What is work?
sIn my Facebook feed, I often get videos of a young woman from Finland named Aurikaterina cleaning really dirty houses for free. She says she does it because she really enjoys cleaning and to help people who have, usually because of mental illness, filled their homes with garbage. These rooms, most often kitchens, are impassable, and they are filled with all kinds of garbage, but mostly food garbage. In these extreme cleaning videos, the mess created by people who have not been taking care of their homes highlights how much work it takes to clean up after ourselves. Humans can be pretty disgusting and food garbage needs to be dealt with or there will be some really bad outcomes, including terrible smells and vermin.
Abraham Marlowe believed that humans possess a constantly growing inner drive which motivates them to fulfill unsatisfied needs, which he describes in his 1943 paper, “A Theory of Human Motivation”. Maslowe’s Hierarchy of Needs, which includes physiological, emotional, and psychological needs, is often portrayed in the shape of a triangle, although he did not describe it that way. At the base are all our physiological needs, which include the necessities for our survival, food, water, and shelter, with shelter providing heat, clothes, and sleep. Interestingly, all of these can be provided by one’s own home, which means satisfying all of our most basic biological needs involves housework. Without this, it is difficult or impossible to focus on any of our other needs.
I don’t know about you but I find watching videos of people cleaning really dirty things mesmerizing. I have known plenty of people like Aurikaterina who enjoy cleaning, they find it very satisfying. I certainly like living in a clean home and have cleaned very messy and dirty rooms myself over the years, usually my own. When I was younger my mother and I would jokingly call cleaning “fighting the forces of entropy”. In a recent opinion piece in the New York Times, Linda Sohn, discusses the spiritual value of housework, and concludes that housework is “integral for my and my family’s happiness”.
What if what you do for fun is drudgery for other people? If you do an activity for fun, could it be considered work? For instance, in a way I am writing this blog for fun, but right now it really feels like work. I am feeling the pressure of a deadline and struggling to figure out exactly what words to use to explain my point. And to be honest, I am also working hard to figure out what my point is. And also, typing, which I have to admit is not easy for me. In addition, this post is part of my work, both as a life coach and as an artist. I knew that from the beginning of my life coaching business, I would need a website. Website design is fun and difficult, artistic and technical. Then there’s the writing itself. Without the push of the business side of it, I don’t think I would be motivated to write one 1,200 word essay a month. It’s hard for me but also really satisfying in a deep meaningful way.
In some ways creative work is less important than housework, at least to the world at large. At least housework affects other people, either the people that you live with or the people who would eventually have to clean up after you. Creative work could be seen as pointless, meaningless, except maybe because artists are happier if they are creating (Are they? What about the tortured artist trope? I’m certainly feeling a bit tortured right now!) Sure, art affects people who engage with it and that could be considered a positive effect but it doesn’t have to be any one specific artist’s art.
When I first started painting, I came to a few conclusions that I’m realizing still guides me in my creative work. The first and probably most important one was to take my own work seriously. Part of this is also reflected in my choice, since I became a stay-at-home mom to call myself a housewife (albeit a feminist one), as a way of claiming the value of the work that I have chosen to do, to create a home that satisfies as much of my and my family’s essential needs as possible. If I expect my work to be valued, then I must value it.
At the top of Maslowe’s Hierarchy of Needs is self actualization. He posits that once we have filled all of our other needs, we all have a need for self-actualization, to realize our full potential, including creative work. Throughout our lives, we work to satisfy all of our needs, not in a straight line, but we go between the levels over and over. At the most basic level, we can all understand the motivation for finding food and then eating it - hunger. But what motivates someone like me to give up a beautiful summer day to sit at my desk and do something that at times makes me curse with frustration? Can the creative urge be considered a type of hunger?
In physics, work is energy (force) applied in a direction (vector) from one thing to another. One definition of work is any effort or activity directed towards achieving a particular goal. Is the fulfillment of our basic needs the work of humans? Like all the other species on Earth, the majority of our effort is focused on putting food on the table and a roof over our heads, and then cleaning up afterwards. The stuff of life needs work, needs an input of energy. Things naturally fall down, their energy dissipates. Energy must be constantly added into a living system and adding that energy is work. It’s difficult to see clearly in our complex society but the basic needs of humans are at the root of all of our activity. We are fortunate that our world is so abundant that we have the time, energy and resources to create just for the fun of it, expressing one of our species most transcendent biological needs.