With the natural evolution of societal living and the ever-increasing specialization of professions, we’ve collectively become progressively further removed from the most basic tasks of survival. The structure of modern society allows the overwhelming majority of us to become entirely focused on extreme specifics—the creation of computer programs, the authoring of books, the assembly of individual automobile components, or even the playing or coaching of a sport. Our basic needs, such as food, water, shelter and the numerous trappings of convenient living we’ve developed as a species, are provided by other specialists—people whose professions concern harnessing and providing electricity, processing food, treating residential water supplies, or building homes.
This specialization ultimately has allowed our separation from survival related demands. Pre-industrial societies generally, contrary to the typical imagined scenario, actually spent relatively little time daily working and had considerable freedom for socializing and more intellectual and recreational activities. It’s not that we’ve reduced the amount of work more recently (we’ve actually increased it, although we’re back below the crushing peak of the early industrial revolution era’s sixteen-hour days and working children to death in factories stage, with some unethical exceptions), but that we’ve altered the kind of work we participate in regularly. This development is hard to reasonably criticize in totality—it’s provided far too much benefit to us individually and collectively—but it’s also created an extensive inventory of obvious and sometimes severe unintended consequences.
One of these consequences, which our convenience and security afford us the luxury of ignoring or even failing to recognize, is the absence of truly hard work that the majority of us are required to engage in at all, let alone with any regularity. This absence has utterly skewed our perspective on what constitutes difficulty, inspiring balking at the most minor of inconveniences and demands, and imbues too many of us with a sense of entitlement and condition of fragility. We’re more willing to spend countless hours trying to determine ways to avoid hard work than to simple put our heads down and get it done. We can literally purchase anything we need by clicking a few buttons and waiting for it to be delivered to our doors while consuming entertainment from thousands of possible sources from the same comfortable location. The very concept of working for what we have has become an obscure one, and the connection between what we do day to day and what it affords us is often so indirect and convoluted that we find it hard to appreciate.
In a 1906 speech to the American Philosophical Association, psychologist William James said, “The human individual thus lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum, and he behaves below his optimum… We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.” Over a hundred years later, this has become more accurate than I suspect James could have ever imagined. We spend more of our time and energy actively pursuing methods to reduce effort than engaging in activities that demand true effort, and actively seek meaningless distractions for our minds in place of intellectual stimulus.
This elimination of regular hard work from our daily lives may provide us with incredible opportunities, but it simultaneously robs us of others. There’s an inherent power of difficult tasks that can’t be replicated with the tedious and mundane activities we’ve so thoroughly replaced them with. It may be “hard” to get through a long day of data entry on a computer, or to serve rude, whiny customers in a restaurant, but that kind of difficulty is far removed from the sort of work we experience when a task naturally combines both physical and mental challenges.
Work that inextricably connects physical and mental demands creates a unique phenomenon in which the entire being is engaged synergistically and immersed into the experience in a truly interconnected fashion. Arguably this is the apogee of human experience—completely engaging every element of ourselves into an enthralling and fluid symphony of our entire existing complement of abilities, while also demanding the development of new ones in search of solutions to novel problems.
To be fair, this absolute level of activity is uncommon and perhaps can exist only in the most extreme situations, such as survival, in which our lives depend on our concerted physical effort and skill, rational decision-making, imagination and ingenuity, strategic planning, and emotional control. But we can access lower levels of the experience voluntarily through our chosen activities and derive many of the benefits of the kind of hard work our collective innovation has eliminated from our lives.
This is a way to experience a more direct flow of effort to results than we can usually attain. So much of what we do is investing time and effort into tasks contributing to results realized only in the distant future—it becomes difficult at times to remain committed to these kinds of activities. Hard work gives us a chance to see the product of our efforts materialize and to cement the connection in our minds, to gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of what we’re able to accomplish and what it takes, and to then be capable of applying that knowledge and confidence to the rest of our lives. It develops elements of our character that are unreachable in any other way, yet influence everything else we do.
Hard work is a self-contained system of effort and results that offers its own intrinsic value along with that of its products. It forces us to commit ourselves to a purpose, to exercise determination, and to utilize existing and develop new capabilities. The form this work takes can vary—it’s less an issue of content than structure. It might mean building things, repairing problems in the home or vehicle, creative manual labor in the context of landscaping or property maintenance, or even sport training. Our societal composition generally allows each of us to choose how we express our abilities and engage in hard work rather than nature dictating what’s necessary. What matters is that we immerse ourselves, mentally and physically, to work toward a clear purpose and to complete a meaningful task—that we challenge the abilities of our minds and bodies and remain committed to the purpose until it’s achieved.
