful work is ambiguous and scary in its ambition, and I’ve kept approaching it with the same ‘should’ energy that I’ve carried from employment. The more I sink into it, though, the more the should drops away to reveal a joy that feels durable.

Zettel(s): 9.1