What is the Purpose of Work?

We talk about work in simple terms. Work is dignity, contribution, how we build a life, demonstrate that we’re useful, and prove that we matter. It’s how we prove we’re responsible adults and not simply wandering the earth snacking on someone else’s dime.

There’s truth in this. Work can be dignifying. It can give shape to a day, structure to a life, and purpose to effort. Work can connect us to other people. It can help us make something, serve someone, solve a problem, learn patience, build skill, and participate in the world beyond the private theater of our own concerns.

I’m not anti-work. I’m very pro meaningful contribution. Sometimes that contribution comes with a job title, a paycheck, and a calendar full of meetings that could have been emails.

But the work ethic has never been only about work. It’s also a moral story that, like opening an overstuffed “everything” closet, reveals things we know are there but don’t want to see. So we usually don’t look, but your body still knows because it holds on to everything in the everything closet until you look through it mindfully and let go of the old stories that no longer support you or reflect reality.

Let’s look at some of the invisible, underlying assumptions about work that drive both opinion and policy. For ordinary people, work is often treated as proof of worth. If you work hard, you are responsible. If you keep working through exhaustion, you are admirable. If you have three jobs and no time to sleep, you are resilient. If you struggle financially, the first question is whether you worked hard enough, planned well enough, chose correctly, trained properly, sacrificed sufficiently, or showed enough hustle.

The burden of proof is on you.

Through your work (and its corresponding ability to generate money), you must prove you deserve security and respect. You must prove you aren’t lazy or asking for too much. When times are tough, you must prove your hardship is not secretly your fault.

The story changes when we look upward. For the wealthy—including those who inherited great wealth—freedom from work is called success, financial independence, passive income, and wealth building. The “work” involved is couched as making your money work for you, which is inherently noble when money does it and suspicious when people need help doing the same.

For ordinary people, money without work is framed as handouts or dependency. For the wealthy, money without work is framed as freedom. That double standard is the tell that reveals that our stories about a work ethic are less about and more about hierarchy.

It demonstrates that some people must work to prove their value, while for others, escaping work is proof they have achieved value—even if they’ve never worked a day in their life. It praises labor in the working and middle classes, then praises leisure, ownership, inheritance, and investment once someone has enough money to stop laboring in ordinary ways.

This contradiction is at the heart of the stories about work.

On one hand, we’re told that work gives life meaning. But we often organize society so that the most powerful people are the ones with the most wealth and the least required to do ordinary work. We’re told that people shouldn’t receive money they didn’t earn, yet we admire entire systems built around ownership, inheritance, capital gains, dividends, and other forms of income that do not require the kind of daily labor we morally demand from everyone else. We even, in the US at least, tax income from work at a higher rate than we do income that comes from capital gains or other forms of non-work wealth.

In our stories, money must be earned by the body when you’re poor, but can be earned by assets when you are rich.

This is why conversations about work so quickly become conversations about morality. When we talk about jobs, we’re talking about deservingness. We are talking about who gets help, who gets judged, who gets called dependent, who gets called strategic, who gets to rest, and who is expected to be grateful for the opportunity to keep going.

The phrase “work ethic” sounds clean and wholesome, but underneath it are old stories.

• Religious stories about virtue, discipline, punishment, obedience, sin, idleness, and salvation.

• Economic stories about productivity, efficiency, growth, competition, and usefulness.

• Class stories about who must labor, who may lead, who may own, and who may live from the labor of others.

• National stories about rugged individualism, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, making something of yourself, and pretending that everyone was issued the same boots.

• Family stories about sacrifice, survival, respectability, duty, and not becoming “one of those people.”

• Body stories about exhaustion as proof of deservingness.

• Gender stories about who is expected to care, soothe, manage, remember, clean, raise, nurse, comfort, accommodate, and then label all of that a labor of love rather than labor deserving of adequate pay.

Work isn’t just an economic arrangement. It’s a reality system that teaches us how to see ourselves and each other.

A hardworking person is good.
A productive person is useful.
A busy person is important.
An exhausted person is admirable.
A successful person must have earned it.
A struggling person must have done something wrong.

These assumptions become so familiar that they stop sounding like assumptions and start sounding like truth.

This is how inherited stories work. They don’t arrive saying, “Hi, I’m a culturally constructed belief about human worth.” They arrive as common sense or an ingrained belief that parrots, “that’s just how life works.”

“That’s just how life works” is often the phrase a story uses when it doesn’t want to be questioned. And right now, the story of work needs to be questioned because work has been asked to carry too much moral weight.

We attached income to work, which has been a practical reality for centuries. People contribute labor and receive money. Fine.

But then we attached dignity to work.

• Then identity.

• Then morality.

• Then healthcare.

• Then housing.

• Then adulthood.

• Then belonging.

• Then the right to be taken seriously.

• Then the right to rest without shame.

• Then the right to receive help without being humiliated.

Through all these additions, work is no longer simply what we do for money or one way we contribute to society. It becomes the main—often only—gate through which we are allowed to access security, respect, and legitimacy.

That is a dangerous amount of power to give one story, especially when the economy does not offer opportunities evenly or reward work fairly.

Some people work constantly and remain poor. Some people do necessary work like childcare and home health care that is badly paid because the market has decided their contribution is low-value, even when society would collapse without it. Some people can’t work because of disability, illness, age, caregiving responsibilities, trauma, discrimination, geography, economic shifts, or simple bad luck. Some people work in jobs that drain the life out of them but keep them insured, housed, and socially acceptable.

Meanwhile, some of the most “successful” people make billions leveraging technology or finance in ways that cost jobs, damage the environment, cause widespread uncertainty, and decrease the standard of living for mere workers—and that could actually break the whole global economic system. Yet, they’re lauded for it because it makes short-term income for those who live on wealth, so it’s justified under the “that’s just how life works” clause.

Meanwhile, amidst a system that rewards wealth over work, our moral language still circles back to the person at the bottom.

• Are they trying hard enough?

• Have they adapted?

• Did they choose the right field?

• Did they retrain?

• Are they willing to move?

• Are they willing to work nights?

• Are they willing to take less?

• Are they willing to become more useful to an economy that has never been asked whether it is useful enough to human beings?

This is the hidden obedience inside the work ethic. It asks ordinary people to keep adjusting themselves to systems that are not designed for their flourishing. It praises resilience when people endure conditions that should be changed. It calls exhaustion noble when rest would be more productive and profitable, and certainly more humane. It calls survival a personal responsibility while treating structural advantage as an invisible hand in success.

Most importantly, it makes economic arrangements feel like moral truths.

If someone is poor, the story asks what they failed to do.

If someone is rich, the story asks what they must have done right.

But neither question is as honest as it pretends to be.

Of course, choices matter. Effort matters. Discipline matters. Skill matters. Persistence matters. Responsibility matters. There is no wisdom in pretending human agency doesn’t exist.

But agency doesn’t exist in a vacuum. People make choices inside systems. Inside bodies. Inside histories. Inside families. Inside economies. Inside unequal access to education, healthcare, housing, safety, time, technology, networks, inheritance, and second chances.

The work ethic often speaks as if everyone is standing at the same starting line. We are not. When a moral story ignores unequal conditions, it stops being a story about dignity and becomes a story about blame.

This matters even more now because the old story of work is under pressure.

AI is changing the tasks people are paid to do. Some jobs may disappear. Others may be redesigned. Entry-level pathways may become narrower. Many countries are facing aging populations, fewer younger workers, and increasing care needs. Costs keep rising. Many people who are employed are still living close to the edge of financial survival.

Business and tech leaders had talked about this time as a remaking of society where most jobs were obsolete and, it was implied, we’d find a way to restructure so that people could live more leisurely lives. But now that we’re at the dawn of this age, it’s clear that they are running the same morality play. Some people who have accumulated wealth will have lives of more leisure, because that’s always been true. At the same time, policy conversations about how to adapt to this new reality still lean heavily on the old script for ordinary people:

Work harder.
Retrain.
Adapt.
Choose better.
Be more productive.
Do not expect handouts.
Earn your place.

What happens if the economy no longer provides enough stable, meaningful, decently paid work for everyone who needs security? What happens if machines produce more value while humans are told they are less necessary?

What happens if the work that most needs doing—caregiving, teaching, repairing, listening, raising children, tending elders, rebuilding communities—is still treated as low-status or low-paid or unpaid because it doesn’t generate the right kind of profit?

The old bargain was never perfect, but it was powerful:

Work hard and you will be okay.
Work hard and you will belong.
Work hard and you will deserve dignity.
Work hard and you will have a future.

To be clear, AI didn’t create the problem, but it’s revealing it—and magnifying it.

The surface questions revolve around whether robots will take jobs, whether people will need to retrain, whether universal basic income or similar is realistic, whether a four-day workweek could become normal, or whether college should be a job-training venture or an exercise in human development.

Those are important questions. But underneath them is a deeper one:

What story of human worth do we want to live by in the coming age?

Because if our worth depends on paid employment, then anyone without stable paid employment becomes morally suspect.

If dignity depends on productivity, then illness, aging, disability, caregiving, grief, burnout, and transition become threats to identity.

If survival depends entirely on work, then technological progress becomes terrifying instead of liberating.

If freedom from work is admirable for the wealthy but shameful for everyone else, then we are not talking about work at all.

We are talking about power.

A better story of work would not dismiss effort, responsibility, discipline, or contribution. Those things matter. Human beings need purpose. Communities need participation. Societies need people to do real things that support life.

But a better story would separate contribution from exploitation, dignity from exhaustion, and survival from moral performance.

It would ask not only, “How do we make people useful to the economy?” But also. “How do we make the economy useful to life?”

The story of work is changing because it has to.

AI may accelerate that change. Demographics may force it. Economic precarity may expose it. But the deeper shift is moral and imaginative. We’re being asked to question one of the most powerful stories modern life has handed us: That work is how we earn the right to matter.

One way to begin is to notice what stories about work are alive in you. Not as an abstract opinion about the economy, but as a reflex, a judgment, a tightening—the kind of body sensations that reveal when something is being challenged or justified or ignored.

You might ask yourself:

When I meet someone, what assumptions do I make based on their job? Do I automatically assign more intelligence, discipline, status, or seriousness to certain professions? Do I quietly diminish others? Do I treat a CEO, doctor, professor, server, caregiver, artist, delivery driver, stay-at-home parent, unemployed person, or retired person as occupying different moral heights or assign them different values?

Where do I place myself on the ladder of work? Do I feel proud, ashamed, defensive, superior, invisible, behind, successful, trapped, or not quite legitimate when I describe what I do? Does my work feel like proof of worth, proof of failure, proof of usefulness, or proof that I chose correctly?

What kinds of money feel “earned” to me? Do wages feel more morally legitimate than inheritance, investment income, family support, disability benefits, unemployment, public assistance, or universal basic income? Do I admire passive income in one context and judge “handouts” in another?

What forms of work do I fail to count? Do I value caregiving, emotional labor, parenting, cleaning, community support, elder care, teaching, listening, and relational repair only when they appear as official jobs—or even then, only modestly?

What happens in my body when I am not productive? Can I rest without guilt? Can I receive help without shame? Can I have an unstructured day without feeling suspect? Do I feel safer when I am busy because busyness proves I am trying?

These questions help reveal the invisible architecture beneath the stories we tell ourselves about work. We learn this private hierarchy from family, school, religion, class, media, politics, and the subtle social cues that tell us which lives deserve admiration and which lives require explanation.

When you happen upon a juicy moral quandary, sit with the sensation and the thoughts that triggered it without trying to change or justify the story. Just notice, and in the noticing, let the story unwind to create space for something new.

It’s only once we see the ladder of moral ranking that we can begin to ask who built it, who benefits from it, who gets crushed beneath it, and whether we want to keep climbing something that was never designed to hold everyone.

Gently open to new stories by pondering ideas like:

• Maybe work is one of many ways we contribute.

• Maybe money is one of many ways society distributes resources.

• Maybe jobs are one of many ways people organize effort.

The much-touted “work ethic” was never just about work. It was about the story we told to parse who deserved dignity, comfort, health care, food, housing, and the other necessities and niceties of life.

That story is ready to be rewritten, and you get to choose how you want to rewrite it in your own psyche and life. It’s one of the great services you can offer in a time of great change. You don’t need to imagine the answer, because our new story doesn’t come from just one person. But the story you choose helps tip the scales for everyone.

Collectively, we can recreate a story that breaks the moralism of deserving and supports mutual thriving, or we can rewire moralism to fit the AI age and create new layers of who matters, who deserves, and who gets left behind.

If you like this discussion, watchmy conversation on “What’s the Purpose of Work?” with Henry L Sullivan III below!

If you like this kind of exploration in general, tune in to my biweekly conversations with Henry on Fridays at 3pm EDT. Subscribe below to get notice of the topics, dates and links.

Next in this Work, Worth & What Comes Next series, we’ll explore how when one structure has to carry survival, identity, dignity, purpose, and belonging, any disruption to work becomes a disruption to the self.

Peace, Kristine

PS—Need a little escape from so-called “real” life? Check out my novel God in Drag and/or read the first chapter for free!