Why Am I Working?

Book excerpt: If there’s one question that could very well start this book, it would be this: Do you love your work? Now, that question’s kind of heavy, isn’t it? It is perhaps too big for an opening statement, so you might think you didn’t get the question right. Let me repeat it then: “Do you love your work?” Why do I ask? It’s because everything that you are becoming every day, everything that you do every moment of your working hours, and probably everything that you think about most of the time, has everything to do with your life as a whole. Simply put, even if that question sounds seemingly easy, it’s a powerful key to finally putting to rest every agony, sorrow, and disappointment you have inside you that probably makes you hate either your job or your boss. When you get to answer that question with a “yes” or a “no,” let me ask you this follow-up question: “Why are you working?” Seemingly, that’s an easy question, too. When I ran a short survey on Facebook, in fact, there was no question at all about the answers. It was all about money, livelihood, satisfaction, the absence of choice, fate, and many more. The sentiments were all the same. In sum, we all work for either money or fulfillment or for a combination of both. But of course, one other fact has remained the same as it was thousands of years ago: We all need to work. Even company owners need to work. More often than not, they even work three or four times harder than their employees. Your bosses will need to work, too. Students will need to study. Parents will need to parent their children. Everybody will need to move and do something for as long as they live. Is it a punishment by God that when a certain Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, we all have ended up having to labor to live? Well, whether the story is true or not and whatever the answer to that question, the fact is we are all working and we will need to continue to do so to live. This is why I wrote this book. If we don’t have any option but to work for a living, how should we look at our work? If there’s nothing else we can do but to work for a living, how should we respond to this reality? If we could never ever escape a “working” life, then how should we position ourselves in the workplace? Our goal here is to understand the real meaning of what we do so we can liberate ourselves from anxiety, from pain, and from frustration due to our poor understanding of our job or of our work. Without expanding our thinking on this very important matter, our limited knowledge can do us more harm than good.