A fascinating book to read, if you can find a copy of it, was a book created by Studs Terkel in 1974 called ‘Working.’ This book was developed through several questions from this Chicago radio host, who moonlighted as an oral historian. He interviewed over 100 people in a wide variety of occupations and just let them speak for themselves. He did not ask them the typical types of things, like, "What do you do for a living?" He instead asked them, "What does working here do for you?"
What Terkel discovered was that people are doing a lot more than exchanging time for money in these settings. They are actually searching, searching for things like meaning, dignity, recognition, autonomy, usefulness, and connection. When those things are deprived, even well-paid work can become absolutely miserable.
I have first-hand experience here. I voluntarily walked away from a high-paying job simply because the work had become miserable and I no longer felt that what I was doing mattered. As a company, we just kept repeating the same failed experiments over and over again, and the improvements and growth that we had accomplished kept getting unraveled, so you started seeing anything that you built just fall to pieces around you.
Terkel discovered that people really want to establish evidence that they actually existed. Take that away, and they will just not talk highly about their jobs. A top-level executive for a big company would talk far less enthusiastically than a stonemason or a carpenter, or even a teacher. Why? Well, it was simple. The stonemason who builds a wall can point to that wall for decades, saying that he had built that. He had contributed to the world, and that was a monument to his work. Same thing with a carpenter who works on a house or a teacher who helps develop a young mind. They can point to something that lasts.
Terkel did not take this on as an economic problem; he approached it as a human problem. There is absolutely a psychological relationship with our work. To boil it all down to something that can be replaced by machines seems like we are missing the point of work entirely. Interestingly, Terkel’s work is arguably becoming relevant again because of AI and automation. We are once again asking a very Terkel-like question:
If technology can perform more and more of the tasks we call "work," what part of work were humans actually valuing in the first place?
I think that is the question of the day, not "What are we going to do when AI takes over everything?" Wrong question. The right question is, how are we going to build anything that matters?
